Official Blog » 2008 » July

We all know that every day can’t be your birthday, so today it’s back to the practical! One thing that always pays is to listen to people in the same field that are experiencing the type of success we desire!

Here are four recent articles that all exemplify the idea of following a good example:

From The New York Times (7.19.08)

From CNNMoney.com (7.21.08)

From USA Today (7.21.08)

From the Indianapolis Star (7.22.08)

There are tips and pointers in these articles that cover many of the important aspects of online retailing! From tips like this one from the USA Today article, “Jeff Zimmerman also pointed me to an interesting study which found that the average cost per acquisition for search engine advertising was $8.50 per customer, as opposed to $20 each for Yellow Page advertising, $60 for email and $70 for Direct Mail. (Source: Piper Jaffray & Co.: “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting” 2006.)” to information cited by The New York Times article such as the chart below showing the recent increase in online sales vs. walk-in sales for the Gap:

There are also general tips regarding boosting your traffic using SEO and other online marketing found in the CNN & IndyStar article. It is my hope that by a little reading you will find useful, current information to help you maximize your site and bolster your online marketing efforts!

As always, please let me know if I can be of any support to you with opening an account with Smarter.com! (And yes, the $50 in Smarter ‘birthday bonus’ clicks is still in play for accounts that sign-up between now and the 31st : )

Image Source: Gap, The New York Times

This month marks Smarter.com’s *fourth* birthday!!

Besides a special offer for merchants outlined in the bottom of this post, I thought I’d let you in on a *few* of our proudest accomplishments over the last 4 years (in no particular order):

• First comparison shopping engine in US, China, & Japan simultaneously

• In Fall of ’07, Smarter was included in Inc. 500 Magazine’s top 500 fastest growing private Companies in America

• Smarter’s parent company (MeziMedia) was acquired by ValueClick Media in August 2007

• Smarter reached to #4 ranked CSE (comparison shopping engine) by traffic volume in just 3 years from launch

• Smarter was the first CSE to launch Video Product Reviews through a partnership with ExpoTV (Smarter is currently  featuring 63,251 live product reviews!) 

• Smarter was one of the first CSE’s to offer daily blogs (We currently offer blogs across six categories!) Go to: http://blogs.smarter.com to check them all out!

Over-all Smarter is very happy to be the first CSE to provide an integrated shopping experience for shoppers. We put reviews, rebates, coupons, videos, merchant reviews, product specs, and blogs all right at their fingertips!

Here are some additional key points that a merchant should know about Smarter.com:

• Merchants can add and manage bidding and special offers at the category OR product level!
• Merchants can utilize our ROI Tracker and see all their traffic results down to Cost-of-Sale with one easy account!
• Smarter can take feeds designed for other online sites and use them to populate our site with their products!
• Smarter has recently launched an expanded Ad Deck of additional advertising opportunities for our merchants including display ads and a newly updated Featured Merchant program!

And finally, here’s the moment that I’m sure you’ve been waiting for in this post (drum-roll) - our special B-Day celebration offer! It’s always nice to receive a little incentive, so for any merchant that open’s an account with Smarter within the rest of the month of July (moving forward from today for those who would ask!!), Smarter will offer $50 in bonus clicks to your account! What a great way to begin a profitable time partnering with Smarter.com!

image source: PinkCakeBox.com

I came across a great article recently posted by eMarketer talking about the importance of online reviews to today’s shoppers.  Here is one of the charts they published together with Opinion Research Corporation to illustrate how popular reading online reviews is, broken down by category: 

Question:  How healthy are your sites online reviews?

To answer that question, please see the chart immediately below:

As you can see most of the shoppers they interviewed like to read 4 -7 reviews on a product before purchasing!  Do all your products have at least that many independent reviews attached to them?  Many of our top performing online stores literally have thousands of reviews to offer potential purchasers! 

In terms of reviews and Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) like ours, these findings really point-up something that we’ve known at Smarter for quite some time!  Mainly that online reviews are critical for your sites success when it comes to the competitive landscape of eCommerce marketing!  Imagine the product you are offering listing on Smarter.com right next to the same or similar product of a competitor.  If all other factors were equal and your site offers no reviews and their site offers plenty – which click do you expect the shopper will make?  Getting that click is the first step to getting that conversion! 

Time and again, we see the merchants that are offering reviews receiving the traffic for their products over those sites that do not offer reviews. 

Smarter offers two ways for you to incorporate reviews into your product listings with us.  First, we do aggregate reviews from all over the web for your site.  So, if you have online reviews posted, even in a variety of places, Smarter will do the work of going out and finding them, and bringing them for display on Smarter once your account is open with us.  We update our reviews approximately once a month. 

Secondly, Smarter offers 5 basic ways to increase your Merchant Reviews on Smarter.com.  The tools that we offer for collecting reviews are all available once you open an account with Smarter.  They are listed in your backend SAM (Smarter Account Management) account.  Just sign-in to your account and then click on the tab marked, “Feedback Survey Info” for more information! 

BTW – here’s the link to the full article I’ve mentioned above:  Click here to see full eMarketer article!

Questions?  Give me a ring or email at the info provided!  Also, if you do not have your account set up with Smarter.com yet, please let me know and I can help you get that started as well! 

Happy Reviewing!!

Image Source: eMarketer

Hope you had a great holiday weekend with lots of BBQ & patriotic fireworks!!

Something that has been on my mind to mention for some time now is the importance of adding coupons, rebates and special offers to your CPC (cost-per-click) data-feed when listing with a comparison shopping site like Smarter.com.

As a merchant listing your products on a CSE (Comparison Shopping Engine), a large part of your success in terms of performance is going to include your visibility and the resulting click-thru & conversion rates.

If you think about Smarter.com as a “shelf” in a traditional brick and mortar store, (let’s take a grocery store for example), you can draw some parallel’s.

For instance:

• In a grocery store, you may walk down the pasta isle, for example, and notice that Brand “A” Fettuccine is on sale that week for $4.99 for a 12 oz bag, vs. their regular price of $5.89! This is done thru a little tag on the shelve just below the product. Same thing with Smarter.com!

• When you add your coupon, discount or special offer into your data-feed, it appears just below your product listing on our product pages with a special, eye-catching coupon icon. I’ve included an example from our books category that you can see right here:

Notice the coupon icon showing with the scissors below each of the book entries and then the “blown up” version I imposed on top the graphic shows it larger -

We have seen some great results for merchants by simply adding a coupon/rebate or special offer to their products! Adding one of these options really helps draw attention to your listing and gives one more way for you as a merchant to set YOUR product apart from the others on the page (think shelf)!

Keep in mind that any offers you list with us can be date-sensitive (start/end date).

And finally, there are two ways that you can add these offers to your feed with Smarter.

1. Incorporate the offers right into your data-feed before submitting (go to: www.smarter.com/datafeed for more information)
2. Add these offers in right at the product or category level thru your back-end SAM (Smarter Account Management) account with us. We are one of the only CSE’s that allows you to add these offers at the product & category levels!

Hope this helps! Please feel free to forward any specific questions my way!

 Happy Fourth of July! Hope you have a great holiday weekend planned!

This week I’d like to let you know that two of critical areas of advertising on Smarter.com have come down in cost!

They are:

1. Our Featured Merchant (Product & Detail Pages) program and
2. Our site Display Ads

The Featured Merchant program allows for your listings to be optimally displayed in your participating categories. In addition to having your items highlighted on both category and product listing pages you will receive:

- Your Company logo featured on all of your product listings
- Prominent product placement
- Featured Merchant Logo
- Link to Merchant Store page (Exclusive to all Featured Merchants): Benefit Featured Merchant Store

The Featured Merchant program can be opted into at the category level, and can run as short as 48 hours. Perfect for promoting your upcoming sales!

Also, we offer 4 different areas for you to participate with your Display Ads:

• Search Results Pages (Run of Network)
• Category Search Results Pages (great for a more targeted approach!)
• Blog Pages (check out our blogs at: Smarter’s Blog Home Page)
• Buying Guides & Special Interest Pages

We are currently taking placement orders throughout the end of the calendar year for Display Ads!

Please let me know if I can answer any questions for you regarding Smarter.com and how we can put our significant online marketing muscle to work for your online store!