In our Martech Insider Newsletter, we feature a marketing technology each month that deserves recognition. This quarter, we spotlight Monibrand, a SaaS solution for impactful monitoring that protects brands' territories on sponsored links. Mathieu Robine, COO & co-founder of Monibrand, spoke with SaasAdvisor to introduce us to their solution.
Hello Mathieu,
Can you describe Monibrand and its positioning in a few words?
Monibrand is the only French startup offering a solution for monitoring and competitive analysis of commercial links to protect brands' online advertising campaigns. While online advertising networks allow advertisers to use brands' registered keywords as they see fit, Monibrand aims to bring common sense back to these practices and alleviate the competitive pressure that inflates their search budgets on their own keywords (brand names, product names, store names, etc.).
Our impactful monitoring solution allows our clients to identify those who exploit their brand's reputation by targeting their own keywords and provides them with the tools to mitigate the negative impact.
What problems do you solve?
Our support addresses three main challenges: enhancing brands' online visibility and traffic, protecting their image on search engines, and optimizing their sponsored campaign budgets.
Everyone knows that competition in advertising networks affects campaign prices and performance. However, few brands truly measure the extent and negative impact of third-party campaigns when these actors target their own keywords. On average, it's estimated that competitive pressure on sponsored spaces in their ecosystem can cause a 25% increase in advertising costs for companies.
This is where we come in, enabling brands to systematically identify all third-party advertisers (competitors, resellers, affiliates, counterfeit sites, etc.) that use their keywords as targeting terms in their search engine ads. Depending on their strategy, we then offer them the opportunity to eliminate these advertisers to clean up the bidding and regain long-term control over their brand territory. This combined action allows us to reduce our clients' advertising campaign costs by an average of 15%.
What are the main features of your tool?
Analyzing the actual performance of ad campaigns is complex, especially for brands with a rich web ecosystem that's difficult to monitor comprehensively. To address the challenges faced by brands dealing with high competition on their own keywords, we developed our monitoring and competitive analysis solution by combining two functional modules:
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A monitoring module, which continuously tracks all sponsored links and therefore all advertisers targeting the brand's keywords (sometimes thousands of terms). We use bots capable of replicating natural online user behaviors (multi-engines, multilingual, geolocated, across different search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Baidu).
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An alert module, allowing brands to directly contact these "parasite" advertisers, regardless of their profile, to encourage them to exclude these keywords from their campaigns.
Your "Killer Feature"?
Undoubtedly, the automatic notification of detected advertisers by the platform. Monibrand allows brands to reduce competitive pressure by directly contacting the actors who pollute their online territory. This process involves several steps to facilitate decision-making and maximize the impact of our action: targeting and detecting contacts at competing advertisers, prioritizing advertisers based on their size and impact, and managing arguments and notifications to them.
Are there any integrations of Monibrand with other tools?
Monibrand has already developed a number of integrations, including with Clicdata and Zapier, to meet our clients' technical requirements. Our goal is to quickly expand this scope to include Google Ads, Google Analytics, Bing Ads, and Slack.
Tell us about your client onboarding process?
Onboarding is straightforward to allow our clients to start notifying and removing third-party advertisers within the first week of engagement.
- Once registered via our site, we conduct a free audit of the brand's competitive pressure on Google Ads within 48 hours.
- After presenting the results of our research, we work with the client to identify the scope of terms and spaces to monitor based on their specific issues (customer journey, competitor types, locations).
- In less than a week, Monibrand's monitoring system is in place, and management of the first removal requests begins. Our support and the platform's customization capabilities then allow our clients to adjust the search scope as needed.
How does client support work?
Each client is assigned a dedicated account manager within the Monibrand team, available throughout the engagement to advise on using the platform's two modules. We also have a technical hotline available 24/7.
What are your goals for 2020?
Many projects for Monibrand in 2020, and on all fronts!
- Technical side: Expand our monitoring scope to include sites with advertising networks in addition to search engines, specifically on Apple Search Ads and Amazon Advertising, and enhance platform interoperability by integrating other external APIs (Google Ads, Analytics, etc.).
- Development side: Conduct significant evangelization efforts with brands to raise awareness about the impact of keyword competition, continue our commercial acceleration in France, and reach 100 clients by the end of the year. We also plan to offer a white-label solution for agencies.
- Team side: Recruit in Rouen and Paris to achieve these goals!
Who are your main competitors?
Monibrand's positioning and value proposition are unique in the sponsored link market. While some of its features are shared with traditional SEM players, no competitor has yet addressed the issue of sponsored link campaign performance from the perspective of third-party activity, which can cause a 25% variation in budget and performance.
We developed our tool based on a strong insight identified by one of our clients—who couldn't find a tool to both monitor all key spaces on search engines and offer simple, automated solutions to regain control.
How do you see the evolution of your market?
At Monibrand, we often refer to the search world as a "wild west," where anything goes. It is a complex and largely unregulated market, leaving room for strong competition. Until now, brands have remained powerless, many of them not even fully aware of the damage. But this is slowly changing.
Our ambition is to support this change among marketing professionals by bringing order to their campaigns through a comprehensive and systematic action to protect their brands.
About Monibrand:
Founded in 2018, developed in beta with 15 major clients throughout 2019, and officially launched in early 2020.
- Number of offices: 2 offices, in Rouen and Paris
- Number of employees: 8 employees, with a 50% increase target for 2020
- Team breakdown: Product/tech: 4, Sales & Operations: 3, Corporate: 1
- Client type: Major accounts and agencies
- Main French clients: Lacoste, Pandora, Cofidis, Conforama, and agencies like Havas, KRMedia, IProspect
- Funding: First seed round in early 2020 of €430,000 from Normandie Participations and Crédit Agricole Innove in Normandie; this funding was supported by Bpifrance, with a non-dilutive financing of €850,000.
Thank you, Mathieu, for your time and the quality of your responses.
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