Skip to main content

YC-Backed Kuhcoon Promises To Automate Facebook Ad Campaigns For Small Businesses



A lot of ad tech companies like to talk about automation, but Andrew Torba, co-founder and CEO of Kuhcoon, seems particularly enthusiastic: “Our grand plan is to automate all of paid media spending on the Internet.”

The startup isn’t quite there yet, but it says it’s already working with more than 6,000 advertisers in 90+ countries. (Those advertisers include a number of startups at Y Combinator, where Kuhcoon is part of the winter class.) It’s currently limited to Facebook advertising, but Torba said Kuhcoon’s Google Adwords launch is imminent, and there are plans for Twitter and Pinterest as well.

Torba and his co-founder/CTO Charles Szymanski acknowledged that there are other Facebook ad automation products out there. However, Szymanski suggested that the ones that offer “full automation,” like Nanigans and Kenshoo, are focused on huge advertisers. When it comes to small and medium businesses (Torba said Kuhcoon serves advertisers who spend between $20,000 and $1 million a month, with a focus on those who spend less than $100,000), the available tools are more manual.

“What AdEspresso does, they’ll say, ‘This ad isn’t performing well, you should pause it,'” Torba said. “We’re actually going to pause it for you.”

Sounds pretty simple, right? Well, Szymanski said that it required a lot of development to actually turn what he and Torba had learned about social media advertising into an automated process.

One of the main points of differentiation is how Kuhcoon optimizes its campaigns. Through the normal testing process, an advertiser might upload a bunch of different ads into Facebook, test them all out on day one, then focus on the ad that saw the best results. That can waste a lot of money, Szymanski said, but the real problem is that “you’re actually competing with Facebook’s own optimization algorithms.” In other words, when you upload a bunch of possible ads in one campaign, Facebook will choose the version that will probably do best, and the rest might just sit there.

Kuhcoon, on the other hand, will usually only run one ad at a time for each audience segment, rotating between different variants over the course of the campaign.

“We don’t just let Facebook take a guess for us,” Szymanski said.
Kuhcoon screenshot

The pair walked me through the campaign creation process, which is pretty straightforward. You enter your goals and budget, upload your creative assets, then Kuhcoon takes over pretty quickly, starting and optimizing the campaign without additional work on your end, though you can monitor the results (either from desktop or through the mobile app) and tweak the campaign as often or as little as you like.

Torba suggested that once Kuhcoon expands, it can also automate how money is spent on different platforms, though you’ll also have the option to direct 60 percent of your spending to Facebook and 40 percent to Google, or whatever.

I haven’t run any Facebook ad campaigns myself, but the Kuhcoon website features some enthusiastic customer testimonials. For example, Brian Chen, co-founder of YC-backed suitcase tracker BlueSmart, says Kuhcoon “gives me back several hours of my day, saving me the trouble of creating ad sets, A/B testing those ads, and generally getting mired in Facebook’s clunky Ads Manager.”

Kuhcoon says it saves advertisers 40 percent of their spending and more than 20 hours a week, on average.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Boom, the startup that wants to build supersonic planes, just signed a massive deal with Virgin

Have you heard about Boom? Boom is a relatively new startup that’s aiming to build something pretty crazy. They’re not building an app… or a social network… or even some new gadget for the Kickstarter crowd. Boom wants to build planes. Really, really, really fast planes. Specifically, they’re trying to design and build a supersonic passenger plane that goes 2.2x the speed of sound. If all goes to plan, they’ll be able to shuttle people from New York to London in 3.5 hours, and SF to Tokyo in 4.5. Sound crazy? I wouldn’t disagree. It’s worth noting that the company is in the very early days for something as intensive, massive, and hugely expensive as designing and producing a passenger aircraft. They’re still working on their first prototype, and hope to fly it by late next year. But it’s also worth noting that the team behind the plane has some serious talent in its blood: the company’s 11 employees have collectively contributed to over 30 aircrafts — having worked on thin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fun Tools to Translate Your Name into Japanese Calligraphy

Japanese calligraphy is an artistic writing style of the Japanese language. Its Chinese origins can be traced back to the twenty-eighth century BCE. Calligraphy found its way into Japanese culture in 600 CE and is known as the karayo tradition. For Westerners, calligraphy is forever fascinating. However, it takes years to learn how to properly draw the signs. Two basic principles must be known to understand Japanese writing: there are different writing styles and different alphabets. Kaisho for example, is a writing style most commonly used in print media. Tensho on the other hand is used in signatures. Other writing styles are Reisho, Gyosho and Sousho. The alphabets include Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana. Katakana is used for writing foreign words. It can also serve to highlight words, in analogy to capital letters as we know them from the Roman / Latin alphabet (Romaji in Japanese). Each Kanji character has a meaning of its own, while Hiragana or Katakana characters merely repres...
Post a Comment
Read more