WebSideStory Adds Dashboards, Bid Management

WebSideStory upgraded its HBX “active marketing suite” today with the addition of a paid search keyword management product and dashboard-based forecasting to the Web analytics suite.

“Analytics and data can give you numbers, but you can’t take action on those numbers. We’ve made our suite surprisingly simple, because we expect marketers to be using these tools and making changes on an hourly or daily basis,” Rand Schulman, chief active marketing officer at WebSideStory, told ClickZ News.

The HBX suite includes the company’s flagship Web analytics product, with Web publishing and site search products added with its recent acquisition of Atomz, and the new paid search keyword bid management product. Combined, these products comprise what WebSideStory calls its “active marketing suite,” which goes beyond analytics that tell users what’s happening on their site to providing tools that allow marketers to act on the information, Schulman said.

The new “active dashboard” interface lets users quickly forecast the effects of site changes, such as how conversion will be affected if traffic increases by a certain amount, or how revenue will change when average order size rises.

“We’re finding customers don’t want more features and functionality as much as they want more easily accessible information they can take action on,” Schulman said.

HBX includes several pre-set dashboards for e-commerce, lead-generation, media and self-service sites. More can be designed and delivered by WebSideStory’s professional services group.

The new WebSideStory Bid product allows marketers to manage up to 100,000 keywords across multiple outlets with the same “active marketing” interface. Bid integrates with the other suite products to track conversion and ROI, or to act on site events by bidding on keywords that are searched on the site.

At launch, Bid will be able to manage keywords from six paid search providers: Google, Yahoo, Miva, LookSmart, Kanoodle, and the newly launched Ask Jeeves sponsored listings. WebSideStory and other Web analytics vendors have reportedly had conflicts with Yahoo over access to its API for tighter integration with its system. Schulman said that WebSideStory is “working with Yahoo” to solve the access issues.