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.
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.
A few days ago,the ShopLocal team relaunched a large multichannel retailer’s HTML version of their SmartCircular site to include a number of specific search engine optimization (SEO) enhancements. The goal of course was to get as much free organic search traffic to this site by making it as attractive as possible to the search bots that crawl through the site’s content and links. The specific initial steps taken included the below with more specific tunings planned in the coming weeks as the performance metrics will help guide what additional SEO improvements need to be made:
By creating a weekly ad site environment that is built for search engine bots, the early returns have been extremely positive in regards to # of pages indexed, to the rankings of the SmartCircular site for specific, high value keywords to # of site visitors that the engines are now sending to the SmartCircular site.
- Dynamic Meta Tags
- Keywords – Example: GPS Navigation deals, sales, specials, promotions
- Description – Example: Find weekly deals, sales, specials and promotions for GPS Navigation at RadioShack
- Dynamic Page Titles & Breadcrumb Trail - Example: GPS Navigation Deals, Sales, Specials, Promotions – RadioShack
- Descriptive Landing Page Copy – Example: The RadioShack Weekly Ad Site allows consumers to see the current items on sale now at your local RadioShack Store Location. You can see all the hottest electronics in Television, Video, Computers, Cameras, Games and Appliances. The Weekly Ad site also allows you to browse your localized ad, promotion, catalog and guide online.
- Dynamic Image ALT Tags - Example: TomTom™ GO 730 GPS
Vibrant Media blends the best of both search & display advertising. It allows an advertiser to target the content within a publisher page on a keyword basis and upon a user initiated interaction with the green double-underlined keyword within the content of the page, a graphic display ad appears that allows rich media content to be inserted instantly.
Vibrant & ShopLocal have come together to form a joint partnership that brings the weekly ad to growing in-text advertising marketplace
ShopLocal has officially partnered with Vibrant to take the best of each others offerings to market. This means that the localized promotional content that ShopLocal brings can be distributed on a contextual targeted basis which will drive traffic back into the relevant area of a retailer’s online weekly ad (SmartCircular) site. This hybrid ad format can be bought on an CPC (Cost Per Click) or a CPV (Cost Per View) basis directly through the Vibrant sales channels.
Here is a mocked up sample of what the flash based Vibrant Media ads look like. This ad for example would be triggered by the keyword 'sunglasses'.
Maybe the simplest way to understand what this new partnership and localized in-text ads are is to imagine if a Pointroll PaperBoy rich media display ad had a baby with a Google AdSense paid search ad, their offspring would be a Vibrant Media Localized In-Text ad.
This joint partnership offering is a great blur of search and display ads. If offers:
- Localized content: Since weekly ad content is what is being featured within the Vibrant Media ads, the ad serving needs to be sensitive to the user’s geography so that the right version of the weekly ad content can be displayed
- Dynamic updating: The keywords that are targeted, the ad content and the landing pages are all automatically synced every day to ensure that only live and active weekly ad content is being used to content keyword target and populate the user initiated in-text ads.
- Keyword targeting: Vibrant Media’s system works by going after specific keywords contained within a great network of publisher’s content within a specific geo-location
- Product specific landing pages: The product featured within the ad is connected to the same item within the weekly ad site
- Rich reporting: Able to measure metrics such as the number of users that interacted with the ad and the number of users that clicked thru from the ad to the online weekly ad site
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)
(4.00 out of 5)
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(4.50 out of 5)
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