Within the Deal$ area of the search engine Ask.com, a new beta area called ‘Local Only’ is appearing that is currently nearly exclusively powered by the localized what’s on sale content that ShopLocal houses in it’s many SmartCircular sites.
Lots of SmartCircular retailer clients are showing up within the search results of this Ask.com beta area like Office Depot, Best Buy, Kmart and Target to name a few. Luckily this local content is not siloed, as it is woven back into the overall Deal$ result set, as I am guessing not many users make it into this specific beta area. One of the coolest things that Ask.com is doing in this beta site is calculating the percentage savings from the original price to the sale price.
Example results page for "Digital Cameras" within the Local Only Beta area of Ask.com's Deal$ part of their search index.
However the only current down side to the Ask.com beta implementation is that the landing page URLs are 100% generic and are not product or deal specific, which leaves plenty to be desired on the user landing page experience. So a user that is looking a specific digital camera within the beta area of Ask.com that clicks off is routed to the main “home” landing page. It also appears that the store filter doesn’t account for all retailers that are included within the results set.
Aggregated sites are helpful tools for consumers trying to get a wide selection and broad coverage. Over the last few years, a number of weekly ad / circular / newspaper ad focused aggregator sites have sprung up. Some retailer’s online weekly ads are starting to see low single digit percent traffic coming from these sources. Not bad, given a small % of a really large number is still a decent chunk of free organic traffic.
This really is a win-win-win situation for all parties. These aggregator sites make a tiny bit of revenue via online display ads & Google AdSense, ShopLocal gets good inbound links (great for page rank and SEO) and the retailer gets targeted free inbound traffic to their weekly ad site.
There are a growing number of weekly ad aggregator sites as nearly all retailers that do newspaper circular advertising are now publishing their weekly ads online within their .com site
- SundaySaver.com (by far the strongest in nearly every search engine’s organic rankings which links to 187 weekly ad sites, many of which are ShopLocal operated)
- Spoofee.com (links to 49 weekly ad sites, most of which are ShopLocal operated)
- ShopLocal.com (aggregation of all the retail circulars content that ShopLocal creates)
- WeeklyAdCirculars.com (links to 207 weekly ad sites, many of which are ShopLocal operated)
- DealsPl.us (links to 34 weekly ad sites, most of which are ShopLocal operated)
- Deals2Buy.com (links to 54 weekly ad sites, most of which are ShopLocal operated)
- AdFinderTV.com (appears to only be for Southern California as it is run by an CBS affiliate)
- Flyerland.ca (only features Canadian retailer flyers which a number of which are ShopLocal operated)
- GrocerySavings.ca (only features Canadian retailer flyers which a few are ShopLocal operated)
- SacBee.com (only features retailers within the Sacremento, CA area)
- Zip2Save.com (US version of Flyerland that features a limited number of circulars so the content is on the lite side currently)
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.
The team actually did it. After months of internal R&D, the first SmartSearch campaign is finally live on Google for JCPenney (only for the Kansas City DMA currently) and on Yahoo!. This marks a historic day here at ShopLocal as the SmartSearch product allows for fully automated, localized search engine marketing (SEM) on both Google & Yahoo!. Below is an actual screen shot from a Google search result page for the keyword “womens apparel” that comes back with a SmartSearch paid in the top paid position:
The SmartSearch ad on this LIVE Google search result page is the very first paid ad in the top ranked spot. Note that within this particular screenshot the organic search results are from Chicago, but all of the paid ads are from the Kansas City DMA area due to fact that ShopLocal is located in Chicago
And here is what a user would see if they actual clicked on the Google ad:
Notice how the SmartCircular landing page is loaded with localized, relevant content to the search term "womens apparel".
And just to be fair to our good friends over at Y!, here is how the same live SmartSearch campaign shows up within a Yahoo! search results page (SRP) for the keyword “bedding” within the Kansas City geo-location:
The SmartSearch ad for JCP is showing up in the fourth (4th) position in the paid search portion within Yahoo! currently
A few of the most notable differences between this specific search effort and all the rest of the pack of typical paid search campaigns is:
- Hyper-Local Focus so that a retailer’s store foot print drives where the ads will be shown and what content will be within any given ad. So if there are no “shoes” on sale within some store locations, then those underlying geographies of the country would not get targeted with a search keyword of “shoes”
- In-Store Focused Conversion instead of the typical online or eCommerce sale based conversion. This type of paid search campaign is not intended to drive online orders, but rather shoppers into local stores that make purchases offline
- In-Store Sale Based Content as the circular or weekly ad is the underlying source of this promotional store focused set of keyword ads. This helps leverage this core existing offline assets
- Full Automation of the creation of all the localized keywords, ad copy and landing page URLs. Once a set of ad copy templates are setup and agreed to by the client and/or agency, this entire process of determining what keywords should be active for what markets and what the associated ad copy and landing page URLs should be is all system driven. The sheer volume of keywords and associated ad copy and landing page URLs would never be possible to be done by humans on a week in and week out basis
Some of the key features that SmartSearch has built in version 1.0 are:
- Fully dynamic and localized search ad copy that can pull in the correct, localized information in regards to:
- # of Items On Sale within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Example: 35 Deals (on womens apparel items on sale)
- Relevant & Exact Keyword
- Price Range, from lowest priced item and/or to highest price item of the all the items within the relevant content slice that the keyword pertains to
- Retailer Location, as expressed via a mixture of City Name, State Abbreviation, or ZIP Code
- Example: Shop Your Local K. C. (Kansas City, MO)
- Retailer Name
- Sale End Date of the in-store promotion that this content is being drawn from
- Example: Sale Ends Jun 30
- Auto ad copy template selection so that when some of the above dynamic ad copy variables get too long (total # of characters), the systems gracefully falls back through a series of alternate ad copy templates selecting the one that best fits the dynamic data being thrown at it and at the same time attempting to maximize all available allowable characters within both the headline/title and the description line(s)
- Client specific business rules can be created and applied so that each unique advertiser can tune the ad copy templates and associated landing pages (very powerful)
- Fully dynamic and localized landing page (via a precisely relevant click thru URL) that takes the user deep within the ShopLocal hosted SmartCircular site
- Support for third party bidding and management tools so that search agencies can still use their same tool sets to manage these localized paid search campaigns in a native manner
- Support for both Google and Yahoo! paid search campaigns. The other search engines are not supported currently, but that doesn’t mean too much as they all collectively only represent less than 15% of the overall US search volume as of May 2009 (comScore data)
Here is a practical break down of how the two JSP example (live) ads from both Google and Yahoo! actually breakdown according to the ad copy specifications imposed by each search engine:
- Google AdWords
- Keyword: Womens Apparel
- Headline (25 characters max): Apparel At JCPenney
- Line 1 (35 characters max): 35 Deals Starting At $4 Visit
- Line 2 (35 characters max): Your Local JCPenney By Jun 30
- Yahoo! Search Marketing
- Keyword: Bedding
- Title (40 characters max): Bedding From $5
- Description (70 characters max): Shop Your Local K.C. JCPenney Store. Sale Ends Jun 30.
For another look at what the SmartSearch product looks like in action, you can personally check it out by using the Google Preview Ad Tool. Just click the image above and make sure to enter a keyword of "womens apparel" and select a State location of "Missouri ---Kansas City MO" and you'll get to see localized search in action.
Finally, a special thanks to the JCP and 360i (JCP’s search agency) teams for all working really hard on this launch and making hyper-local paid search a reality.
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