• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 4, 2008

Making it easier to expand search campaigns across multiple engines, Marin Software will unveil a feature today that lets media buyers duplicate a campaign built for one search engine and clone it for use in another.

Cloner, built into San Francisco-based Marin's Search Marketer software, takes tedious and time-consuming processes and removes the work of expanding campaigns from Google into Yahoo and MSN, said Marc Barach, Marin CMO. The technology changes the ad parameters, along with bids and tracking URLs, to accommodate the switch.

It also replaces the need for manually cutting and pasting from Excel spreadsheets into other documents. URLs are built to reflect keyword-level tracking, and are pushed to publishers supporting the campaign. The Google-to-Google cloning feature geared toward local search marketers allows them to quickly ramp from one geographically targeted location to the next.

Search has become an efficient advertising tool--but laborious, manual, and difficult to do well. Simplifying the process could boost the number of search campaigns across the Web. "It's so much work that many advertisers only end up putting the most popular terms on Yahoo and MSN, and leave behind the long-tail keywords that are typically profitable, but labor-intensive," Barach said. "Those who execute search campaigns well reap the rewards of an effective way to pull in business. That's why search has become the cat's meow."

The cost to use the Marin Search Marketer is based on a percentage-- between 2% and 5%--of the advertiser's monthly budget for paid search campaigns. About $200 million in advertising search budgets is managed through the application. It can take between one day and two weeks (or more), depending on the complexity and size of the campaign.

About 75% of search marketing advertisers who spend more than $500,000 per month or manage more than 100,000 keywords said that adding keywords is too cumbersome a process, according to a recent JupiterResearch study. The same study reveals that 69% said optimizing paid search is labor-intensive.

Barach said Marin hopes to ease the burden of large advertisers, such as New York-based Razorfish, that can spend more than $50,000 monthly--managing hundreds of thousands to more than a million keywords. Many advertisers known as the 10% that drive 90% of the PPC dollars begin by building out search campaigns on Google.