• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, May 13, 2010

Trada engineers have begun developing business process and reporting options that make it easier for ad agencies to outsource paid search campaigns to the marketplace. About 45 days ago, Neil Robertson, the company's founder, introduced the service as an easy way for businesses to take advantage of paid search on Google and Yahoo. He recently added the ability to buy paid search ads on Microsoft Bing through adCenter. For some the complicated and time consuming process has not been an option.

Trada's technology links work done by multiple paid search experts into one campaign. The pay-per-performance model requires no set-up. Keywords, bid prices, match types, landing pages and everything else that makes up the campaign automatically gets matched with ads.

Today, Trada works with about 10 agencies out of about 140 clients, but that number continues to grow. About 20% of inbound leads come from agencies, Robertson says. The company has been bringing on between 10 and 20 clients weekly. The average client now spends $6,500 monthly on average, up from $2,200 about 30 days ago, as ad agencies continue to find Trada's tools useful. About 500 paid search optimizers support accounts, up from 175 at launch.

So Robertson has set out to design a set of features for ad agencies that will allow them to support a variety of clients, from major multinationals to several-store chains to one-store mom and pops. The biggest change comes in automating the manual reporting process. "We learned that an agency's biggest value is in formatting information for clients in a way that supports decisions," Robertson says. "Aside from the traffic and conversions, agencies view reports as a deliverable to show clients the progress."

Although most agencies have dedicated people working on campaigns, many of them have found Trada as a way to audit performance and take on smaller clients that may not invest as much as the big guys, Robertson says.

As agencies move downstream to take on businesses with smaller budgets, they will split the time of one in-house paid search specialist between 25 clients. If clients pay $25,000 per month, the amount of profit from running the business in a traditional agency model becomes relatively thin. So the agency must become tactical, which puts the campaign in jeopardy because the paid search specialist may only run the paid search campaign on Google, rather than splitting it between Google, Yahoo and Bing.