Tim Waddell, director of product marketing for Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit tells WebProNews, “The relationship is built on Adobe SearchCenter+’s alignment of engine, traffic and conversion data with OptiMine’s powerful keyword level algorithm which provides customers with new options for automated bid management.”

“Adobe will pass 12 months of keyword level data along with an ongoing daily feed to provide the algorithm with historical performance data to determine seasonality or other trends combined with the recent performance,” he adds. “We then define at a keyword level which variables are most important and match one of twenty four (24) different statistical models to define the optimal bid for the next day… Thus predicting optimal paid search performance.”

When asked what sets this apart from other similar tools, Waddell says, “The native data captured by Adobe SearchCenter+ aligned with OptiMines keyword level algorithm is a powerful combination. This option also gives our customers choices in how they want to manage their campaigns – we think the ability to manage high-touch head terms with our existing SearchCenter+ bid solution, which gives marketers total control and flexibility to bring in the human element along with the powerful automation OptiMine delivers is a great combination.”

“Customers can choose to manage their keywords any way that suits their needs,” he adds.

As far as cost to the user, Adobe SearchCenter+ is sold on a percentage of ad spend, and Waddell says the new functionality will follow the same model.

Adobe announced today that SearchCenter+ now allows users to integrate data from both paid search campaigns and organic SEO. 

"Our customers derive significant value from our ability to serve as the hub to gather, analyze and take action on their valuable marketing data,” said John Mellor, VP, strategy and business development at Adobe’s  Omniture Business Unit. "Customers use SearchCenter+ to collectively manage more than $1 billion of the global paid search spend. Adobe now helps search marketers ensure that their paid search initiatives do not compete with or cannibalize the search volume they’re already receiving from natural search.”

Users can measure paid and organic search rankings, onsite engagement, or conversions in one report, use performance of natural search to adjust their paid search bids, gain insight to help in making keyword bidding decisions, etc. 

The new version of SearchCenter+ is currently in beta, and is expected to become generally available in the second quarter.

The Omniture acquisition has been big in terms of making Adobe a bigger deal for search marketers. Late last year, the company also introduced a tool for site search, aimed at helping marketers anticipate visitor search intent and promote relevant products and content. 

"Since search is the primary form of navigation on many websites, it is often the first step a potential customer takes toward meeting his or her online goals – especially on mobile-optimized websites," says Adobe. "When visitors cannot easily find what they are looking for early into their website visit, they may leave to search elsewhere for what they need. As a result, key metrics such as online engagement, conversion, average order value (AOV) and visitor retention can be negatively impacted."

"Every onsite search query is an opportunity," explains Brad Rencher, VP and general manager of Adobe’s Omniture Business Unit. "Each search is a customer telling you what they want, what they are interested in, or what they want to purchase or download. With Adobe Search&Promote, our customers can use search and navigation as a way to dynamically deliver the right content, products and offers to the right visitors. Each search becomes an opportunity to optimize how visitors browse, find, compare and select relevant products and content across screens and devices – driving visitors to convert at a higher rate and leave much more satisfied."

Search&Promote integrates with other products from Adobe’s Online Marketing Suite, such as Test&Target, Recommendations, and Scene7. With Test&Target, Search&Promote users can test search experiences, marketing, or results pages against each other. Recommendations can be integrated into search results, and Scene 7 lets users enhance search results visually. 

Around this time last year, Google launched Commerce Search, also aimed at improving bounce rates for product search on sites. "Search quality is a big factor in changing visitors to buyers online, and in making customers happy too," the company said. "Visitors spend an average of just eight seconds before deciding whether or not to remain on a website, so having a good search tool is important for turning visitors into buyers."

For more helpful information on dealing with bounce rates, watch our interivew with Avinash Kaushik and Brett Crosby from Google from search engine strategies a couple years ago. 

Adobe offers a lot more information about Search&Promote here, with a product overview, success story, white paper, etc.

Initially the two companies will focus on the ability to automate Facebook media buying and access analytics that measure customer engagement on Facebook. The partnership builds on Facebook analytics the companies introduced last year to help marketers join the conversation and have more relevant interactions with their customers.

The partnership is aimed at helping companies more easily integrate Facebook as a marketing channel in an effort to connect and have relevant conversations with Facebook’s more than 400 million users.

“Working with us, Omniture has been able to develop a rich and immersive set of tools that will help our clients better understand the value of their Facebook advertising campaigns,” said Dan Rose, Facebook’s vice president of business development and monetization.

“By creating a single dashboard to plan, deliver and measure campaigns, Omniture can make advertising on Facebook easier and ultimately increase ROI for clients.”

Omniture customers can now use the company’s SearchCenter Plus, a combination of its search engine marketing management application with added functionality for buying Facebook Ads.

In addition, Omniture customers can now generate reports specifically designed to understand ad effectiveness for some of the unique elements of Facebook such as pages and applications.
 

Joking aside, it looks like a peanut butter/chocolate moment for the world of online audience measurement. The partnership will see comScore combine the data it gets from a 2 million person global panel with Omniture’s–raise pinky to side of mouth–1 trillion quarterly web site transactions. According to the announcement:

This strategic partner relationship blends these two methodologies in a highly automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement designed to enable publishers to represent themselves in a more comprehensive manner to advertisers, and for advertisers to better optimize their media planning with the benefit of more extensive media reach data.

That’s a fancy way of saying the data is going to be a lot more accurate from here on out. As Josh James, Omniture CEO and co-founder puts it, "With this relationship, Omniture and comScore will enable publishers who have rich, highly targeted audience segments to reliably demonstrate their value to advertisers and also help advertisers find these attractive consumer segments. The combined offering will provide advertisers and publishers with a common currency to measure the value of online audiences across an ever-increasing number of digital channels."

So what does this mean for publishers and advertisers? I like how Scott McDonald, SVP Research, Conde Nast Publications explains how it will help (in theory):

"For more than a decade, we have fretted about – and sometimes quarreled about — the discrepancies between the audience estimates derived from third-party panels like comScore’s and those derived from web site analytics systems like Omniture’s. This collaboration represents the most significant effort to date to harmonize the two approaches and give the industry, at last, a common and convergent set of numbers."

It’s a real kumbaya moment for the measurement world. Now we just need to see if the two ingredients can combine to make something as tasty as a Reese’s cup!

What do you think of this partnership?

Comments

The partnership will combine Omniture’s method of analyzing web traffic by looking at data collected by servers with comScore’s panel based audience measurement.

Previously the two methodologies had different objectives and used contrasting data collection technologies, resulting in metrics that caused confusion among publishers and advertisers.

Magid Abraham
Comscore President,
CEO and Co-Founder

This partnership blends the two methodologies in an automated way to create a unified approach for audience measurement aimed at allowing publishers to represent themselves in a more accurate way to advertisers, and for advertisers to improve their media planning with more data about their reach.

"comScore and Omniture are working to provide the marketplace a much-needed solution for consistent Web-wide measurement," said Dr. Magid Abraham, comScore President & CEO.

"This relationship will deliver to our customers the solution that they have been seeking, thus helping to promote and accelerate the usage of digital marketing intelligence for delivering actionable business results and competitive advantage. We believe it will also help the industry overcome concerns of inconsistent measurement of digital audiences and promote further adoption of digital media advertising."

The partnership is aimed at allowing joint Omniture and comScore customers to use Omniture tags to collect and share information with comScore’s Media Metrix 360.
 

"Adobe customers are looking to us for solutions to deliver engaging experiences and more effectively monetize their content and applications online," says Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe. "This is a game changer for both Adobe and our customers. We will enable advertisers, media companies and e-tailers to realize the full value of their digital assets."

Adobe says the deal will enable advertisers, ad agencies, publishers, and e-tailers to achieve greater ROI from their digital investments while improving the end users’ experience.

Some (not everybody) simply think that Omniture was out of ideas. SeeWhy Founder Charles Nicholls, who is a 20-year veteran of the software, BI and analytics industry,  recently attended the Web Analytics XChange conference, where John Pestana (a founder and current Director of Omniture), Brett Crosby (Urchin/Google), Matt Cutler (founder of NetGenesis), and Bob Page (co-founder of Accrue, now a Yahoo!) each spoke.

"The consensus, if there was one, was that the industry was approaching maturity, and there was some speculation that the next generation of web analytics was on the horizon, just about to disrupt the status quo," says Nicholls. "Revolutionary in nature, and built for today’s ecommerce challenges, the new generation would brush away the old."

"Little did we know what John Pestana already knew," he adds. "…that a few days later Omniture would be acquired for $1.8bn, a signal that the industry is rapidly approaching maturity and maybe even a wave of consolidation as we saw in October 2007 in the Business Intelligence industry."

Either way, Omniture is Adobe’s now, and the company sees the acquisition as one that will significantly expand its addressable market and growth potential in the online advertising and e-commerce industries.

While the concept behind testing and optimizing is simple in theory, the results that can come with enough attention to these things, can have a tremendous impact on a business’s success.

Take for example, Encyclopaedia Britannica. This is a well-known encyclopedia company that relies on its e-commerce site for its direct-to-consumer business. Naturally, this makes the site a very important portal for business and revenue for the company.

"By using multivariable testing, Britannica’s marketing team was able to optimize its landing page for visitors coming from sites such as Dictionary.com in order to better target key consumer audiences," says a spokesperson for Omniture, the company behind the testing tool Britannica uses.

"After honing in on its ‘best recipe’, Encyclopaedia Britannica saw a 48% lift in revenue via increased subscriptions and a net revenue increase of 28% over a 4-week period," the spokesperson says.

Those are some impressive numbers for a month.

Multivariate tests are good for when you get a substantial amount of traffic, the layout and overall design of your landing page is basically staying the same, and you want to change specific parts of your page, like a headline, or an image.

For mid-sized and larger enterprises in particular, and buyers in the UK and Europe, there are many established vendors who can provide advanced analytics functionality.

This analysis stems from the 2008 edition of the Web Analytics Report, released today by CMS Watch, which evaluates 15 major Web Analytics suppliers based on extensive vendor research, interviews with customers across a range of industry sectors, and hands-on testing of solutions.
 

"The web analytics marketplace has seen some instability and consolidation –
such as ClickTracks and SageMetrics being acquired by larger entities, and
Omniture’s imminent acquisition of Visual Sciences — and this has led some to
believe that web analytics has become a two-party system," said Phil Kemelor,
lead analyst for the report. "But don’t believe the hype that Google Analytics
and Omniture are your only choices, because that’s hardly the case."

While Omniture is the largest pure-play web analytics firm and Google has brand cachet, CMS Watch research finds that enterprises can select from a broad selection of established vendors that work well in diverse scenarios and can scale as web site traffic grows. Moreover, Microsoft is planning to enter this space later in 2008. "Especially with Microsoft’s looming entrance, the Web Analytics marketplace is far from limited," Kemelor added.

Comments

In the middle of the holidays, people began to notice and question how some Adobe applications pinged a remote server at 2o7.net. Omniture owns that domain; the requests from Adobe apps were destined for 192.168.112.2O7.net.

Some wondered if this represented a type of spying on Adobe customers. Nack posted a response to the topic, listing the occasions when Adobe apps make outside calls. He called the commentary on sites like Valleywag “wild accusations.”

Nack returned with a new post to follow up on the story again. He explained how all requests to Adobe.com also ping Omniture for anonymous analytics purposes; Adobe posted a tech note about this too.

The topic of the questionable subdomain used by Omniture came up twice. At a quick glance, 192.168.112.2O7.net may look like a local, non-routable IP address. Even the letter ‘O’ is capitalized, unlike the usual 2o7.net preference for lowercase.

It looked to us and to others like a blatantly deceptive name choice. Nack said on his latest post that Adobe didn’t really know why Omniture used that subdomain.

However, Adobe plans to have Omniture change the server name, presumably to something a little more self-explanatory. Nack has done well to respond on the story a couple of times, without getting defensive or accusatory, and that positive approach probably helped keep what seems to be a minor question of analytics from being blown out of proportion.

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