Miva Adds Agency Tools

In a bid to make its performance-based ad network more attractive to agencies, Miva has launched a set of account management tools designed for media buyers handling multiple client accounts.

The tools, dubbed Agency Center 1.0, enable creation, access, monitoring and reporting on multiple accounts through a single interface. Agencies can use the application to manage pay-per-click and pay-per-call campaigns on Miva’s platform. Previously, users have to use separate user names and passwords required to access each client account.

“Miva is still gathering strength in the agency part of our business,” Seb Bishop, Miva’s CMO, told ClickZ News. “Our roots, especially in the U.S., are in SME [small to mid-sized enterprise] advertisers. We’ve started building more relationships with agencies, and this is a part of that.”

Besides Agency Center, Miva has also improved access to its application programming interface (API), the developer tools needed for agencies and enterprises with their own software platform to integrate data from Miva’s system into their own. All of the major search engines, and some of the second-tier ones, offer users access to their API, so much so that it has virtually become a requirement for companies that want to work with agencies and large advertisers.

Miva updated its Ad Center campaign management tools in November, with more advanced tools for managing keywords as a group as well as broad-matching capabilities for keyword bidding.

For much of the past year, Miva has been repositioning itself as a non-competitive partner to publishers, contrasting its lack of a search engine to Google and Yahoo, who sell ads for their own sites as well as for publisher partners. Bishop said this message is beginning to resonate with publishers.

“If you look at someone like an offline publisher, their revenues are being eroded by Google and Yahoo But the publishers are still paying Google and Yahoo to distribute ads on their Web site, so they’re helping their competitors grow,” Bishop said.

The company announced last month that it had hired Deutsche Bank to help explore strategic options.

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