AdGrok (YC S10) Raises $470K To Be The TurboTax For Search Engine Marketing | Hacker News Reader

AdGrok (YC S10) Raises $470K To Be The TurboTax For Search Engine Marketing

techcrunch.com

77 pointsantongm24 comments

Congrats on raising money, AdGrok is a great product that solves a very real problem for businesses looking to advertise online: they really don't have the time or desire to learn how to do it right. The campaign improvement suggestions are especially useful, because scaling and optimizing campaigns is so hard. Campaign improvement recommendations are something Google frequently tries and fails at. I'm beginning to think their failure to give good suggestions is intentional, because they're optimizing for getting you to spend as much money as possible without giving up completely. That's why having third party tools in the space are so critical.

I'm beginning to think their failure to give good suggestions is intentional

I call it conflict of interest consulting. It happens in many industries and people (customers being "consulted") are most times oblivious to the conflict.

How does TurboTax come into play here? I don't see the analogy really.

They're making an otherwise complicated practice (like doing taxes), and simplifying it, (like TurboTax).

In that case, let me suggest some other headlines:

Heroku, the TurboTax of Rails Application Deployment, acquired by Salesforce, the TurboTax of CRM.

10 things you can do with Dropbox, the TurboTax of Cloud Storage.

I was going to ask the same thing, and doesn't TurboTax/Quicken have a negative connotation of being horrible software?

Note: I've used turbotax.com and it's always worked well, so maybe that's a positive connection.

No, TurboTax has the reputation of being awesomeness. They have extremely high retention and a very high viral-spread rate because the software works so well to take taxes and make them simple.

Parent is the TurboTax of comments.

Some may cast a negative shadow on Turbotax & other tax filing companies because their existence and lobbying has "prevented" the IRS from implementing a free e-file service of it's own. This is either a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it.

I agree, it sounds like they are just trying to be quotable.

The analogy here is that TurboTax takes a complicated thing (the 1040) and makes it into a very simple, intuitive process (basically, a managed clickflow that takes you from start to finish). The analogy is also in the market itself: most people don't need an accountant or fancy accounting software, TurboTax does what they need it to do.

Well, nowadays, marketing is almost as central a function as accounting to many small business. There's no 'TurboTax' out there to help get them online. The marketing space is still full of confusing and clunky tools that the average person can't really use. AdGrok hopes to remedy that by creating a similar tool.

That makes sense, but why don't you just say that you make "[your cateogry] simple" instead of saying "we are the [successful, unrelated product] for [your category]"? The benefit being that you won't have to write two paragraphs to explain it to people.

Even worse, when I think Turbotax for search engine marketing, the analogy led me to believe that it's an accounting program for SEM or something that lets me prepare a report on my SEM spend.

Argyris - it's Amal from Trinity College. Glad to see you shooting for the moon here in SF :)

I assumed that it meant that you were making taxes related to adwords easy which confused me. I'm not trying to be obtuse or anything but the connection didn't jump out at me even though I really enjoy TurboTax.

I actually having been hoping someone would make a product like yours' too so good luck!

lol i think these comments are a bit malicious. Since when is it a bad thing to provide an analogy at the end of an explanation to solidify the idea in people's minds?

"Heroku, the TurboTax of Rails Application Deployment, acquired by Salesforce, the TurboTax of CRM. 10 things you can do with Dropbox, the TurboTax of Cloud Storage." Yes, these would also be acceptable applications of the analogy--thats the nature of an analogy...its analogous.

AdGrok is an awesome service, we just started using it and have been happy with the results. We've found it very useful for getting AdWords campaigns off the ground quickly.

The last time I checked, AdGrok had no API. Are they planning on changing this any time soon?

It would be useful to many sites if AdGrok made it dead simple for other web applications to help you advertise online.

We've had some interesting chats with third-party developers already, and we'll have an API to drive Grok-o-matic within the month. If you have other ideas, hit us up on chat through our website! I'd be more than happy to talk with you.

Just curious, do you have any plans to expand into adCenter as well?

Yes!

That's next on the queue. Stay tuned.

So let's say I had some dollars to spend on SEM, how is this better than Trada? I've never used either, but without learning anything more I feel like I'd lean more toward their approach as it currently stands.

I'll let Trada's product speak for itself.

One basic difference is that from the advertiser's perspective, Trada is an agency in which you've essentially outsourced your marketing. However, AdGrok is a tool you can use to manage your own campaign. It can serve either as your stand-alone SEM tool, or as a complement to your existing SEM workflow.

Either way, you get an unparalleled view into what's going on inside your campaign and why.

We also have a managed service offering called GrokMe, in which we set up and manage your campaign for you. That's more in the agency vein, and from the user's perspective, similar to Trada's offering. Again though, even GrokMe users get our GrokBar and can see what's going on at all times.

That makes sense. I definitely look forward to playing with it at some point.

Good work, Argyris, Matt, & co.

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