WebTrends Launches Dynamic Search

WebTrends today unveiled its new search marketing solution, WebTrends Dynamic Search, an application that automatically determines which combinations of networks, keywords, positions, creative, and landing pages perform best. The technology allocates advertising dollars to the top-performing combinations across major search networks, including Google, MSN and Yahoo!. "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," says Greg Drew, CEO and president of WebTrends. 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. Once marketers upload initial keywords and business goals, such as maximizing revenue, gross profit or return on advertising spend, WebTrends Dynamic Search starts managing campaigns. First, leveraging a combination of methods expands keywords and creative. Then, the optimization engine automatically performs multivariant 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. A few companies successfully tested the solution before Monday's announcement. "Through WebTrends Dynamic Search, we have been able to drive sales and improve our contribution margin dollars," says 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." "This comes on the heels of WebTrends' acquisition of ClickShift (earlier this month)," says Gregory Dowling, a Jupiter Research senior analyst. "This provides an interesting multivariant analysis capability." While there are other firms that offer multivariant analysis technologies, none of them are in the paid search space, leaving the market open to WebTrends, according to Dowling. "Dynamic Search users should see positive returns on their investments. If they don't, they're not using it properly." Related articles: Search Marketing Revs Its Engine Making Better Use of Web Site Behavioral Data Come Up to the Marketing Lab

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