Adchemy seeks to ignite keyword-search marketing

Murthy Nukala, Adchemy CEO and founder, sits down with Bambi Francisco

Since Google made search-marketing mainstream, an entire ecosystem has been built on helping companies and advetisers reach potential customers via search. Billions of keywords are purchased on Google and Microsoft in an effort to find people searching for a specific item, say "baby bugaboo," right at the moment they care to find it and maybe, just maybe - buy it.

But for marketing managers trying to find "all" the people who are researching or seeking desparately to find specific items, keyword management can become unwieldy. Imagine: Someone searching for "baby bugaboo" might also use "baby strollers" or "infant strollers," and so on, and so on.  This challenge has been pretty apparent for many years, of course. Yet one company, which has been around since 2004, has been trying to tackle the problem of managing these out-of-control keywords. 

After all, managing those keywords can be a tremendous headache for the up to 20,000 (estimated) people making their living off of managing them, said Murthy Nukala, CEO and founder of Adchemy, an ad-technology company that makes managing keywords more efficient and scalable, with its service called IntentMap.  

In hopes of driving more keyword buys, Microsoft recently led $61 million round in September. August Capital and Mayfield Fund invested as well.

Here are some highlights from my interview with Murthy Nukala:

- The problem with search marketing is that "marketers, merchants and advertisers want to worry about what they're selling," said Nukula. "They don't want to worry about keywords." Additionally, "advertisers have a very hard time convering products into keywords."

- Adchemy has created a "formal abstraction layer" that sits on top of the keywords so the managing of millions of keywords is possible. There are roughly 1,000 intents that correspond to one million keywords. Adchemy's IntentMap simplifies a marketer's job by allowing them only to focus on intents and not keywords. To this end, a marketer can scale their keyword campaigns.

- How does IntentMap work? Take a keyword string like "discount, lightweight laptop." The word "discount" denotes price sensitivity. Adchemy will then find synonyms and come up with other combinations that are similar, like "cheap weightless computers." 

- Adchemy isn't looking to save marketers money. It's intent is to help marketers scale their campaigns so they can spend more on search engine marketing. Since the rate of return on search marketing is much higher than display, it would seem logical that marketers would want to spend more on search marketing, said Nukula. Adchemy can help them scale their campaigns, so they can take their ad budgets from other places and put more into search. (No wonder Microsoft invested.) "The whole objective is to deploye these IntentMap services and scale their spend," said Nukula.

- How does Adchemy measure its success? Success is not based on increasing click-through-rates, according to Nukula. Success is measured by raising the ROR (rate of return) for each advertiser.

Watch the interview for more details about Adchemy's product and how Adchemy plans on working with Microsoft's AdCenter.