Clicks that Count

With financial belts tightening throughout the industry, retailers are seeking ways to optimize ad expenditures that reached a record $11.5 billion in the first six months of 2008, according to a survey by the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Bidz.com is the second-largest online jewelry retailer, with estimated 2008 revenues of $230 million. From earrings and necklaces to watches and sunglasses, the website operates in an auction format where customers bid on their favorite products. Seeing there was a segment of the market that preferred direct purchase to auctions, the company launched Buyz.com last year with an inventory of more than 20,000 jewelry items.

“We wanted to take our product lines out to customers in a more retail environment and to a more mainstream consumer,” says Leon Kuperman, chief technology officer and vice president of business development for Buyz.com.

Online marketing channels are critical in providing traffic and sales leads, and Kuperman estimates that up to 40 percent of Buyz.com’s sales come from those channels. A customer who searches online for Azimuth jewelry often is led to a shopping site where she can learn more about the individual products and compare retailers and prices.

Known as comparison shopping sites, they include customer reviews and rate everything from video games to furniture and baby apparel. Some of the more popular marketing channels include Nextag, Google Product, Shopzilla, Price Grabber and Yahoo! Shopping.

Traffic from comparison shopping engines is important to retailers because most visitors who arrive via them tend to be further along in the buying process and therefore represent a more solid lead. When a consumer clicks on an offer from a retailer at a comparison shopping site or online marketing channel, that retailer is charged a pay-per-click price that can run anywhere between a few cents and a few dollars.

To help it reach customers through these online marketing channels, Buyz.com enlisted the help of Mercent, an online marketing firm that helps retailers optimize performance across online channels. Through consulting and use of its web-based solutions, Mercent clients are able to push their ads and products out to the major online marketers more easily.

From creating the individual ads to 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.”