Vurve Advances Trend Toward Online Marketing Automation For SMBs

This past Monday Vurve launched. The CEO is Amit Kumar, who built SearchMonkey at Yahoo and then was at Dapper, which was recently acquired by Yahoo. The company’s tagline is “advertising on autopilot for your online store.” Vurve is targeting small businesses (SMBs) with e-commerce stores that spend up to $10,000 per month. The minimum […]

Chat with SearchBot

This past Monday Vurve launched. The CEO is Amit Kumar, who built SearchMonkey at Yahoo and then was at Dapper, which was recently acquired by Yahoo. The company’s tagline is “advertising on autopilot for your online store.”

Vurve is targeting small businesses (SMBs) with e-commerce stores that spend up to $10,000 per month. The minimum monthly spend is $200. Traditional “offline” SMBs (service businesses) aren’t part of the program right now.

The company says it can entirely automate online advertising across a range of media types including search. The platforms and media types Vurve addresses are:

  • Search
  • Display
  • Remarketing
  • Social media (Facebook)
  • Shopping comparison engines

Vurve is integrated with the Yahoo Shopping Cart and Shopify and has “preferred” API access with Facebook and Google. Kumar made the following claims in his presentation about the success rates of Vurve’s platform for its clients:

Screen Shot 2010 11 11 At 6.44.02 AM

Vurve is part of a larger movement toward full automation for online advertising for SMBs. Consistent with that Google recently introduced Boost, a fully automated search marketing program directed toward SMBs (but not exclusively used by them).

Automation, especially of multiple media types, is a solution to the confusion and fragmentation that many small businesses experience in trying to figure out were to best spend their marketing dollars. There was a bit of a “too good to be true” quality to Kumar’s claims and presentation. However he says it’s all true.

Perhaps others more technically inclined and knowledgeable can take a look and opine.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About the author

Greg Sterling
Contributor
Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land, a member of the programming team for SMX events and the VP, Market Insights at Uberall.

Get the must-read newsletter for search marketers.