Good news for ClickShift.com, not good news for me (read how I was considering Clickshift). Actually, maybe it’s good news. My biggest hangups with turning over SEM optimization from Omniture to ClickShift were:

• Losing control of the Google AdWords account that handled the keyword management for us
• Having to pay up-front for the cost of SEM rather than after the work was performed
• Using yet another vendor and introducing some overlap between Omniture and Clickshift

Now that WebTrends has purchased Clickshift, this may very well eliminate the possibility of using them as a vendor because they will be integrated with WebTrends (a direct competitor to Omniture) and we previously used WebTrends and switched to Omniture (plus, I really, really dislike the WebTrends UI). This purchase also helps explain why I heard nothing from Clickshift after saying I would be able to do business with them after the new year (when we get our new SEM budget). They were so focused on trying to get me to sign a contract that it almost seemed a little pushy and…well, strange. Hopefully being bought by WebTrends eliminates this and it can safely integrate with WebTrends services. Kudos to WebTrends for a very strategic aquisition. This gives them a significant competitive advantage over the other web analytics companies.

This may be a good thing for us in that I can focus on allocating funds towards Omniture’s professional search consulting to assist in creating optimized business rules. It still doesn’t feature the Clickshift automation and featureset, but maybe through requests and complaining from enough of their customers, they will add it in a future release of SearchCenter. I really hope they do (our corporate discount with Omniture is fantastic). The amount of manual labor that goes into managing each individual business rule in Omniture is significant. Clickshift was really onto something.

On a side note, I did receive the Google digital photo frame gift today.