Ad management platform Marin Software has partnered with Yandex to let its clients automate and manage paid search campaigns on the Russian search engine giant.
Basically, if those clients have similar advertising campaigns running on other search engines, they can clone those campaigns and pop them into Yandex.
“We have more global clients looking to leverage the campaigns, all the conversion and apply that globally,” said Marin CEO David Yovanno, adding that Marin has 25% of Fortune 500 companies – global brands with Russian operations.
So while Marin gets to hit up the Russian market, Yandex also gets access to advertisers using Marin’s platform, which has been modified to enable smaller search publishers to write to Marin’s API.
Consequently, Marin’s 800 “very high spenders in search” can tap Yandex and can monitor their search campaigns along with their RTB display spend and social spend on a single dashboard. (Yovanno said there were “five to 10” Marin clients doing this in beta.)
The Yandex partnership is Marin’s latest effort to become a cross-channel performance advertising platform, taking search history and applying it to display retargeting campaigns in online and social channels.
While most of the $6 billion in ad spend that runs through its software is search-related, the company has made inroads into display and social, notably with its June acquisition of retargeting platform Perfect Audience.
For instance, Marin’s platform has an API to manage ads in the Facebook news feed, and its Perfect Audience acquisition gives it the capabilities to manage display RTB for Facebook ads outside the news feed.
“Within social, most marketers use the proprietary Facebook data which it provides as targeting options,” Yovanno said. “But I would argue that the data is relatively weak with regard to performance. When you can complement that proprietary Facebook data with prior search behavior, that’s when you get performance out of social that compares more to retargeting.”
These capabilities are nascent, and Marin is just beginning to ramp up its clients and scale its operations around this functionality.
“We’ll have a hell of a lot more to talk about very soon,” Yovanno said.
Correction 9/8: An initial version of this article stated that Yandex wrote to Marin’s API. In fact, Marin (via a consultancy) wrote to Yandex’s API. Marin however has introduced a new architecture enabling search publishers to write to its API. While Yandex is plugged into this architecture, it did not write to Marin’s API.
