STORES Magazine - February 2009 - (Page 48)

NUTS AND BOLTS / ONLINE MARKETING optimizing performance on search engines, Mercent uses pricing, performance metrics and constant updates to keep retailers’ advertisements running at their top efficiencies. “We’re helping connect retailers with high-intent online shoppers in more places across the Internet and, more important, we’re helping retailers generate more return on their advertising investments,” says Mercent chairman and CEO Eric Best. Mercent Retail, the company’s on-demand platform, provides retailers the insight necessary to understand their online channel performance and the control to optimize and generate greater ROI from their marketing channels. Applications like Mercent Retail Shopping, Mercent Retail Marketplace and Mercent Retail Paid Inclusion allow retailers to promote their products through comparison shopping channels, online marketplaces and natural searches on engines like Yahoo!, Google and Alta Vista. Relevant product content Mercent offers features like a customizable dashboard and advanced reporting where retailers can analyze ad performance by multiple categorizations. During the discovery and set-up stage, Mercent obtains as much product and catalog data as it can from the client. That comprehensive view also looks at e-commerce and warehouse management software to optimize pricing and inventory levels. “The more relevant product content you have, the better you can optimize these advertising campaigns,” Best says. “We take all that information to create unique ads for every product in every channel.” Some retailers manually create online ad campaigns that reflect their brand and presence, but Mercent views advertising as a core business function that should be directly integrated with the retailer’s business infrastructure. 48 STORES / FEBRUARY 2009 or two per click and you don’t even have the ability to show the customer the individual items,” he says. Tracking and analysis A customer may not always buy immediately and may sometimes return directly to the retailer so Buyz.com uses cookies to measure the true return on advertising investments. Mercent also intercepts a click from the customer on the way out so that, with tracking and analysis, it can look at the purchases that result from the marketing spend on various sites. “They can tell us on a granular level what options are profitable and what options are not,” Kuperman says. “We can set a typical return on ad spend goal of about 400 to 500 percent and actually meet that.” One such example would be Rolex watches. While it is one of the most searched watch brands on the Internet, the high cost makes the chance of generating a sale very small. Perhaps out of curiosity, many people may follow a Rolex search to Buyz.com just to see the price. By managing the number and type of search terms, Buyz.com can eliminate ads for unpopular items and maximize its ad spend. “We typically remove those low-volume, high-probability words within 30 days of the analysis of the data,” Kuperman says. “Once it is kicked in, the reporting elements of Mercent filter those unprofitable products out of sequence.” The system can automatically adjust ad campaigns every 15 minutes depending upon inventory status of the individual products, profitability and performance profile, and Mercent can also help maximize advertising spend efficiency by cutting back during certain times of StORES the year. Craig Guillot is a New Orleans-based writer and photographer. WWW.STORES.ORG Buyz.com provides the product data to Mercent, which manipulates and maps it for each of the comparison shopping sites it works with. “They distribute the data in a way that is palatable to all of the different shopping sites,” Kuperman says. “Each one has different processes and configurations, and it would be unmanageable for us to look at all these feeds and manage each one individually.” Buyz.com provides twice-daily updates to Mercent, which can include new products, price changes, special promotions and image and categorization changes. Mercent then reconfigures those ads and updates them daily at the various online marketing channels. Buyz.com can then analyze ad effectiveness through a robust reporting engine. When a customer is looking at a particular piece of jewelry on a comparison shopping site, she will use the description, price, rating and customer reviews as a basis for selecting a merchant. If that user clicks a product that links back to Buyz.com, the jewelry retailer pays the comparison shopping site 20 to 75 cents, depending upon the site and the quality of the lead. There is tremendous value in those click-throughs, Kuperman says, because they are considered more targeted than those generated by a search engine. “If you use a general competitive keyword to be in the top four or five, you will often be paying more than a dollar http://www.Buyz.com http://www.Buyz.com http://www.Buyz.com http://www.Buyz.com http://www.Buyz.com http://www.Buyz.com http://www.Buyz.com http://WWW.STORES.ORG

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of STORES Magazine - February 2009

STORES Magazine - February 2009 Contents Executive Editor's Page President's Page Are You a Pusher or a Puller? What Shoppers Think Online Retail Satisfaction 10 Things You May Have Missed Numbers Worth Counting Full Price/Markdown Retail People Cover Story - Something’s Got to Give First Look Concept2Watch Online Partners Merchandising Sustainability Inventory Systems Drug Store Systems Business Intelligence Inventory Managment Online Marketing Supply Chain - Better Data, Better Decisions Returns Management - Identifying Fraud Data Security - Securing Intimate Data Anti-Shoplifting - Mall of Shame? Risk Management - Securing Consumer Confidence Loeb Retail letter ARTS Update Point of View NRF News Retail Crossword Retail Industry Calendar End Cap

STORES Magazine - February 2009

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