Coremetics Rolls Out Analytics Tool

Web analytics company Coremetrics has rolled out a new tool to allow retail advertisers to better gauge how their marketing is working in various interactive media, including paid search, banners, affiliates, and e-mail.

The Marketing Management Center will operate within Burlingame, Calif.-based Coremetrics’ Marketforce suite of ad-tracking and measurement technology. With marketing campaigns increasingly complex, Coremetrics’ chief executive officer, Scott Kauffman, said the MMC would allow marketers to accurately measure what works and what doesn’t.

“These online marketers are faced with limited budgets and the expectation of high returns, but they have no ability to effectively manage their hundreds of thousands of simultaneous marketing programs,” he said. “The conflicting metrics and tool available in the industry give them absolutely no idea as to how their campaigns are performing relative to each other.”

Coremetrics isn’t the only industry player trying to address these problems. The Marketforce offering competes with analytics tools such as WebSideStory’s HitBox products and NetIQ’s WebTrends. Online ad giant DoubleClick entered the online metrics market with the June release of its SiteAdvance product.

Marketforce tracks users and creates a profile of them, figuring out how they came to the site, which advertising worked best, and the return on investment. By providing unified, automated reports, Kauffman said the MMC helps marketers sort through the mass of data to answer their No. 1 question: Where do I spend?

“They’re generally held hostage by enormous spreadsheets,” he said. “What we’re able to do through our technology is completely automate the process.”

The MMC is currently in use with pet-food retailer PETCO, which uses it to track 1,500 keywords and 6,000 SKUs. Marketforce is priced at between $8,000 and $30,000 per month, depending on site traffic.

The MMC is the second enhancement to Marketforce in as many months. In September, Coremetrics rolled out a profitability reporting tool for Marketforce, giving e-commerce marketers the ability to find their most profitably customers.