Over at Zip2Save, a recently launched local deal finding site, the early signs of a partnership between LocalPoint Media and Suburban Newspapers of America (Zip2Save’s two parent companies that jointly control it) and ShopLocal are now visible.
Currently the Target weekly ad that ShopLocal provides services for is being pulled into Zip2Save’s site via ShopLocal’s SmartDelivery API (SDAPI). Metroland (a Canadian firm that is wholly owned by Torstar) is the technology provider behind Zip2Save that did the Target weekly ad integration, which appears to have ported out their publishing platform that Metroland Media Group uses to power Flyerland.ca, a Canadian focused weekly ad, deals and coupon site.
The current Target circular presentation and user experience is very basic, with only page views. So no browse by brand, category or keywords. No hotspots, rollovers or item detail pages. Just circular page flipping / viewing at this time.
The ShopLocal team is hopeful that both Target will see success with this content integration and that Zip2Save will continue to iterate and improve the weekly ad browsing experience to make it more rich, robust and engaging.
As a side note, ShopLocal is also powering the Lowe’s circular that is shown within Zip2Save via an iFrame integration to a ShopLocal hosted Lowe’s SmartCircular site.
Starting today, the ShopLocal team is proud to announce a much improved way of supporting our partners and retailers that use one or more of ShopLocal’s active APIs. Instead of sending members of our development community overwhelming 100+ pages of technical API documentation, the team will now be granting access to an online Wiki style site called the ShopLocal Developer Center.
If you are a current development partner or in the process of evaluating a ShopLocal API, please send an email to apisupport@shoplocal.com and someone from the team will get you setup with the required access.
The ShopLocal Developer Center promises always on access, an up-to-date and accurate set of technical API documentation for all the the various ShopLocal APIs that is rich with examples and easy to navigate and use.
The vision of the ShopLocal Developer Center is to hold a developer’s hand when first being introduced to a ShopLocal API so as to make it easier for them to develop their own unique applications with these powerful web services ShopLocal offers. With this goal in mind, the team has added some additional resources to the ShopLocal Developer Center that were never previously available which include:
- API Examples – sample iPhone and Banner ad application with more examples coming soon
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) based on real world usage from ShopLocal’s own Client Services group
- Data Dictionary – to define ShopLocal nomenclature that is foreign to an external user, e.g. what a listing means, interest threshold exposure, etc.
The team also spent some serious time in revamping the technical documentation for the following APIs:
- SmartDelivery API (SDAPI)
- SmartBrand API (SBAPI)
- ShopLocal CrossRetailer API (SCRAPI)
- Local Offer Management System API (LOMSAPI)
Each API method for all of the APIs above now contains complete and standardized information including a:
- Short description of the API call (method) and how it can be used
- Required parameters
- Conditional parameters
- Optional parameters
- URL example to show the syntax of correctly constructed API call
- Data outputs (fields that are returned by call)
- Data output example (XML return examples)
So here is a very interesting data point, from one recent Pointroll campaign that had part of the ad impressions benefiting from Yahoo! BT data and the other part of the impressions did not include any BT data.
BT enabled Pointroll ads had a 41% overall higher interaction rate than non-BT enabled Pointroll ads.
Same creative. Same publisher. Same timeframe. Basically as many other variables were held constant between the two groups except the inclusion of BT data within the test group. Sure, its not airtight statistically sound case due to the single campaign data point, but its very indicative of other similar campaign results the team has seen when comparing BT enabled ad results with those that did not receive any additional insights from BT data.
The important point to take away is BT works. By using user level “hints” to better select what creative, copy and content elements should be inserted into the ad units, BT enabled ads are just more relevant and personalized to the user. Therefore its no surprise that these more personalized ads receive more interest as expressed in either interactions or clicks.
If we look at click-thru rates as another meaningful measure, BT enabled Pointroll ads had a 73.5% overall higher click-thru rate than non-BT enabled Pointroll ads.
Meeting shoppers right where they are. This principle is at the core of ShopLocal’s latest product innovation – the Weekly Ad Facebook App.
Instead of always trying to push and pull user to a specific destination site (e.g., retailer.com), smart retailer today are building out rich and inviting socially enabled experiences within the areas of the web that users spend most of their time within – namely portals and social sites.
Since Facebook is clearly the largest social site in the world with over 350 active users (see the rest of their insane stats below), making sure any given retailer’s brand is well represented within this massive ecosystem is now becoming a requirement.
- 50% of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day
- More than 35 million users update their status each day
- More than 55 million status updates posted each day
- More than 2.5 billion photos uploaded to the site each month
- More than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each week
- More than 1.6 million active Pages on Facebook
- Pages have created more than 5.3 billion fans
- The US represents about 30% of total users
So why add weekly ad content (or any other store promotional or deal content for that matter) to a Facebook fan page? The answer is simple. To attract and retain “fans”, retailers must meet the needs of these shoppers. One of these key needs is to get something in return for their action of becoming a retailer’s “fan”. Namely deals, discounts and coupons. There is a certain social contract at play and it needs to be upheld. The weekly ad is a great source of localized promotions and deals that exactly meets the expectation that fans have.
“When a 1,000 “connected consumers” where surveyed in late 2009 about their digital habits and attitudes towards social media marketing, they found that promotions and discounts were primary drivers of “friending” a brand for over a third of social networking users” – recent Razorfish study
So what makes up ShopLocal’s Weekly Ad Facebook App anyways? Here are a few of the key features:
- Integration of common social Facebook features such as:
- Ability to browse localized weekly ad content by both categories and brands and sort the results of these by:
- Popularity
- Item Title
- Sale End Date
- Price
- Rich metrics of all of the user actions
- Multi-channel capabilities that enable retailers to drive traffic either back to their regular weekly ad site and/or retailer.com site
- Geo-target user location identification process that seamlessly determines the user’s nearest store location. It also offers the user a method for changing their system-derived location to a new one at any time
- View an item detail layer complete with the option to view a larger item image
Important Note: This finished, private Facebook app was not paid, approved or directed by Kohl’s. Rather Kohl’s circular content was merely selected to build and test around by the ShopLocal product development team due to its representative nature. This weekly ad Facebook app demo is just so be an example of what is possible for any given retailer. If you would like access to this private beta, all you need to do is simply become “my friend” on Facebook and I will set you up so that you can view this amazing demo app.
This is the "splash" page where the entire weekly ad experience begins. Facebook currently has a really dumb policy in place that prohibits a Flash movie from auto-running. Instead they force a rule that requires that the user to click to activate the flash experience. So this is the ONLY reason why this splash page exists.
Once the user clears the initial hurdle of activating the flash movie, the weekly ad experience comes to life. Right now, the beta app starts with all users viewing the most popular products overall, across all brands and categories.
If a user wants to more details on specific offer, a simple item detail screen is shown which allows the user to potentially buy the item online (at retailer.com), share the item as a link post with their Facebook friends or post a comment. In this case, the user is attempting to leave a comment on a specific item.
Since this user has never interacted with the weekly ad app before, there is a required and Facebook controlled popup that the user must grant the weekly ad app access to some of the personal information. This is a very standard popup that happens in nearly all Facebook apps. But all the same, it is hurdle #2 that Facebook forces us all to jump over.
Once the user has granted the weekly ad app access to their profile information, the comment can be posted. Notice for example the thumbnail image of the user now appears vs. the anonymous user image.
As a nice little feature, within the item detail area for an item, a larger image view is easily accessible.
As an alternate to browsing by category (which is the default method), the user can also choose to browse by brands at any time.
If a user decides that they want to share a specific item of interest as a "link" with their Facebook friends, they can very easily do so from within the weekly ad app. They can even write a comment to help provide some context of why they are sharing this "link".
And finally, here is how a "link" that is shared appears on the user's own wall. This is the #1 action that can cause viral spread of a weekly ad offer, since now all of the user's friends are now going to see this story within their news feed and be able to like, comment and re-share it.
Spreezio, the “priceline of local shopping”, has recently launched a great beta site in which all of the local deal and sale content is being sourced directly from ShopLocal via our latest API – SCRAPI. Spreezio calls this location-based personalized shopping. What I call it is a strong, unique and focused vision that really drives at simplicity and easy of use. Look at it this way, ShopLocal.com and Spreezio both share the exact same underlying data set. However one site is very feature rich, complex and somewhat complicated at points (e.g., ShopLocal.com) while the other site is nearly featureless, stark and simple (e.g, Spreezio.com). It really is exciting to see how a fresh set of eyes (and brains) can tackle the same problem and come up with such a different answer.
The initial success metrics that Spreezio has been able to generate are very promising, with nearly one out of every 4 unique site visitors “converting” which equates to claiming at least one deal. Granted the traffic to the site is still small, but if its a good mousetrap, that can easily be solved.
The entire Spreezio user interface is focused on two things. The keyword search box and the level of desired discount that the user desires. All of this happens within the large red tag area on the homepage.
Once a user has selected a geo-location and search radius, a percentage off discount amount and entered the type of item they are interested in, the real behind the scenes magic happens (eg all sorts of filtering/matching/meta data extraction, etc). Spreezio looks at the entire ShopLocal data set and only pulls back the exact deals that meet this unique set of user defined criteria.
Once a user has narrowed in their search on a specific item of interest, the user is asked to claim the deal. Entailed within this step is learning the name and location of the retailer that is offering the deal as well as some additional product details.
There is also a lot of other great things to look forward to from Spreezio in the near term including:
- Launching an iPhone application that packs up the functionality contained within the browser based version and jams it into a nifty little mobile app.
- Integrating Google Maps into the site to better visual depict the local nature of the deals that were found that meet the user’s search criteria.
- Adding a viral spread loop that will enable a user to invite their friends to join in on the deal that they found, socially powered of course.
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