Constant improvement is a mantra here at ShopLocal. To that end, the team knew there was room for improvement in our popularity ranking algorithm that we call “Wisdom of the Crowds” (WoC).
The current system for determining product popularity only counted those products that a shopper specifically clicked on. There are a number of product level clicks that are counted in terms of a shopper expressing interest such as a product detail page, a buy online click or an add to a shopping list click (which are cumulatively called Expressions of Interest). Not any more. The ShopLocal team has begun collecting and counting another key piece of consumer interest data – product rollovers.
By factoring in both product rollover data AND expression of interest data, the overall Wisdom of the Crowds ranking data is all the richer and accurate. This process of collecting and using rollover data for SmartCircular sites is underway and will complete over the next month or so for all clients, SC sites and versions of SmartCircular.
At a macro level, what we have learned so far about rollover data is:
- Rollovers are on average about 5x as common as Expressions Of Interest. This means by adding them to the Wisdom of the Crowds calculation, the overall popularity ranking data should become much more accurate and more truly reflect actual consumer interest.
- Rollover usage varies significantly by retailer. No surprise given all the variation in UI/UX out there within weekly ad sites. Also some sites don’t even use rollovers. Or on other sites, the rollovers are down played. In any case, we are now tracking them all so as to extract the most useful and complete set of consumer interest data as possible.
Illustrated here is a specific product level rollover that has been triggered by a user rolling over a predefined hotspot region that is overlaid on top of the circular page view images. When talking about rollover tracking, what is actual being tracked is the number of times, for a specific product, a rollover is triggered and left open for at least 2 seconds. If it meets that criteria, it would be counted as one (1) rollover for the product.
Here is a quick snapshot of some early returns from a 6 day sample set of data across 20 retailers:
- # of total product level exposures: 1,006,078,269
- # of total product rollovers: 25,620,887
- # of total product specific indicators of interests expressed: 4,532,430
- Overall ratio of interest divided by rollovers: 18%
- Rollover trigger rate (of overall total product exposure) : 2.55%
- Interest trigger rate (of overall total product exposure): 0.45%
- Total CTR (rollovers + interest): 3.00%
UPDATE 1/21: The ShopLocal analyst team just today cranked out a nice little additional stat on this topic that is worth sharing. The correlation of interest/exposure ranks compared to the rollover/exposure ranks, on average overall is 0.6636 Meaning that rollovers are for most sites a good measure of interest. Maybe think of it this way. This correlation helps prove that the items a user rolls over are likely the very ones that they end up taking other subsequent action at a later point in their site visit.
Shopper, the top selling iPhone shopping assistant from ReachEverywhere, has launched a successful integration of all of the localized on-sale content (e.g., retailer circular data) that ShopLocal has to offer. At its core, the Shopper iPhone app is a shopping list management tool – and ReachEverywhere has incorporated ShopLocal’s local circular content across the retailer’s consumer know and trust to aid the app users in their decision making process in a seamless user interface.
Here is a snippet of the release notes that detail the ShopLocal content integration:
“Shopper is now integrated with the weekly flyers from Target, K Mart, Meijer, Babies R Us, Walgreens, Home Depot, and literally over 100 of your favorite stores (see What’s new for a complete list of stores available). You keep your shopping lists as you always have, and Shopper shows you the relevant specials from stores around you. No more flipping thru stacks of flyers on Sunday morning – saving you time and money!”
And here is what the trade publication the Progressive Grocer had to say about the app with the addition of weekly ad specials:
“Our research indicates busy consumers want to quickly pull relevant money-saving specials on what they intend to purchase rather than sift through catalogs of unrelated products from the newspaper and mail every week,” said Sean Flynn, CEO of ReachEverywhere. “This is just another step in our mission to help save shoppers time and money, and we have more coming soon.”
This is the company that is behind the 'Shopper' app
In addition to the ShopLocal circular content, the app has Guiding Stars Nutritional information on select products, allows real-time list syncing between users (send your significant other to the store with an always updated list!), coordinates multiple store lists, and keeps a running total of the amount you intend to spend.
To ensure the circular content’s relevance, the Shopper app uses the existing shopping list items as search terms to query the Shoplocal Cross-Retailer API (SCRAPI) – only returning retailer specials that are targeted to the purchase intent of today’s store visit. It’s another great example of what a creative partner can come up with using ShopLocal content.
If you have $0.99 cents to spare, its a great ap that is worthwhile to check out. Hey, you may even end up using it to help buy your groceries.
ReachEverywhere’s insight that people already have their shopping lists built before searching for weekly specials is unique. In fact, one could envision the Shopper app becoming a sort of search engine for in-store deals on the iPhone, which would create a lead generation machine for brands and retailers. For instance, if the Diaper category is a destination and basket size driver for a store- they could ensure Shopper users who intend to purchase Diapers see their circular sourced, in-store specials by sponsoring that category in the app.
The app is firmly centered around the concept of a shopping list
ShopLocal weeekly ad data shows up in all sorts of places within this app, usually under the title of "My Flyers+"
With the inclusion of the weekly ad deals across retailers, ReachEverywhere was able to increase their rankings within the iTunes app store Lifestyles category to the #7 most popular paid app, an increase of over 10 spots at the time of the release of the version of the app that contained the ShopLocal content (since then, they have fallen to #35 currently).
Within a limited number of Canadian Tire physical stores, a test is now underway to see how in store shoppers react and use a new touch screen Fujitsu kiosk that enables them to browse the weekly flyer (ShopLocal powered of course) among a product locator, price verifier and browsing the CanadianTire.com site.
It’s exciting to see high engagement technologies creep back into the physical retailer world. There is a real un-tapped value proposition that retailers need to capitalize on of blurring the lines between the different channels.
Canadian Tire has done a great job of creating a strong visual identify around these kiosks which are called iShop by wrapping the rather boring looking, underlying kiosk in a "skin" of sorts that definitely is more inviting to shoppers.
Here is the "un-wrapped" (or non-branded) Fujitsu made touch screen kiosk that is internet enabled that is being deployed into two (2) Canadian Tire stores on a limited test basis.
The book sellers (Borders and Barnes & Noble) for example has been doing exactly this for a number of years by allows in store shoppers to break free from the limitations of the books available for sale in the physical store to the countless millions more available within the online store by utilizing kiosks. This just makes so much sense, and prevents a shopper whom didn’t see the book in store from going home an ordering it on Amazon.com.
The Canadian Tire use of the flyer (that is what Canadian’s call circulars or inserts) within these Fujitsu kiosks is very similar to the problem that Ecast is also trying to solve. In that, wayfinding (i.e., digital in store maps) combined with engaging “what’s on sale right now” content is a great way to help create motivation for a shopper to visit areas of a store that they may not typically travel to. It also aides in new product discovery as the currently on sale products can be highlighted and showcased. In addition, it is expected to decrease the number of abandoned baskets and increase customer satisfaction as shoppers can now get the answer to their #1 most asked question of, “Where can I find product X?”
Simplification of the overall SmartCircular Adobe Flash/Flex based interface was a key theme in this project here at ShopLocal, in that:
- Super-large navigation visuals were employed
- Only one circular page turning mode was used
- No shopper inputs (of for example a postal code) are required
- No category, brand, keyword search, shopping list, store details or 25 other different views are offered. Just simple circular / flyer ad page viewing and turning
Integration was the other theme which allowed:
- Tying into an interactive store maps and in store inventory called iPAL (made by TreoSystems) that creates a seamless product locator action by simply clicking on any of the items within the flyer
- For the store’s postal code to be passed into the weekly flyer application so as to take away a dumb user input from occurring
This is the main flyer view that offers a single page by page, animated page turning mode to browsing the Canadian Tire on sale items. All of this flyer content is of course locally geo-targeted to the specific store location of where the kiosk is located.
From within the interactive flyer, a simple help layer can be accessed at any point to aide any customers that need additional instructions on how to navigate the kiosk version of the Canadian Tire SmartCircular site.
By clicking on any product that is contained within the interactive flyer, the user is taken to an visual map of where that specific item
Masha Sajdeh of Arc Worldwide presented a great piece of brand new multichannel research at the In-Store Marketing Expo that took place here in Chicago last week. This studies methodology and sample was a solid:
- 3 countries
- 5,609 respondents
- 60 minute online survey
- 20 categories of products examined
- 10 unique channels probed
The entire Arc multichannel study is worth a careful read, but due to it’s length (57 pages) we’ll only examine a few portions that pertain to better understand which channel different types of multichannel shoppers are using and why.
For those not familuar with the concept of what multichannel shopping is all about, this is a great visual explanation.
So first let’s examine a few of the insights uncovered around how much time different multichannel shoppers spend per channel on a monthly basis. Surprisingly, the circular is the channel that showed the highest usage across all of the different types of mutlichannel shoppers (excluding a retailer’s own web site and store).
Note how the circular across all types of multichannel shoppers plays a critical role in adding the shopping process.
If we take a closer look at just the medium and heavy mutlichannel shoppers, the picture becomes even more stark. A retailer’s own web site and physical store are used heavily and fairly equally by both types. However the usage pattern around circulars is very different with heavy multichannel shoppers (arguable the most desirable and profitable type of shopper) using the circulars 95% of the time, which is higher than the retailer’s own web site. Even the more moderate mutlichannel shoppers are using the circulars at pretty hefty rates of 61%, which when again compared to a retailer’s own web site usage of 69% clearly demonstrates the continued importance of the circular to multichannel shoppers.
Wow, circulars are nearly as used by heavy multichannel shoppers as a retailers own physical stores!
Finally let’s try to get to the bottom of the ‘why’ – in this case, the ‘why’ is what causes these multichannel shoppers to use which channel when. Not surprising, circulars are all about saving money. Catalogs on the other hand are all about providing shoppers with inspiration.
Every single channel has a unique use and value proposition to a multichannel shopper.
There’s an old saying “without trust there is nothing” and as marketers we know that if we lose the trust of our audience we lose our voice. Good news for digital marketers, a new Nielsen study found that consumers trust information and opinions that they find online.
“The explosion in Consumer Generated Media over the last couple of years means consumers’ reliance on word of mouth in the decision-making process, either from people they know or online consumers they don’t, has increased significantly,” says Jonathan Carson, President of Online, International, for the Nielsen Company.
Validating that crowd sourced content matters, Nielsen’s Global Online Consumer Survey found that 90 percent of participants said that they trust recommendations from people they know, and 70 percent trust consumer opinions posted online. In addition, 70 percent of the participants trust brand websites which is even better news for digital marketers.
Nielsen Survey Consumers Trust Online Opinions
According to Carson, “It also shows that, despite the authority of word of mouth when it comes to consumer decision-making, advertisers still have a major say in the process. The website, and monitoring feedback through it, is a golden opportunity for advertisers to shape the tone and content of consumer opinion before it reaches the digital masses.”
This ties in perfectly to our philosophy here at ShopLocal. Present shoppers with what they want… targeted, relevant retail promotions. Then add value by coupling those promotions with valuable information like crowd sourced opinions and ratings. And of course constantly evaluate and optimize so that every shopper receives a great personalized experience.
To view the entire Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey click here.
(4.00 out of 5)
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