Things are on the up for online ad firm Yodle: it’s just filed for a $75 mil­lion IPO and signed the lease for a swanky new office.

Phe­nom­e­nal success

Art direc­tors and account man­agers who work for online adver­tis­ing agen­cies in the Big Apple may already have heard of Yodle. Found­ed in New York 2005, it spe­cial­izes in help­ing local busi­ness­es achieve the most effec­tive online adver­tis­ing cam­paigns, with a plat­form encom­pass­ing email mar­ket­ing, inter­net mar­ket­ing social media mar­ket­ing, reviews and rec­om­men­da­tions, mar­ket­ing automa­tion, SEO and local search.

In a nut­shell, Yodle is a lead-gen­er­at­ing machine that helps local busi­ness­es adver­tise their prod­ucts and ser­vices by deliv­er­ing opti­mal search results on all the major search engines. Yodle ads will point straight to its customer’s web­sites and lets them track the effec­tive­ness of their online mar­ket­ing from a sin­gle, per­son­al­ized per­for­mance dashboard.

Busi­ness-savvy account man­agers may also appre­ci­ate that it’s been phe­nom­e­nal­ly suc­cess­ful. In 2005, it had a mere 9 employ­ees. Between 2007 and 2010, its annu­al rev­enue soared by a stag­ger­ing 700 per­cent, its staff head­count bal­looned to 250 and its client ros­ter sky­rock­et­ed from 600 to 5000. Today, that’s explod­ed to 45,000 local busi­ness­es, the staff head­count now tops 1,100 over five offices and its rev­enue last year tipped the scales at $162 mil­lion, up 22 per­cent on 2012

Big­ger things to come

Investors cer­tain­ly appear to have been impressed: the com­pa­ny has so far raised a grand total of $50 mil­lion over five fund­ing rounds and it’s clear­ly decid­ed the time is ripe for an IPO (esti­mat­ed to be worth $75 mil­lion), hav­ing filed the nec­es­sary doc­u­ments with the U.S. Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion at the begin­ning of July

Matt Turlip, a senior ana­lyst with the pri­vate research firm Priv­co, said that a cloud-based adver­tis­ing firm like Yodle undoubt­ed­ly has strengths, includ­ing “a unique com­bi­na­tion of cloud, mobile, social, and local that investors are inter­est­ed in, and it does have immense poten­tial for growth in the very large local busi­ness market.”

Appar­ent­ly in antic­i­pa­tion of big­ger things to come, Yodle has signed a 10 year lease for 85,000 square feet in a stun­ning 18-sto­ry build­ing at 330 West 34^th Street – the new home for its NY headquarters.