I just sat down with Bridget Shea, VP, Eastern Region for Kenshoo, one of the sponsors at eTail 2010, to talk about some trends in e-commerce as well as some of the challenges of being a technology provider in this ever-growing landscape.

Kenshoo is a leading technology provider focusing on paid search and according to Shea, the company has established a sweet spot with major retailers in part due to a new feature called RealTime Campaigns which connect ans synchronize actual inventory with online search marketing programs.

Kenshoo is excited that the company has reached a profitability point and took on another round of funding. “That is important for our client base because it allows us to expand into other areas and we are directly investing in our product,” said Shea. “One investment is into the social media realm beyond paid search. We started as a paid search technology and now we’re social media management as well, Facebook is one of our clients.”

“In the early days of search engine marketing you’d have to log in to Google adwords,” Shea continued. “Now that we have an API feed, we give you the ability to manage campaigns so you can track your social media and you get additional management features, you can do multi-variet testing where you can split demographics and do some testing. We’re making Facebook trackable so you can track conversions and we’re making it cross-channel and we’re giving you additional optimization features and really starting to leverage it.”

While Kenshoo is aggressively approaching the marketplace with evolving technology, Shea admits that challenges come with an increased level of complexity when dealing across so many product skus. Retailers are still focusing on bids and not on quality management, said Shea, but there are a lot of elements that go well beyond bid management.