AdHawk aims to take the complexity out of Facebook and Google advertising

After more than a year in beta testing, AdHawk has opened its doors to all advertisers.

The company helps businesses manage their Facebook and Google advertising campaigns. It’s a world that co-founders Todd Saunders (AdHawk’s CEO) and Dan Pratt (its COO) know well, having formerly worked on the AdWords team at Google.

AdHawk brings the data from your different campaigns together in a single dashboard — Saunders said that what really sets the product apart is its combination of “sophisticated technology” with an “easy-to-understand analytics dashboard.” Over time, AdHawk analyzes the data and makes recommendations to improve performance.

How sophisticated can that technology be, when AdHawk’s team is just 20 people? Saunders said the company focuses on specific industries like retail and manufacturing — areas that bigger competitors usually avoid because they seem “archaic” and “boring.”

“What we’ve tried to focus on is verticalizing all of the data and all of the keywords,” Saunders said. So most of AdHawk’s customers are involved in e-commerce, and “if you come to us in an industry like insurance leads, we would probably tell you that we’re not able to help you.”AdHawk dashboardHe added that recently, one area where AdHawk has found success is in class-action lawsuits. After all, these are suits where many people need to be notified that they’re eligible for payment, and where the legal system traditionally relies on mail and newspaper postings to do that notifying. Saunders said AdHawk customers have found that with the right targeting, online ads can be a much more effective way to reach people.

Now that AdHawk has taken the beta label off its product, Saunders said the company is on-boarding the more than 7,000 businesses on its wait list.

The company, which is a graduate of Techstars Boulder, charges a subscription fee, tiered-based on your monthly ad spend, with “a sweet spot” in businesses that spend between $5,000 and $75,000 a month — in other words, Saunders said, the kind of company that has a small performance marketing team but can’t afford to “spend their whole day” looking at spreadsheets.