WebTrends Unveils Automated Optimization of Paid Search Advertising with WebTrends Dynamic Search

WebKnowHow
Monday, December 11, 2006; 05:58 AM

Following the December 4th announcement of the ClickShift acquisition (www.webtrends.com/acquisition), WebTrends Inc. today unveiled WebTrends Dynamic Search, a sophisticated search marketing solution for optimizing paid search keyword portfolios to any business objective. Powered by WebTrends True Optimization technology, this innovative on-demand solution automatically determines which combinations of networks, keywords, positions, creative and landing pages perform best and dynamically allocates advertising spend to the top-performing combinations across major search networks, including Google, MSN and Yahoo!. With this announcement, WebTrends is breaking down the barriers to effective search engine marketing with end-to-end automation that eliminates the impasse between insight and action to continuously—and effortlessly—improve results and profitably scale search marketing.

“The growth of search engine marketing has brought rising keyword costs, and increasing complexity has made it more difficult for advertisers to profitably scale their efforts. Additionally, today’s bid management tools saddle marketers with an ever-increasing time and resource burden, forcing them to manually monitor, measure and tune dozens of variables for hundreds if not thousands of keywords,” said Greg Drew, CEO and president, WebTrends. “WebTrends now leads the industry in delivering a solution that dynamically optimizes search marketing efforts by automatically selecting the best combinations of variables to maximize return on investment. We are thrilled to provide our customers with a truly unique and comprehensive solution that will give them the competitive edge in acquiring quality traffic to drive their business objectives.”

Major online retailers such as ShopNBC are already seeing the powerful results of automated optimization in their search marketing. “Through WebTrends Dynamic Search, we have been able to drive sales and improve our contribution margin dollars,” said Loran Gutt, director of customer marketing, ShopNBC. “We have also been able to greatly expand our search efforts, increasing paid search revenue from non-branded terms by 25 times and more than doubling our profit margin for all paid search efforts.”

More Science, Better Results

Once marketers perform a few easy setup steps, including uploading initial keywords and creative, and defining business goals, such as maximizing revenue, gross profit or return on advertising spend, WebTrends Dynamic Search starts managing and dynamically optimizing campaigns. First, leveraging a combination of methods, keywords and creative are expanded. Then, using unique mathematical and algorithmic statistical models, the True Optimization engine automatically performs multivariate tests to determine which network-keyword-position-creative-landing page combinations deliver the best results for the marketer’s stated goal—within the shortest amount of time and the least amount of money. The solution then automatically allocates spend to the best performing variable combinations across the major search networks, eliminating the need to manually manage keywords or change creative on each network. Results are available on-demand for campaign, product, landing page and keyword-level reporting.

Marketers can also upload product cost, gross margin percentage, shipping expense, and other financial data directly into WebTrends Dynamic Search for a holistic understanding of how paid search is impacting their business and for the most accurate allocation of spend for optimal efficiency. The solution can also automatically pause inventory listings related to out-of-stock items, and incorporate pricing and product changes as they occur. In addition, as an integrated solution within the WebTrends Marketing Lab product family, customers also benefit from a single data collection tag for consolidated reporting and real-time monitoring, providing complete visibility into search performance.

For more information on WebTrends Dynamic Search, please visit www.webtrends.com.

About WebTrends Inc.

WebTrends is the leading provider of web analytics software and on-demand solutions for web-smart customers including General Mills, IKEA, Microsoft, Reuters and Ticketmaster. With WebTrends Marketing Lab, the company has expanded its comprehensive analytics platform to offer on-the-fly data exploration, dynamic advertising optimization and customer targeting solutions fueling relationship marketing. Thousands of enterprises have chosen WebTrends solutions and consulting services to accurately prove and improve their business and marketing results. For more information, visit www.webtrends.com.