Overture today unveiled its Search Optimizer, company officials gave me an overview of it yesterday. This tool – built on top of their Marketing Console and an extension of the technology Overture/Yahoo acquired with Key Lime – is aimed at search marketers who manage a lot of keywords – in the hundreds, if not thousands. It provides one analytic view of a campaign, and has an automated feature that, based on business rules you input, will optimize your campaigns for you. I’m no expert in this field, but I find it a worthy development in that it addresses the extraordinary complexity which has become a reality in search marketing these days. I suggested they make it free, but for now they’re charging an average of $500 a month for the service.
As opposed to the blunt instrument of, say, TV buys, the numbers trend toward the infinite when you are managing thousands of keywords against scores of creative executions in multiple channels (ie Google, Yahoo, FindWhat, etc) across demographic, behavioral, daypart, and other variables. And it will only get more complex in the future. Smaller firms (such as Key Lime) have sprouted up which focus on addressing this issue (and they keep getting bought), but it’s good to see Yahoo also in the game. I imagine Google will need to respond in kind.
By the way, if anyone has experience using this or similar tools to manage a lot of complexity, and has an extraordinary story to tell of how your marketing plans/return/approach shifted due to them, I’d like to talk to you for my book. jbat at battellemedia dot com, thanks!