New Omniture Tool Offers Bid Management with a View

Web analytics provider Omniture announced in January that it will launch the second tool in its eight-year existence: a new hosted bid management service called Search Engine Manager. The new offering, which was made available to selected beta customers in January and will be generally available this month, is designed to interoperate with SiteCatalyst, the analysis platform from Omniture that operates on some of the largest, busiest Web sites on the Internet.

Why would Omniture develop its own bid management tool when the company has partnered successfully for other Web functions such as ad management and e-mail providers? According to Omniture marketing vice president John Mellor, there just wasn’t anything else currently available that did what Omniture wants to do.

“Other bid management tools will let users consolidate interfaces from a range of different search engines,” he says. “But there’s not another one that connects to a robust Web analytics platform that will help you understand why a keyword is successful or not and what you can do to improve it.”

“We want to create partnerships with best-of-breed products where they exist, and in those cases where we feel we need to build something ourselves, we’ll do that. That’s what we’ve done with Search Engine Manager.”

Mellor points out that most search engine bid management today is done strictly by studying conversions—which typically amount to 1% to 2% of click-throughs on a keyword. “What that means is that you have a deep understanding of about 2% of the business,” he says. “We believe the gold is buried in the other 98% to 99%. Show me where those other 98% are dropping out of the process. If I can channel more of them into the converting population, even getting it up to 2.5% or 3%, that’s worth the effort.”

Integrating with Omniture’s SiteCatalyst Web analytics platform lets Search Engine Manager leverage knowledge that isn’t available to other bid management tools, such as the number of pages viewed on a site or the “abandonment arc” at several middle stages before conversion. For example, trying to understand and optimize a Web shopping cart solely by measuring how many people went in and how many came out throws away a lot of important mid-stage customer knowledge.

“If I’ve got four steps in a registration process for people coming to me from a search engine, I may find that Step Three is where I’m losing 70% of my traffic,” Mellor says. “Now I can go into Step Three and find out where that traffic is going. Are they just exiting the site? Are they clicking on a link they shouldn’t? Is the page confusing?” Using the other SiteCatalyst tools, a site owner can then optimize the pressure points on the page to cut the drop-off and, it’s hoped, deliver more traffic to Step Four of registration.

The two basic measures of an ad’s effectiveness are its click-through rate and its sign-up or conversion rate. A high click-through rate and a low conversion rate indicates a landing-page problem. “Those users need to go and investigate the conversion funnel on their site to understand where people are falling off,” Mellor says. Conversely, a low click-through rate but a high conversion rate indicates a problem with the ad on the engine.

Search Engine Manager also offers an alert function that will send out an e-mail alert if a search metric such as page rank, click-throughs or conversions fall below a certain level. Search Engine manager goes out and queries the engines periodically during a day to measure keyword performance. Customers can set a bid range and let the service bid up to the max if necessary—as long as the metrics stay within a preset acceptable range. If not, they’re notified and can take action as needed, either canceling a bid or adjusting its range.

“We find most of our customers prefer to manage by exception,” Mellor says. “If I’m buying a thousand words, I don’t want to know how all one thousand are doing: Show me the ten that I’ve got a problem with.”

Like SiteCatalyst, Search Engine manager will be a hosted application, so the site owner does not have to install any software. Pricing for the service has not yet been set, but Mellor expects the cost to be “reasonable” for mid-sized Web advertisers and the agencies that manage their search campaigns.