Back on Dec 9th, 2009, Chris Saridakis, Gannett senior vice president and chief digital officer (and our fearless leader) shared part of the ShopLocal success story with analysts at the UBS Media and Communications Conference.
Below are the two relevant parts to ShopLocal of the overall presentation that spans all of the assets that make up Gannett Digital. It’s great recognition of the successful integration with PointRoll and Gannett, and its always fun to see one of your “babies” (i.e., CircularCentral) get such clear promotion on the big stage. So here’s to another record year in 2010.
“Our acquisition of ShopLocal continues to exceed our expectations. We saw a significant improvement in profitability in 2009 and as we are still executing on synergies between PointRoll and ShopLocal, we expect to see further financial improvements in 2010, most notably on the topline. ShopLocal continues to grow its roster of clients and powers 44 of the top 50 retailers’ Websites.”
If there is one image that the team here at ShopLocal is proud of, its not of any of our digital solutions that we bring to market. Rather it's an image of our clients and the relationships we have with each of them. The longevity and multi-year partnerships that most of the retailers have with ShopLocal is truly unique and exciting.
“One of the big product initiatives for ShopLocal in 2010 will be CircularCentral, what we believe could be a newspaper industry solution for retailers’ preprint programs. As consumers increasingly move online, circulars must extend their presence online to remain relevant. CircularCentral is a product that replicates the Sunday print experience by delivering digital versions of national and local circulars in one location. It can be distributed across any digital medium from PointRoll’s rich media ad units to mobile applications. It offers a powerful targeted and localized online ad solution for retailers, while offering publishers a way to defend their lucrative Sunday preprint business. We have rolled it out across all of Gannett’s newspaper and TV sites and as well as other major portals, including Yahoo. We continue to receive positive feedback from advertisers so far and are increasingly hearing from them that they want a scaled solution across the newspaper industry overall.”
CircularCentral is poised to become the digital distribution vehicle for preprint advertisers, both within Gannett and across other leading newspaper companies, as the need for large audience is key to success.
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.
All things deals, sales and coupons are red hot and the smart folks over at Gannett Digital has been listening to this ever growing consumer demand. So a combined team from ShopLocal, Planet Discover and Gannett Digital has been working together over the last few months to create a streamlined and consolidated “deals” experience for nearly all of the local newspaper.com sites that Gannett operates.
The result of this effort is visible at deals.desmoinesregister.com which does a great job of bringing together many different types of deals all under one unified site. From a user’s point for view, this is absolutely the right move, as it consolidates local deal content that was previously fragmented all across the newspaper.com site and wraps it up in a searchable and browseable manner.
The types of content that are available in these deals sites to shoppers include:
The Des Moines Register just launched the first of many new local deals sites. This is the main entry page of the deal site. All of the dynamic, localized data that appears in the "Sunday deals all week long" section comes from ShopLocal's SmartDelivery API including the three most popular circular front cover images for that market.
From the 'Weekly Deals' link in the top menu bar, a user is taken into the familiar CircularCentral flash based user interface that allows a shopper to browse all of the newspaper ads online in one easy to use location.
Sometimes until you gather all of the inputs and list them out together, the overall size and scale isn’t immediately evident. The team here at ShopLocal had one of these ‘ah-ha’ moments a few days ago when we stopped and realized how broad our international (e.g., non US based) footprint has grown. We are currently supporting at least nine (9) retailers and one larger newspaper publisher that have operations outside of our typical US only borders and this list continues to grow.
ShopLocal currently supports eight (8) different countries as well as five (5) different languages.
Current International ShopLocal Clients Include:
The CircularCentral platform continue to mature. With graceful aging the richness of features multiplies. Yesterday three key new features were deployed to the the latest instance of CircularCentral live within ShopLocal.com which are:
- Related Online Offers: Within the item detail page, additional online offers provided by our great partner Shopping.com (SDC) are being tasteful integrated so as to offer the consumer a true mutli-channel experience. This also adds an element of cross-selling and discovery as it offers additional similar products to the local on-sale one.
- Synchronized Display Ads: Since CircularCentral is built using Adobe Flex 3 and deployed via the Adobe Flash Player browser plugin, all of the intrasite user actions do no cause the overall HTML page to re-load. This means unless specific ad server integration is undertaken, all of the many page views that a CircularCentral guest would generate (see past averages of page view per visit performance) would only result in one paid banner ad impression. The team has wired things up in such a way that the most every page view that is generated within the CircularCentral application results in a new display ad being rendered.
- New Backend Database: The SiteSolutions team here at ShopLocal has finally switched out the backend systems that power CircularCentral to use the much more powerful Endeca search engine that runs site search and guided navigation currently within ShopLocal.com. This is a key foundational building block of letting us expand the functionality further in the future.
Here is the default entry view of CircularCentral where a user is asked to pick a single retailer of interest that they want to explore the print ads for. Note the leaderboard display ads integrated above and below the CircularCentral content area.
Here is an item detail page within CircularCentral that depicts the related available online products. A user can actually scroll through a number of relevant suggested eCommerce offers within this horizontal carousel UI element. Also notice that the banner ads are different, even though the overall parent HTML page has not been refreshed.
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