ChannelAdvisor acquires SearchMarketing.com

ChannelAdvisor Corp., a company that helps retailers sell through eBay and other online channels, has acquired SearchMarketing.com to offer natural- and paid-search services to its clients, it said yesterday.

"After talking to our customers, the overwhelming feedback was a lack of satisfaction with existing search engine optimization advertising-based tools such as rules-based and portfolio-based approaches," said ChannelAdvisor president and CEO Scot Wingo. "The ChannelAdvisor/SearchMarketing combination allows us to offer our customers, from eBay`s largest sellers to top online merchants, a next-generation ability to utilize search as a powerful new sales channel."

ChannelAdvisor will re-brand the SearchMarketing product suite as ChannelAdvisor SearchSuite. It includes:
-- software designed to automatically and in real time optimize a web site for natural-search web crawlers;
-- a keyword generator that monitors how consumers find online merchants through natural search, then mines that data to produce keyword candidates for paid-search programs;
-- a web-based, on-demand application that monitors all of web site’s search traffic and conversions to sales;
-- an automated bid manager for optimizing keyword costs and click rates.