SEMDirector Upgrades Paid and Organic Search Insight Tools

SEMDirector has rolled out new versions of Organic Insight and Paid Insight--two of its automated search reporting and management tools that are geared toward enterprise-level businesses.

The San Jose-based search marketing tech and service firm announced the upgrades at the 2007 Search Engine Strategies conference today, highlighting tweaks to the applications' interfaces, auditing capabilities, and reporting features.

The upgraded Paid Insight tool aggregates data from across all a company's search marketing activities--including search engines, Web analytics tools and bid management systems--to provide a comprehensive view of the efficacy of their paid search efforts.

The application provides macro details of search performance for a brand or company overall, analyzing campaigns according to client-specified benchmarks and time periods. Paid Insight also supplies real-time comparisons of paid and organic search results that allow for swift bid changes and swaps--all in a single dashboard.

"Paid Insight ties costs to actual value metrics, so people with budgetary responsibility can see what they're spending and where they should be spending to get the best results," said David Flesh, senior director of product management, SEMDirector. "At the same time, there's the flexibility to view bids, analytics and algorithmic changes--allowing someone to make actual tradeoff decisions between paid and organic keywords, and campaigns."

To shore up a client's organic search results, SEMDirector's Organic Insight software automates the Web site auditing process. The tool helps companies ensure that every Web page in their inventory complies with SEO best practices by comparing them using a single, proprietary metric called Audit Score.

SEMDirector's Audit Score ranks Web pages according to their tech configuration, the quality of their content, and an analysis of links--much like the ranking methodologies used by search engines themselves. Organic Insight finds and reports errors via a dashboard, and like Paid Insight, offers multiple levels of fact reporting.

"With Organic Insight, brand managers and execs can compare site traffic and ranking across hundreds of brands, while SEO professionals can view detailed, page-level audit results," said Flesh. "But on every level, clients have been able to correlate improvements in their SEMDirector Audit Score to improvements in page rankings, across their particular industry and their SEO as a whole."

Paid and organic search data that ranges from views of the industry-at-large to granular keyword details has become increasingly valuable as advertisers begin to integrate search insights into their overall marketing plans.

"Being able to provide visibility into how search terms are impacting performance through all phases of the sales cycle, from research to purchase--and how they fit into the optimal media mix--can instill a more accurate perception of a campaign's ROI," said Flesh. "Clients often ask us about how to clearly identify the way search campaigns are driving performance on- and offline." Some clients will leverage the tools in a complete search marketing management solution, part of SEMDirector's Marketing Action Platform--working with SEMDirector reps to track, analyze and act on the data. But Organic Insight and Paid Insight are also both available as stand-alone applications that clients and agency partners can incorporate into their existing search marketing strategies.

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