The six key features to genesis are:

1. Data from partner network fed automatically into SiteCatalyst – Once the genesis integration is established, you won’t have to worry about data being feed in in a manual fashion.  You will also be able to set up cross app dashboards to properly optimize the marketing mix
2. Easy setup via wizard menus – Easy to set up interface and menus provide limited IT involvement
3. Easy graphical user interface to configure items – Simply “drag and drop” the partner into the specified area and the wizard will help you configure the remaining steps
4. 360 information sharing – With Omniture working closely with their partner network, you will not need to worry if both systems are playing nicely together
5. Rich and expansive partner network – Many partners in Ad serving, email marketing, optimization, site search, user experience and more are readily available at your fingertips to integrate within SiteCatalyst
6. Automation, automation, automation – No need to work with Data Sources and have to manually handle processes

One caveat to Genesis is there is a cost associated with the automated integration (in addition to a potentially re-occuring fee).  So please be aware of this before jumping in feet first.

1. Make the keyword/campaign classification(s) that add the most value to your specific business.
2. After this is created, you can either use the bulk upload tool or the excel intergration to grab the most current keyword/campaign data.  You can also, as of version 3.0, download the keywords into a special template via the manage search engines area and upload them into SearchCenter via Data Sources.  If you are unfamilar with Data Sources, stick to the other two mentioned methods.
3. Add the classification into the appropriate column(s) for your keywords/campaigns.
4. Once entered, upload the file and you are done.

Now you have the new classification data and can begin to manage/optimize towards it as well as at the individual keyword or campaign level.  You will see the new classifications added by running any SearchCenter report.

• Portfolio Bid Management –> This option looks at all keywords in one large group and optimizes them across all of the search engines.  If one keyword is doing well and one isn’t, they average out and the portfolio is considered ok.  You can optimize to clicks, impressions, revenue or Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).  By using an automated big management tool, like SearchCenter, you don’t have to look at the specific keywords everyday.  You can dedicate your spend to keywords that are most important to you.  Its good to deactivate poorly performing keywords further improving overall performance.  This can run automatically or manually.

• Bid Rules –> Set rules within one engine or across all of them.  When bid fall below certain thresholds, alert emails can be sent to notify business users that actions need to be taken.  With these alert emails, you can then develop new bid rules that take this new found knowledge into consideration.  You can also set up day parting which lets you raise, lower or disable/enable keywords during specific times of the day or the day of the week.  This is another way to save money by running keywords at times you want at the CPCs you want.

** Further insight can be gained leveraging the cross visit participation plugin for Omniture SiteCatalyst.  This plugin can help search marketers see the number of campaign touch points by marketing channel (paid search, email, affiliate, etc) or any other captured key performance indicator (customer loyalty, days since last visit, visit number, time parting, etc).  Now see and understand all touch points that influenced the customers conversion decision instead of the first or last touchpoint (via SearchCenter allocations).

• How does my paid strategy incorporate with my organic strategy?
• Should I be paying for certain terms that I rank well in organically or not?

If you have SiteCatalyst, you will need to do a subrelation with natural search engine and natural search keyword.  Since Google is king, I tend to pick them for my analysis.** This can be further analyzed by looking at the Google Search Ranking (which can be added in via javascript code that looks for the cd= parameter within the referring URL string and grabs that value and passes that to an eVar and sProp or via a VISTA rule from Omniture Consulting)Next you will need to export that data to excel and generate a paid search keyword report by Google (or pull a campaign report with the SAINT classification additions for keyword term).  Once you have this in excel you can do an analysis on whether or not it makes sense to purchase and optimize the same terms across both campaigns.  Be sure to look not only at ROAS but create a calculated metric for searches by orders, registrations, bookings, etc. to see the ratio for searches to success event for both organic and paid search.The second option, if you have  SearchCenter, is to run one report where the data is housed for both paid and natural search without any need for customization.  Just login into SearchCenter and pull up Reporting and then go to Organic to Paid keyword report.  This report pulls in both organic and paid keywords into one central area for you to make decisions based on it.Once this loads up, You will see the keywords bringing in clicks, their paid keyword status, and most importantly, the natural clicks that the keyword brought in and its ROAS.  Break down the report to show only natural and then only paid to see where the best ROAS is.  Now you get to see if you should be buying that paid keyword within your overall SEM strategy.  This is very useful across all of your PPC campaigns and since SearchCenter is looped into all of your search engines, you can quickly activate/deactivate keywords that you need to on the fly.

• First – applies credit to initial touchpoint that drove the user to the site.
• Last – this is most commonly used allocation since it is thought of as more reflective of the user’s intent.  This gives credit to the last item touched within the customer cycle.
• Linear – this allocation spreads the credit equally across the various touchpoints in the cycle (i.e. if there were three campaigns that a user saw before converting, each one would receive 33% of the credit).

You should begin creating keyword groups once you understand which allocation setting works best for you.  Group the keywords by performance.  Once you assign the keywords, set up automated bid rules.  These are a “series” of actions to be taken on the keywords in the grouping. If certain conditions are met, the rule will either raise or lower the bid by the predefined amount.** Remember that any event, calculated metric and/or SearchCenter metric can be used in creating an automated bid rule.