DoubleClick has released, as part of its DART Search, Spotlight Tag Bidding, a new solution enabling advertisers and marketers to manage bid strategies across multiple product offerings at the category level, rather than at the generic keyword level, and therefore improve paid search marketing profitability, it said.

The tool is aimed at multi-product vendors, such as those in the travel, retail and financial services sectors; they ca use Spotlight Tag Bidding to optimize search marketing by tracking category, or even individual product, profit margins.

For example, a travel company buys the keyphrase "family vacations to the Grand Canyon," and when customers click to the company's site, they are presented with a range of products - hotels, flights, car rental and travel insurance - each with its own profit margin. Spotlight Tag Bidding allows each product to be optimized to its own category to better track and manage its profit margin, thereby increasing paid search ROI.

"Spotlight Tag Bidding provides our search marketing clients a much clearer perspective into which of their products are converting to profit… [and] clients are able to more accurately - and profitably - optimize keywords and bids, and manage their overall online marketing campaign," said Dave Fall, vice-president of search marketing product management at DoubleClick.