A core ShopLocal team will be attending and exhibiting at the upcoming Shop.org 2009 Annual Summit in sunny Las Vegas this year. The show will be taking place at the Mandalay Bay Report & Casino over September 22nd and September 23rd.
If you find yourself at Shop.org, make sure to stop by and see the ShopLocal team!
If you are attending the conference this year, the team would love it if you stopped by our booth (#727) so that we could meet face to face and chat. We like talking and engaging with our clients, partners and vendors in person. It’s just most fun all around. Attending from ShopLocal will be:
Good things come slowly. The long awaited, newest addition to ShopLocal’s family of APIs is SmartBrand API (or SBAPI for short). This web service allows a user to query across all live retailer content for one or more brands such as “Nike”, “Sony” or “Kraft”. So for example, this new API would allow a user to view all retailers (within their nearby geo-shopping zone) that have “Tide” brand laundry detergent on sale at this exact moment.
APIs or web services allow digital content (e.g., data) to be easily requested, queried and returned to a 3rd party.
Here at ShopLocal, a lot of the growth in our business has been through helping retailers distribute their in-store promotional content all across the web via numerous digital ad vehicles and publishers. Almost all of these distribution opportunities are made possible by having rich web services available to allow easy integrations. This new SmartBrand API falls exactly in line with this existing overall content distribution strategy.
Here is a practical example of what this new SmartBrand API could enable. Shown here are retailers that currently have "HP" brand products on sale that are nearby to the user. In this case the deals shown within this expandable rich media ad unit (e.g., PaperBoy) are for the Chicago, IL area.
A few high level FAQs about this new SmartBrand API:
- REST based protocol (all of which are GET commands)
- Returns XML formatted content
- Taps into the powerful Endeca search engine that all of this multi-retailer content sits within currently
- Allows access to many filters (or refinements) that can be applied to the API result sets
- Exposes all of the product attributes (or metadata) to enable guided navigation UI/UX presentations
- Enables browsing of content by stores (retailers), categories, brands and keyword search terms
Getting a user to come back to your site at a later point in time is one of keys to building and growing a web site’s impact on one’s business. Buying traffic is one way, but it is like an expensive drug that one always has to be consuming. By getting as many users to come back to your site in an organic (free) and direct (e.g., by either using bookmarks or typing in the link to your site within their browser’s address bar) manner, one can reduce the amount of spend for traffic from paid sources and rely upon this free and natural type of traffic.
So proving practical, easy to use tools to facilitate this type of direct (organic) repeat traffic should be a no brainier. One such SmartCircular site that does this well is The Home Depot’s Catalogs & Circulars site with the use of a feature called “Bookmark This Page” which allows a user to add a browser based bookmark for the overall site.
Browser based bookmarking is very simple and straight forward. A user clicks a link (pointed out by the red arrow in the image above) which brings up the 'Add New Bookmarks' feature of the user's web browser which easily allows a user to add a bookmark directly to their local web browser.
Another good example of a large publisher site that prominently promotes a “Bookmark This Page” browser based booking feature is Shopping.com. Just look in the top right hand part of their header
It really is a super easy feature to use. Just click a link and then add a bookmark with your local web browser.
So what web sites get 30+ page views on average? Then add the dimension of time. Maybe a site will achieve this metric on a one-off basis. But what site can claim to delivery 30+ page views week in, week out?
I know one. CircularCentral has consistently been able to drive over 30 page views every single Sunday which is the day of the week that the most activity happens since the weekly ad content. So four (4) months post launch, the trends continue to be rock solid. The biggest opportunity that the ShopLocal team sees with this type of high page views is to tie in display ads around the CircularCentral sites so as to help monetize this traffic.
Average number of page views per visitor that all of the live CircularCentral have generated since the widespread product launch at the beginning of April 2009. The rough average that has held over time has been 30 page views per visit!
If one was to focus in on just those visitors that looked at more than just one page (ShopLocal calls these multi-page visits), the performance story gets even stronger.
Average number of page views per multi-page visit that all of the live CircularCentral have generated since the widespread product launch at the beginning of April 2009. The rough average that has held over time has been 45 page views per multi-page visit!
Mobile display ads have come a long way in a short period of time. It wasn’t that long ago when all mobile ads were essentially really small .gif or .jpg images that had no functionality other than a click thru URL. With the iPhone continuing to increase its massive platform footprint, this is really accelerating and opening up some exciting new possibilities within the mobile display space. So the PaperBoy team has been hard at work building out a mobile version that will be deployed within native iPhone applications.
Here is a link to the mobile PaperBoy prototype ad that the Pointroll team helped create (screen shot below) using CVS weekly ad content pulled in from ShopLocal. Note that this demo sort-of works in a regular web browser, but it only fully works within Safari for iPhone which unlocks many of the features.
PaperBoy has gone mobile! By only using javascript & HTML (and NO flash), the team was able to create a version of a PaperBoy ad that is specifically designed to operate and make use of a number of iPhone specific features.
Here is what the offline in-store shopping list looks like populated with a few items of interest. This can be stored within the session storage that the mobile version of Safari provides for iPhone users.
So if you have an iPhone, try this ad out. Open it up as it has been designed specifically to use the following iPhone features:
- Latitude / longitude based user location service that comes from either the iPhone’s GPS or cell tower proximity
- Slide finger controls that allows a user to scroll though products left and right via touching the screen
- Integration with the iPhone’s one click to call feature for the user’s current/closest store location
- Integration with the iPhone’s one click to bring up a Google map feature for the user’s current/closest store location
- Direct support by the underlying ShopLocal provided data backbone (eg SDAPI) to provide look up capabilities on both radians and decimal lat/long (geocode) values. So no more in-between step of hitting the Google maps API to convert lat/long pairs to ZIP codes
- Offline in-store shopping list where the user’s list of items of interest is accessible regardless the presence of an Internet connection. This only works via using some new functionality that is included within the latest web browsers as it evokes the data URI scheme (e.g., data:text/html;charset=utf-8;base64). Click this link to actually check out for yourselves how this type of offline web page works. This is a powerful new feature that will allow an entire web page essentially to be stored offline
- Support for some of the more traditional ways of navigating ShopLocal weekly ad content which include browse by categories, brands and keyword search
(4.00 out of 5)
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