• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, September 10, 2013

Predictive analytics -- it's the latest buzzword for search engine marketers. Yet many search engine marketing companies no longer just focus on SEM. They have transformed into a social-search analytical machine to converge the terabytes of data it now takes to run one campaign. Okay, I'm being a bit facetious. Here's another example of a search company developing technology that predicts the costs of achieving return on investments and automatically adjusts campaigns to meet those forecasts.

Kenshoo engineers have developed machine learning technology called Halogen that gives marketers insights into the future performance of advertising campaigns. It allows them to find previously unexplored markets by their company, and make better investment and optimization decisions.

Halogen powers the Kenshoo Budget Center, where marketers view budget predictions that in turn aims to create a quicker return on investment and revenue. It also integrates with Kenshoo Portfolio Optimizer to help identify areas of growth, execute planned media budgets, and optimize campaigns.

Spurred on by tons of data, marketers will focus more on predictive analytics to improve campaign performance. In August, Parse.ly, a content performance company, said it raised $5 million for its platform that analyzes Web site data through natural language processing. It defines semantic relationships in data and finds the patterns and similarities for digital media companies. The funding was led by Grotech Ventures.

Similarly, InboundWriter changed its business model after from content creation to content analytics after its engineers developed a platform that predicts how well a piece of content will do on a Web site based on many factors.

The algorithm considers similar content, original content, the publisher's Web site, and audience to determine if and how the piece will influence the readers. The technology also identifies the competition, and determines keywords that trigger performance.