"We're growing very quickly and we're very happy with the uptake," Trada founder and CEO Neil Robertson told ReadWriteWeb. "Google Ventures looked at our businesses and the assessment was that our growth was interesting to them."

New Cash, New Goals

The $5.75 million C round brings Trada's total fundraising to just under $8 million. Robertson says the company has been extremely tight budgeted thus far, spending just $2 million over the last two years. The sudden influx of cash will give the company breathing room to expand and try some new things, he says.

First, the company plans to help provide improved and tailored services to both its large agency customers and its smaller business customers. Secondly, it will expand internationally to run campaigns in more countries. Currently, Trada accepts international customers and experts in the U.K., Australia and Canada, but has yet to brand out to non-English speaking countries.

Lastly, as part of the company's long-term goals, Trada is looking to extend its crowdsourced PPC ad model to other forms of online advertisements. Robertson says the company started with PPC ads because of the obvious crowdsourcing benefits to keyword campaigns. Now the company realizes that other ad styles - including display, banner, mobile and video ads - can also work on this model. The company also expects to allow for campaigns on newer ad platforms, like Facebook and Twitter in the near future.

The Google Bump

Google piece of the funding comes from Google Ventures, the company's investment arm. Rich Miner, one of the original co-founders of Android, has been on boards with Robertson in the past and now manages the Google Ventures fund. Miner joins Robertson and Foundry Group's Seth Levine as members of Trada's board.

While the connection between Google and Trada is an easy one to make, Robertson says that not preferential treatment is given to any of the search giant's investments. As Robertson added, Google likes to make sure that "all boats rise with the tide" when it comes to its investments. The relationship will also not affect or limit the services which Trada offers to its customers, said Robertson.

The fresh cash certainly puts a smile on the faces at Trada, but out of everything, Robertson is most excited for the crowdsourcing community at large.

"We're really happy to have another significant venture firm taking a position in the crowdsourcing ecosystem," said Robertson, who heads an information group of similar companies known as the Crowdsortium. "It's a good sign to see larger tech companies in the evolution of this industry."

Photo by Flickr user horiavalan.

Interestingly enough, Ask, a search engine few of us think about anymore, continues to grow rapidly. Compared to last month, the number of searches on Ask grew almost 48%, though the company still holds only about 3% of the search engine market.

All eyes are obviously on how the partnership between Bing and Yahoo will work out. Chances are that Bing will continue to grow over the next few months, but, as Compete's Marko Madjarac points out, Yahoo "will need to bring high-quality advertisers whose sponsored search results generate more paid clicks." While Microsoft's data shows that users are quite happy with Bing, we will also have to wait and see what happens once Microsoft slows down its $100 million marketing campaign for Bing.

Searches for "home depot" registered one of the most stunning declines in paid clicks, as only 0.83% of searches went to a paid listing in the last four weeks, compared to just over 39% a year ago.

Recession? Or are Companies Getting Smarter About Search?

In part, this decline can be explained by the current economic climate, which has led many companies to reduce their search marketing spend. In its latest quarterly earnings report, Google noted that paid clicks across all of its AdSense partners only increased by 3% in the last quarter of 2008, though the search giant didn't release any detailed statistics about paid search traffic.

However, as Andy Beal points out, this reduction in spending on search could also mean that some of the large brands like Orbitz or Home Depot have simply figured out that, given that they are already the #1 search term for their respective brands, there is really no need to spend a lot on paid advertising.

As we reported earlier this month, some retailers have been shifting their budgets away from search-engine marketing and towards email and social marketing. At the same time, though, small number of companies are also looking at the current downturn as a chance to break into new markets, by expanding their spend on search marketing while their competitors are cutting back their spend in these areas.