Companies planning search engine advertising campaigns have a new tool to use--Keyword AdSearch, which enables them to track the advertising that appears on 19 top search engines.
The search
product comes from Evaliant, formerly Evaliant Media Resources, which was purchased by CMR/TNS a month ago. But the product was in development before the acquisition occurred, according to Todd
Isaacson, Evaliant's senior vice president of business development. CMR, well known for its reports on media spending, purchased Evaliant to replace its Adnet product line, which tracks online Web
advertising, he says.
The new product will primarily be used to research competitive search engine advertising. "Web sites will be able to prospect their competition for advertisers," said Bev
Andal, Evaliant's president. "Agencies and advertisers can see what keywords their competitors are using and optimize their own campaign."
The product appears on the Evaliant website and can be
accessed with a password. Then users type in the name of a search word. Within seconds, the top listings for the word on all 19 search engines appear, enabling users to see who the advertisers are and
click to their websites if desired. "You can also find the bid price for Overture and others that list them," Isaacson says.
A key benefit to the product is that it provides real time
information. "Our spider goes off and queries search engine sites and pulls back the creative and any sponsored links in real time," Isaacson says.
Of course, it's also a big time saver. "You want
to find the advertisers who are advertising with a given key word on competitors sites, but you don't want to open multiple browsers. You can see it all at one time here," he says.
The product
introduction comes at a time of increased use of search engine advertising, with many advertisers now devoting 20 percent of their Internet buys to keywords, according to Evaliant data.
Nick
Pahade, vice president managing director at Beyond Interactive, thinks Keyword AdSearch "could be valuable in doing competitive analysis. It's something we'd want to research and look into with more
detail." At first he compared it with research tools already offered by Overture and search engine optimization companies but then said those products don't provide information about competitive
advertising, which Keyword AdSearch does.
Keyword AdSearch will be available on a subscription basis, like other CMR products. It will be sold with Evaliant's other core Web ad tracking products,
Isaacson says.