Everybody likes a miracle

WebTrends' new Ad Director tool will improve search ad results by 44 percent on average, the web analytics firm claims.

The tool arrives at a dire moment for search engine marketers. A recent liaison between Yahoo and Google is likely to increase Yahoo pay-per-click search rates by about 22 percent, SearchIgnite found. Yet another study found Google gets $1.10 for every new dollar spent on search advertising — that's 77 percent of search ad spend, giving it significant leeway to inflate prices.

WebTrends estimates that aggressive online advertisers will waste $4.5 billion on pay-per-click (sponsored search) advertising in 2008 alone. To stop those losses, the Ad Director "learns" client habits, then optimizes millions of combinations of keywords, landing pages and ads across search networks.

The functionality also provides budget flexibility for keywords meant for branding and not necessarily conversion, such as brand names.

Ad Director goes live at the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference in San Jose between Aug. 18-21.