Introducing “Subject to Search”

As I type this I am sit­ting in an air­plane, return­ing from meet­ings with cus­tomers and agency part­ners in Japan. Hav­ing recently com­pleted my first year as the Search­Cen­ter Prod­uct Man­ager, this eleven hour flight pro­vides a lot of time to sit and reflect on progress made over the course of that year. The prod­uct has improved in so many ways:

• Dur­ing this past year we com­pleted the inte­gra­tion with Test&Target to offer users land­ing page opti­miza­tion capa­bil­i­ties directly tied to their SearchCenter-managed campaigns.
• We began report­ing on and allow­ing opti­miza­tion around qual­ity score.
• Sig­nif­i­cant and ongo­ing improve­ments have been made to plat­form speed and performance.
• Early this year we intro­duced full search query per­for­mance report­ing for all search engines and built a key­word sug­ges­tion tool upon the insights that data provides.
• In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the Omni­ture Con­sult­ing team, we have mas­sively enhanced our bid man­age­ment func­tion­al­ity, now allow­ing for advanced bid trig­gers, plug-and-play bid automa­tion tem­plates, cross-engine bid strate­gies, and much more.
• Numer­ous improve­ments were made to the application’s UI to facil­i­tate eas­ier man­age­ment of accounts and analy­sis of per­for­mance data.
• And now, through our most recent prod­uct release, we are excited to now offer users the abil­ity to man­age and mea­sure all their Face­book ads.

In addi­tion to the feature/functionality advance­ments Search­Cen­ter has seen, we have also taken many other steps for­ward in build­ing out our orga­ni­za­tion to pro­vide for the needs of our users. Most notably, we recently released an offi­cial Search­Cen­ter cer­ti­fi­ca­tion pro­gram. Pow­ered by the con­tin­ued growth of the SEM por­tion of our busi­ness, we also markedly increased our ser­vices and sup­port team.

The improve­ments we’ve seen in Search­Cen­ter have come about in a very direct way from feed­back received from users, like those I’ve just spent a week with in Tokyo, as well as the hun­dreds of oth­ers in cities and coun­tries world­wide that have openly and hon­estly shared with us their busi­ness chal­lenges and needs with us. We view this feed­back as the most crit­i­cal fac­tor in our cur­rent, and future, success.

As I com­mence my sec­ond year on the Omni­ture Prod­uct team, I am down­right giddy about the future of Search­Cen­ter. There are many more excit­ing fea­tures we can’t wait to get into the hands of our cus­tomers. There are numer­ous best prac­tices, prod­uct tips, and hid­den gems already exist­ing in the appli­ca­tion today that I want to ensure are high­lighted so every Omni­ture user can receive the most value from their invest­ment with our plat­form. And through this blog that is exactly what I hope to share with you in the days and months ahead.

I love search mar­ket­ing! And I love what Search­Cen­ter can do to empower online marketers.

Now that my plane has landed and I am mak­ing my way to through the ter­mi­nal, I hear a pub­lic address announce­ment, and I’m smile. Though I’ve heard these words count­less times before, they now hold a deeper mean­ing for me. Not only my lug­gage – but my job, my thoughts, this blog, and my life in gen­eral… are all “sub­ject to search.”