Trada Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: COMPANY - Company overview

INITIAL LIGHT BULB Born in Scotland, raised in California and educated at M.I.T., serial entrepreneur Niel Robertson has another hit on his hands. He sold his first Internet startup, Web-performance monitor Service Metrics, at the top of the market in 1999, then had less success with his second one, software-patch facilitator Newmerix.

Post-Newmerix, Robertson was struck by an idea on a visit to Scotland: a marketplace of paid-search professionals that small businesses could turn to for keyword-based campaigns for Google and other search engines. On his return to Boulder, he founded Trada.

The Trada marketplace launched in March 2010. The company now has about 80 employees in its downtown Boulder HQ (the former home of the Daily Camera) and is on track to break triple digits by the end of the year.

IN A NUTSHELL Paid search is about getting potential customers to click through on the paid advertisements that show up alongside the results to a keyword-based query, with Google being the dominant player in the market. Trada is not in the search-engine optimization (SEO) market, where companies tinker with their website in order to rise in the organic search results.

Small businesses find paid search "very challenging," says Bill Quinn, Trada's vice president of marketing. "You can have thousands of keywords, hundreds of ads and you're constantly in there seeing what works and what doesn't." The flip side: "It's great for advertisers because it's extremely performance-based."

It's perfect for "crowd sourcing" from a wide range of experienced professionals rather than doing it in-house, says Quinn, with the end result of lowering the cost per click, sale or other action. "There are a lot of tips and hints and strategies to make your paid-search campaign have high ROI."

That's where Trada's network of about 2,000 paid-search professionals enters the picture. They craft campaigns based on relevant keywords and earn the difference between the advertiser's target and...