As many advertisers are realigning budgets for greater efficiencies in 2009, we wanted to take a moment to remind merchants of the many ways in which Smarter.com listings can be optimized for greater efficiencies and revenue growth.
The following best practices are brought to you by CJ Search:

1. Verify that your products are properly categorized within Smarter’s taxonomy. This will ensure that products are showing up in the right category and that you are paying the appropriate cost per click for each listing.

2. Continuously update your data feed! Consumers need to see the most updated information in regards to pricing, inventory levels, new products, etc.

3. Take advantage of special features such as adding your company logo or highlighting lower prices.

4. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize! Not all products perform at the same level of return. Some listings may generate great ROI, others may show lower than average return, yet others may perform under the allotted threshold. Weekly rounds of ROI optimization will certify that the highest level of revenue is achieved while meeting your ROI objectives.

Start using these best practices today! Login to your merchant account.
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Need help optimizing your feed? Contact our preferred partner: CJ Search.

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!

Click here for 5 Google Performance Tips

The article contained in the link above comes to your courtesy of USA Today. But for those that want a quick overview, here’s the gist of what Matt talks about:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page!
2. Fill in your “tags”!
3. Get other sites to “link” back to you!
4. Create a blog and post often!
5. Register for free tools!
6. List your products with a high-performing comparison shopping site like Smarter.com to help deliver even more traffic to your site! (oh wait, that’s my additional suggestion : )

Hope you find the article informative and helpful!

It was great to meet so many new people at Internet Retailer! The roof-top Cubs game wasn’t bad either ; )

But seriously, if you haven’t been to Internet Retailer yet, I highly recommend that you plan on attending next year. (I think it will be held in Boston). To my observation, there was a noticeable difference between this year and last year’s show. It seemed that there were more people, more excitement and the tradeshow area seemed much larger with more companies displaying informative approaches to help your online business succeed! For those of you who attended, what did you think?

As always, please let me know if I can answer any questions for you regarding Smarter.com and how we can put our significant muscle (over 24 million visitors each month) to work for your online store!