Official Blog

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!

If you’ve been following along with me, you’ll notice that this is the fourth and final installment of my “Introducing Smarter’s New Ad Deck” series! In the previous 3 email newsletters I’ve covered an Ad Deck overview, CPM Display Ads, Blogs, Videos & Coupon Sponsorships and now for the final area: Featured Merchant & Featured Products opportunities!

The centerpiece of these offerings is our Featured Merchant; Homepage placement. This area includes a graphic screen that rotates in display on our Homepage for a calendar period of one-month. The graphic includes your store logo. In January of this year, our Homepage received 4,325,386 impressions! When clicked, your logo will link to a full merchant “store” which we provide with this area. The store includes all the products that you have listed with us in one area. The Featured Merchant; Homepage is a great offer for calendar-targeted or seasonal time-frames!

The second area to take advantage of is our Featured Merchant; Product & Detail pages. These pages are actually the highest traffic pages on Smarter! Please contact me and I can give you specific impression numbers broken-down by category. Taking advantage of this program will give your listings the benefit of your logo inclusion, a link to a “store” including all of the products you have listed with Smarter, and an attention-drawing, color-highlighted background for each product listing.

The last area is our Featured Merchant; All Merchants Listed page. This is a page that pulls together all of the merchants listing with Smarter in one place and includes your store logo in a Featured Merchants box to the right side of the page information. This Featured Merchant opportunity also includes a link from your logo to a “store” that includes all of the products you have listed with Smarter in one area.

And finally there is the opportunity to have your products singled out and highlighted as Smarter Featured Products. The four products of your choice will be featured on one of our custom “Buying Guides” (see: http://www.smarter.com/home-theater-system-buying-guide/by–bg-11.html for an example). These products will appear for 1 month and can be changed out up to once-a-week. A merchant logo and link to the product are included!

So! I hope you have enjoyed our “tour” of the new advertising opportunities that Smarter.com is offering! These opportunities are available to you if you are already participating with us in our classic CPC listings or if you are simply looking for additional exposure for your products / brand without the CPC listings.

Please email or give me a call and I can get you further details, clarification and specific pricing!

Tomorrow is April 1st, don’t forget to do something fun to celebrate ; )