Yesterday I had a chat with Chris Zaharias, Omniture’s VP of sales for SearchCenter. Chris gave us a quick lowdown of what's been going on with SearchCenter over the past few months.

[Manoj]: SearchCenter recently had a major release, version 3.0 (and smaller releases 3.2, 3.3) - give us some background behind these changes.

[Chris Zaharias]: v3.3, which came out in April 2009, added match type reporting, negative keyword support, Quality Score and 1st Page Bid reporting as well as a number of performance and usability enhancements. You’re never really ‘done’ with an SEM solution; the engines change targeting and campaign management functionality every month it seems, and we try to help our clients take advantage of those options while also making more and more enhancements to unlock value in all the data that resides in our platform.

[Manoj]: What can we expect in version 3.4?

[Chris Zaharias]: I won’t spill all the beans, but one of the key areas is integrating SearchCenter with our Test & Target solution. Our SEM customers view SEM campaign management and post-click conversion optimization as equally important, and so the goal is to integrate the two products in such a way that the marketer can address both pre- and post-click optimization in one workflow.

[Manoj]: Tell us about SearchCenter's support model

[Chris Zaharias]: First, for those agency and advertiser customers who expect to be fully self-sufficient in the use of SearchCenter, we have ClientCare, which is essentially technical/product support and which exists to answer product-specific questions, bugs, etc. Second, because a good number of our clients are transitioning SEM inhouse from an agency, we provide transitional services whose goal is to deploy and customize SearchCenter, train the customer both on SearchCenter and SEM best practices, and often to provide a strong level of hand-holding as the marketer makes the transition to fully managing their campaigns on their own. We’re pretty unique in this respect, as most SEM vendors are either product-only, or full-service. In addition to ClientCare and our SEM services team, we have a Customer Advisory Board that meets regularly to help guide our Product & Engineering teams as they further develop SearchCenter.

[Manoj]: Are there any verticals that SearchCenter has greater penetration in?

[Chris Zaharias]: Retail, media & entertainment and travel are very strong for us, but edu, finance and technology are also important.

[Manoj]: Omniture wants to be (and is) a platform rather than a set of marketing tools, why is this important?

[Chris Zaharias]: The Internet is not just a marketing channel. It has become an enabler for a business strategy that consists of:

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