The new release features better reporting capabilities, including more detailed mobile statistics, competitive insights and industry performance benchmarks. The bid management system has also been tweaked to tie paid search keyword bids to a client's inventory database--raising, lowering or even eliminating bids automatically to reflect the quantity of products in stock.
According to John Squire, Coremetrics' chief strategy officer, the timing of the launch could not have been more prophetic. "The economy is forcing our clients to think very carefully about how much they're spending to drive new customers to their sites, how well they're converting those customers, as well as how well they're performing in terms of their competitors," Squire said. "In the coming months, they might be seeing lower sales growth, or maybe they'll even see a decline in sales. But being able to see whether they're performing on par with their peer set can provide insight into where they can pull back on spending and where they might need to spend a bit more."
Improving the platform's competitive analysis and benchmarking capabilities had been a top priority, Squire added.
Coremetrics 2009 also features more robust mobile analytics--offering users insight into stats like the types of phones their mobile visitors are using and the screen sizes, where they're coming from, how much time they are spending on sites, and even the ad units that brought them there. "Many of our clients want to make investments in mobile," Squire said. "They think it's going to be big, but they want to understand the behaviors first."
Meanwhile, the upgraded search marketing capabilities are geared toward retailers. Coremetrics 2009 can now incorporate real-time inventory data to make better automated bid changes. "We've built applications that pull in all of a client's back-end data and sync it to precise bidding rules that can turn keywords on and off automatically," Squire said. So a client like 1-800-Flowers or Office Depot, with massive keyword lists, can ensure that ads for specific products only appear when they're in stock, and only in the desired position on the search engine results page (SERP).
There has been increased competition in the Web analytics and campaign management space, particularly from free platforms like Google Analytics and IndexTools (which Yahoo acquired in April), incumbents like Omniture, and specialized providers like Enquisite, Squire said. But the company's consulting services were what kept paying clients from migrating to other platforms.
"If a company can get enterprise-level analytics for free or even at a lower price, then why wouldn't they go for it?" Squire said. "But what we're hearing is that they can't get that. Some of the platforms offer discussion boards or forums for technical support, and often, that's not enough for what our clients want to do. They want the ability to reach out and talk to someone live, or have an implementation team that helps them tag Flash pages or their Google Checkout cart." He also said the company had been actively developing a small and medium business (SMB) solution since 2007, and that the product had been Coremetrics' "fastest-growing sales area."