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:

And here is what a user would see if they actual clicked on the Google ad:

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:

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
    • Example: Starting At $4
  • 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
    • Example: JCPenney Store
  • 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
  • This makes use of the previously documented on-the-fly generated, custom landing page feature that was just released
• 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.

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.