the Searchandise Commerce blog

Clickshare: A New Metric to Monitor

Forrester Research recently reported that 80% of all product searches begin online, whether the purchase occurs online or in-store.  In fact, the Web influenced $937 billion in U.S. store sales in 2009, and is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2013, or about one-third of total retail sales.   With more activity moving to the Web, how can you guarantee you’re getting your fair share of those clicks?

The lessons learned from in-store merchandising are simple: the better the position, the better the results.  While you’ll never be able to control the number of clicks that happen on a Web site, you can influence clickshare, or your percentage of the total universe of clicks in your category.

As consumers are changing their shopping behavior, manufacturers are changing how they merchandise their products. One such way is through a technique called searchandising – the combination of on-site search and merchandising.  

In the brick-and-mortar world, manufacturers and product marketers pay for premium spots such as “end caps” or top shelf space to increase awareness and actively engage consumers as they research and/or purchase. On the Web, these premium positions are the top spots on a search results page or product zones featuring most popular or best selling products. 

Leveraging best practices from the merchandising world where manufacturers vie for position, coupling tactics from paid search where position is proactively managed by the setting of a cost-per-click bid, product marketers can now work to boost visibility on shopping sites.  The bid becomes a weighting variable in how search results are rendered, and for the first time, retailers can offer manufacturers an opportunity to enhance their positions.  

What is the difference if you approach the retailer and pay for advertising opportunities such as banners, sponsored sections, micro sites and brand showcases versus using CPC bidding? 

• With CPC bidding you only pay if a customer clicks on your particular product.
• Search results were previously unavailable space and have now opened up as a branding and sales opportunity.
• No additional creative units are required.

Although there are other metrics used such as click-through and conversion rates, they are underestimating the retail process. You can’t control how many clicks a particular category will get, but you can influence your share. Researching and purchasing products happens in multiple sessions, both online and offline, and wields significant impact on consumers when they go into brick-and-mortar stores. Clickshare is the only metric which can measure your share of any given clicks in a category.