VentureBeat

Kenshoo helps advertisers with search engine marketing campaigns more efficiently reach search users.

The Israeli company has raised several million from Sequoia.

Search engine marketing is an umbrella term for a variety of techniques designed to increase the visibility of your web site on search engine result pages. The best-known examples are Google Adwords, Microsoft Adcenter and Yahoo Panama.

Kenshoo automates the traditionally manual process of building search campaigns across these services and figuring out which keywords are most effective.

Many large advertising companies, including DoubleClick and aQuantive, provide SEM analytics services.

Kenshoo recognizes keywords that don’t perform and substitutes them with more relevant keywords for an advertiser’s campaign. It lets you locate competitor ads and see what keywords are working for them, then combine those keywords into your own ad. It detects click-fraud. It manages your bids on Adwords, Panama and other systems automatically according to rules concern price and length of ad run that you set beforehand. More here.

The Israeli company works with large advertising agencies and clients like instant message service ICQ.

This is Kenshoo’s first round of venture funding.