Webinar: Store Promotion Strategies for a Digital World

Posted on 3 February 2010 by Brian Houchins No Comments

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You’re invited to attend an exciting and educational webinar “Store Promotion Strategies
for a Digital World.”

Store Promotion Strategies for a Digital World

February 17, 2010 at 2pm EST (11am PST)

register today

The recent recession, coupled with advances in technology, has changed how people shop. Consumers spend more time in the digital world than ever before. However, while consumers’ media usage has shifted, marketing budgets haven’t made a comparable transition. Marketers face a number of challenges in evolving to a new digital media mix, but with those challenges come exciting marketing opportunities.

In this webinar, attendees will learn how to rapidly develop digital promotion strategies that drive store sales, measure their effectiveness and optimize the media mix.

Learn more from our experts about:

• How consumers have shifted their media usage & the opportunities it presents marketers
• Repurposing successful legacy marketing programs for a digital world
• New paradigms to acquire and retain customers for your store
• Best practices in digital marketing for your store
• How to measure the impact of online advertising in lifting retail sales

Vikram Sharma, CEO ShopLocal

Gian Fulgoni, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder comScore

February 17, 2010 at 2pm EST (11am PST)

Webinar registration:
http://tinyurl.com/webinar-promotion-strategies

Yet Another Reason Why CircularCentral Is Well Accepted By Consumers

Posted on 28 January 2010 by Patrick Flanagan 3 Comments

(3.00 out of 5)

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So a few weeks ago within ShopLocal.com, a key switch was made to the method that most users of the site browse the weekly ads.  The traditional HTML powered weekly ad experience was replaced with a CircularCentral powered experience.  Whenever a drastic change is made to a core feature of a web site, there is always some real risk associated with user adoption and usage.

Here is the new CircularCentral based weekly ad viewer that is front and center within ShopLocal.com

Well the votes are in.  Users are making their voices heard loud in clear, in terms of page views per visit (which is really a measure of content consumption).  On average over a 25 day period (1/1/2010 – 1/25/2010), the users of the new CircularCentral weekly ad experience showed a lift of 160% in the number of pages views per visit.

Wow.  For a publisher site (such as ShopLocal.com) that means real money.  Every time a publisher can increase the number of page views that users create, that in turns creates more display ad inventory.  Even if the inventory becomes remnant and monetized via ad network backfill, this is extra money in the pocket of the publisher (be it at a lower CPM that direct sold inventory).

And from a user perspective, it’s a win as well.  Essentially what this change in weekly ad viewers did was to tear down barriers so as to make viewing and interacting with the weekly ads easier, faster and an overall richer user experience. Those are qualities that users will always reward you for, typically in terms of using and engaging with your product more.

As a side note, the team did end up keeping around the traditional HTML weekly ad experience for a few reasons such as SEO benefits (the Google bot much prefers HTML based content over Flash content) and for those users that are either on slower internet connections or just have an established preference of browsing via this more traditional method.  In either case, the traditional option is not the default method for viewing the weekly ad content and it is downplayed.

The results are so clear - uses interact and consume more content within the new CircularCentral view - at an increased rate of 160%

As a side note, the team did end up keeping around the traditional HTML weekly ad experience for a few reasons such as SEO benefits (the Google bot much prefers HTML based content over Flash content) and for those users that are either on slower internet connections or just have an established preference of browsing via this more traditional method.  In either case, the traditional option is not the default method for viewing the weekly ad content and it is downplayed.

New Partners Welcome – Introducing The ShopLocal Developer Center

Posted on 22 January 2010 by Patrick Flanagan 1 Comment

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Starting today, the ShopLocal team is proud to announce a much improved way of supporting our partners and retailers that use one or more of ShopLocal’s active APIs.  Instead of sending members of our development community overwhelming 100+ pages of technical API documentation, the team will now be granting access to an online Wiki style site called the ShopLocal Developer Center.

If you are a current development partner or in the process of evaluating a ShopLocal API, please send an email to apisupport@shoplocal.com and someone from the team will get you setup with the required access.

The ShopLocal Developer Center promises always on access, an up-to-date and accurate set of technical API documentation for all the the various ShopLocal APIs that is rich with examples and easy to navigate and use.

The vision of the ShopLocal Developer Center is to hold a developer’s hand when first being introduced to a ShopLocal API so as to make it easier for them to develop their own unique applications with these powerful web services ShopLocal offers. With this goal in mind, the team has added some additional resources to the ShopLocal Developer Center that were never previously available which include:

• API Examples – sample iPhone and Banner ad application with more examples coming soon
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) based on real world usage from ShopLocal’s own Client Services group
• Data Dictionary – to define ShopLocal nomenclature that is foreign to an external user, e.g. what a listing means, interest threshold exposure, etc.

The team also spent some serious time in revamping the technical documentation for the following APIs:

• SmartDelivery API (SDAPI)
• SmartBrand API (SBAPI)
• ShopLocal CrossRetailer API (SCRAPI)
• Local Offer Management System API (LOMSAPI)

Each API method for all of the APIs above now contains complete and standardized  information including a:

• Short description of the API call (method) and how it can be used
• Required parameters
• Conditional parameters
• Optional parameters
• URL example to show the syntax of correctly constructed API call
• Data outputs (fields that are returned by call)
• Data output example (XML return examples)

Debuting A Great Way Of Measuring Shopper Interest – Rollover Tracking

Posted on 21 January 2010 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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Constant improvement is a mantra here at ShopLocal. To that end, the team knew there was room for improvement in our popularity ranking algorithm that we call “Wisdom of the Crowds” (WoC).

The current system for determining product popularity only counted those products that a shopper specifically clicked on.  There are a number of product level clicks that are counted in terms of a shopper expressing interest such as a product detail page, a buy online click or an add to a shopping list click (which are cumulatively called Expressions of Interest).  Not any more.  The ShopLocal team has begun collecting and counting another key piece of consumer interest data – product rollovers.

By factoring in both product rollover data AND expression of interest data, the overall Wisdom of the Crowds ranking data is all the richer and accurate.  This process of collecting and using rollover data for SmartCircular sites is underway and will complete over the next month or so for all clients, SC sites and versions of SmartCircular.

At a macro level, what we have learned so far about rollover data is:

• Rollovers are on average about 5x as common as Expressions Of Interest. This means by adding them to the Wisdom of the Crowds calculation, the overall popularity ranking data should become much more accurate and more truly reflect actual consumer interest.
• Rollover usage varies significantly by retailer. No surprise given all the variation in UI/UX out there within weekly ad sites.  Also some sites don’t even use rollovers.  Or on other sites, the rollovers are down played.  In any case, we are now tracking them all so as to extract the most useful and complete set of consumer interest data as possible.

Illustrated here is a specific product level rollover that has been triggered by a user rolling over a predefined hotspot region that is overlaid on top of the circular page view images. When talking about rollover tracking, what is actual being tracked is the number of times, for a specific product, a rollover is triggered and left open for at least 2 seconds. If it meets that criteria, it would be counted as one (1) rollover for the product.

Here is a quick snapshot of some early returns from a 6 day sample set of data across 20 retailers:

• # of total product level exposures: 1,006,078,269
• # of total product rollovers: 25,620,887
• # of total product specific indicators of interests expressed: 4,532,430
• Overall ratio of interest divided by rollovers: 18%
• Rollover trigger rate  (of overall total product exposure) : 2.55%
• Interest trigger rate (of overall total product exposure): 0.45%
• Total CTR (rollovers + interest): 3.00%

UPDATE 1/21: The ShopLocal analyst team just today cranked out a nice little additional stat on this topic that is worth sharing.  The correlation of interest/exposure ranks compared to the rollover/exposure ranks, on average overall is 0.6636  Meaning that rollovers are for most sites a good measure of interest.  Maybe think of it this way.  This correlation helps prove that the items a user rolls over are likely the very ones that they end up taking other subsequent action at a later point in their site visit.

BT Enhanced Smart Ads Outperform Non-BT Ads By 40.4%

Posted on 20 January 2010 by Patrick Flanagan No Comments

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So here is a very interesting data point, from one recent Pointroll campaign that had part of the ad impressions benefiting from Yahoo! BT data and the other part of the impressions did not include any BT data.

BT enabled Pointroll ads had a 41% overall higher interaction rate than non-BT enabled Pointroll ads.

Same creative.  Same publisher.  Same timeframe.  Basically as many other variables were held constant between the two groups except the inclusion of BT data within the test group.  Sure, its not airtight statistically sound case due to the single campaign data point, but its very indicative of other similar campaign results the team has seen when comparing BT enabled ad results with those that did not receive any additional insights from BT data.

The important point to take away is BT works.  By using user level “hints” to better select what creative, copy and content elements should be inserted into the ad units, BT enabled ads are just more relevant and personalized to the user.  Therefore its no surprise that these more personalized ads receive more interest as expressed in either interactions or clicks.

If we look at click-thru rates as another meaningful measure, BT enabled Pointroll ads had a 73.5% overall higher click-thru rate than non-BT enabled Pointroll ads.