Terra Lycos Beefs Up InSite

As economic woes continue to weigh on advertising budgets, Spanish Internet giant Terra Lycos is emphasizing paid services to provide sustainable, recurring revenues.

That said, search marketing is becoming an increasingly important part of the companies mix, which also includes content, portals and Internet access.

This morning, the company, which has U.S. headquarters in Waltham, Mass., unveiled the latest version of its Insite platform, with features such as one-step submission and advanced reporting.

InSite 2.0 comes nine months after the company’s first foray into the search marketing business. The most notable improvement is that customers can now submit their Web sites for paid inclusion in the Inktomi and FAST indexes.

This feature is made possible by an exclusive new pact with Position Technologies, a search technology specialist based in Chicago.

Now, When InSite customers submit their Web sites to both FAST and Inktomi, the service will manage paid inclusion programs covering 63 percent of the domestic search traffic, including Terra Lycos properties Lycos Search and HotBot. The first iteration of the service covered about 25 percent.

The cost of Web site submission to FAST is $35 for the first URL and $15 for additional URLs. The cost of submitting to Inktomi is $39 for the first URL and $29 for additional URLs.

In addition, Terra Lycos is beefing up feedback marketers receive, key in showing customers the return on investment as well as providing valuable data for improving results.

“InSite now has a full suite of online reporting tools,” Tom Wilde, general manager of Lycos search, told internetnews.com. “This includes how many time the site appeared and keywords used.”

As part of its deal with Terra Lycos, Postion Technologies will also offer consulting services available to InSite customers to help improve their search rankings.

Last week, Terra Lycos missed quarterly revenue estimates because of the poor advertising market and currency fluctuations. It now says it won’t break even until 2003.