Adthena, which relies on artificial intelligence and machine-learning technology to pull insights from search data, now offers an AI Categorization tool that automatically builds search groups and organizes categories to help marketers gain insights from thousands of competitive and brand search terms that otherwise might have been overlooked.

AI Categorization gives marketers insights on thousands of specific search terms, even those they may not have considered initially relevant.

Ashley Fletcher, Adthena vice president of marketing, believes that even with all the data that today’s sophisticated platforms collect, search advertisers still work with blind spots.

Until now, search marketers had to manually build taxonomies for thousands — and in some cases, hundreds of thousands — of search terms. The manual process can lead to missed opportunities and mistakes because it forces marketers to focus on a fraction of potentially relevant terms.

The new AI tool continually captures search engine results page (SERP) data and automatically builds and updates these taxonomies for search marketers, while syncing them to Google AdWords. 

AI Categorization, powered by Athena’s Whole Market View technology, does not limit the marketer to a small subset of terms to monitor. The platform automatically identifies the advertisers running the most successful campaigns based on specific search terms each day. It provides higher-quality insights and removes most of the guesswork by showing in greater detail the advertisers that are competing for each term.

Marketers also now have access to search term groups, along with brand search group, both monitored and updated daily. The platform provides access to more than 1,500 taxonomies, including thousands of terms such as athletic shoes and dresses. The terms are linked to Google’s existing taxonomies as well as custom taxonomies built by Adthena.

Here is how it works. It’s the peak summer season and the head of digital for a major retailer wants to drive sales for swimwear. The overall campaign includes search, but to create awareness the marketer also integrates display, social, television and print advertising.

AI Categorization will benchmark the swimwear category from search hourly by collecting all competitor data across Google for the category. Then it gives the marketer a list of relevant competitors in that category, along with terms used. It then segments all competitor data in the swimwear category. This allows the marketer to benchmark the campaign, perform gap and ad-copy analysis, and monitor whether any other brands or retailers take traffic for branded terms followed by “swimwear” or “bikini.”

Adthena, founded in 2012, works with more than 250 clients globally across 14 different business categories. Its platform processes more than 10 terabytes of new data daily, indexing 500 million advertisements and 200 million keywords in 15 different languages for brands such as Hotels.com, Autotrader, HSBC, Burberry, Atlassian, and Air New Zealand. Agency such as GroupM and iProspect are also among its clients.

Late in 2017, when the London-based startup launched in the U.S., Mel Morris, the former chairman of Candy Crush-maker King Digital, made an undisclosed investment in the company and joined Adthena’s board of directors.