• by Kate Kaye , February 28, 2004

24/7 Real Media will unveil its new search analytics ASP tool, InsightSE, today at the Search Engine Strategies Conference and Expo in New York. Built on the company's InsightXE Web analytics product platform, InsightSE tracks and aggregates both paid and unpaid search engine listings across all engines, from initial click to conversion.

"We felt there was a need for a solid analytics tool out there," explains Dave Hills, president of media solutions at 24/7 Real Media. "Advertisers spend a ton of money on search these days, but it's still difficult for them to comprehensively be able to look at the money spent on search across engines and associate it with sales."

Measuring search marketing campaigns can be a grueling task. Although reporting is available from individual search engines or across partner sites of search firms like Inktomi and Overture, it must be aggregated to truly determine return on investment. ClickTracks, for example, offers search reports on keywords across multiple search engines to determine which keywords are driving the most qualified leads.

"ClickTracks has been leading the market," says Dan Thies, owner of search marketing research firm SEO Research Labs. "They need competitors."

InsightSE measures consumer activity, from click to landing page to subsequent pages. The method allows a series of clicks from a search engine to be associated with the amount of sales or number of pages viewed. Information can be combined or separated by engine, keyword buy, and campaign. In addition, the product's path analysis capabilities allow advertisers to determine where people are dropping off during the conversion process.

"This prevents advertisers from having to dump individual analysis from individual efforts into a spreadsheet and doing data interpretation from there," elaborates Hills.

InsightSE reports show which keywords perform best over any period of time and can be downloaded by clients, integrated with other reports, or sent via email. The ASP product can be purchased separately or in package form along with other 24/7 Real Media offerings.

The tool tracks pay-per-click (PPC) buys as well as activity driven through organic search--either aggregating the data or measuring PPC separately from organic keyword data. Regarding the current state of search reporting, Leslie Rohde comments: "Data is dispersed badly." Rohde, the creator of link analysis software OptiLink, adds: "We don't the know the difference between a conversion rate of an organic listing versus a PPC listing, for example. It's kind of like telephony's last mile."

Development for InsightSE began late last summer. Once the company realized the need for such a product, 24/7 Real Media surveyed clients to gauge interest and to understand the search reporting challenges they were facing. The product is currently in beta testing by clients. Hills believes that e-commerce outfits will probably have the greatest use for InsightSE, although he points to publishers moving into subscription models as another relevant market.

All in all, it's apparent that search marketers are hungry for better search campaign planning information and reporting on ROI. "It will become increasingly important as SEM [Search Engine Marketing] is seen as a professional marketing discipline," predicts SEO Research Labs' Thies.