Official Blog » Importance of Coupons/Special Offers in Data-Feed!!

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!