Startup XA.net has been offering its technology to Facebook advertisers for several years, but this week, with the launch of optimalKeyWord, it’s trying to reach new customers who need help finding the right keywords for their campaigns.
CEO Rob Leathern demonstrated the service for me last week. He said XA’s current clients are big social network advertisers, normally spending at least $10,000 on Facebook ads each month. With optimalKeyword, Leathern said he can help smaller advertisers address a common question: What are the most effective keywords for reaching the audience that I want?
There are two main pieces to the optimalKeyword service. First, there’s the Expander, where advertisers can build enter a keyword and get a list of other keywords that reach similar audiences. For example, if TechCrunch wanted to launch a Facebook advertising campaign (I’m not sure why we’d want to do that, but go with it), obviously we could advertise to Facebook users based on the keyword “TechCrunch,” but optimalKeyword says that we could reach a similar audience by advertising to Facebook users who are interested in Klout, Esquire (?), and Yelp. It also tells us the reach of each term and the male-female breakdown.
The other product, which hasn’t launched yet, is called Explore. In some ways, it’s similar to Expand — you type in a keyword and find out about related keywords. However, instead of just getting a list, Explore visualizes the relationship between different keywords. You can enter multiple keywords and see what terms they have in common (for example, you could reach fans of Breaking Bad, The New Yorker, and Mad Men by targeting “louis ck”), and also click on individual terms to find new relationships.
This is all built on XA’s existing analytics technology, Leathern said, and it also integrates with XA’s other services (so you could export the keywords into the company’s optim.al campaign manager for example) — but it’s much more affordable. Pricing for optimalKeyword Expand starts at $25 per 10 credits, and each credit gets you one keyword search.