Kanoodle Debuts Set-And-Forget Search Terms

Timing is everything, they say, and paid search listings company Kanoodle.com is taking advantage of the fact, offering a new technology that sets search terms to become active or inactive depending on the time of day, day of month or month of year.

The product, AutoScheduler, is offered by Kanoodle.com at no additional cost to advertisers. It saves money, the company says, because advertisers aren’t charged for the periods when their keywords are inactive. According to Kanoodle.com, the feature is unique in the pay-per-click market space.

With AutoScheduler, advertisers can set search terms to automatically go live or dead at specific times, with no need for manual adjustment. Businesses that don’t ship internationally, for example, could choose to turn off their search terms between midnight and 5 a.m., when customers are unlikely to shop online.

“One of our goals was to alleviate the labor-intensiveness of pay-per-click marketing. It takes up a lot of time running a campaign,” said Jillmarie Giardina, Kanoodle.com’s director of marketing. Giardina said AutoScheduler has a patent pending.

Segmenting media by time-of-day is a hallowed advertising tradition, known generically as “dayparts.” It’s referred to as “drive time” in radio and “prime time” in television advertising. The practice is known as “lunchtime” in search engine marketing, since the at-work audience is so important online. It’s possible to buy certain search engine inventory by daypart. Kanoodle.com’s offering is different because it’s offered directly by the search engine.

It’s been a big week for Kanoodle, which just scored a major round of VC funding and three former Sprinks executives. Kanoodle.com uses the Sprinks model with its content-targeted listings, so the former execs will come in handy.

With the Sprinks model, advertisers choose categories rather than keywords for their listings. Publishers displaying the ads map their sites to these categories. The advantage of this system, proponents say, is it yields more relevant associations between advertising and content, thus producing better results for advertisers.

An analogous service is offered by Go Toast, a provider of paid search management and optimization tools recently acquired by Atlas DMT. The Go Toast Bid Manager makes it possible for advertisers to automatically reduce the bid, or fee, for a certain keyword at a certain time of day.

“If you want it to go down to the lowest possible price, you can do it automatically,” said Natascha Lee, Go Toast’s marketing director. However, “if you want to turn off the keyword, you have to do it manually,” she said.