Inceptor Inc. today announced a new feature in its BidCenter search engine advertising management platform that uses mutual fund optimization techniques to help companies fine-tune bids to get the best possible advertising rates and returns from search engines such as Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing.

Portfolio Optimizer’s unique advantage over other optimization tools is that it employs optimization techniques similar to those that professional money managers use to optimize mutual funds. Advertisers create groups of keywords in BidCenter and allow Portfolio Optimizer to determine individual bids to meet a business goal. Pay per click advertisers are expected to spend over $10 billion on search advertising in 2005.

“Effectively managing thousands of keywords at multiple search engines is difficult even with a powerful management tool such as BidCenter,” said Vic Odryna, President and CEO of Inceptor. “Portfolio Optimizer makes it easier for advertisers to manage a large volume of keywords by grouping them together in portfolios and assigning a performance rule. BidCenter can then automatically adjust bids across the keywords to achieve the desired outcome.”

Portfolio Optimizer seeks to optimize PPC performance using principles and methodologies similar to the financial industry. The object is to group keywords that share a similar business objective such as “Generate maximum possible revenue for the lowest cost per acquisition” or “Generate maximum possible traffic for the lowest cost per click”.

“We developed a special heuristic algorithm and combined it with a predictive modeler,” said Michael Sack, chief technology officer of Inceptor. “Portfolio Optimizer is designed to calculate the recommended changes to your bids every 24 hours and predict performance. Each day, BidCenter presents users with recommendations and analysis which show current and predict future performance of their portfolios based upon the acceptance of the recommendations.”

Predictive modeling enables Portfolio Optimizer to gauge the outcome of several different bidding strategies then select the strategy most likely to succeed.

“You can spend weeks analyzing data to determine the most optimal set of changes to make,” said Sack. “But that is a waste of time. Portfolio Optimizer can find a set of changes that gets you to your goal much faster – often making critical changes to your bids within the first day.”

Portfolio Optimizer is available to interested search advertisers who subscribe to BidCenter. BidCenter information can be found at http://search-pr.inceptor.com/october_pr_homepage. Subscriptions begin at $19.99 per month.