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Maximizing your ad spend across digital ecosystems means keeping abreast of all the latest ad formats, to exploit sleight advantages and explore new opportunities.

We see many merchants make the mistakes of ignoring certain channels altogether, or biasing their spend too heavily towards either “traditional” and safe formats or experimental ones.

We help merchants maximize their full portfolio of online advertising investments. Our strong relationships and expertise with all the major platforms; our long history; and our massive scale of product categories, merchants, and spend give us unique and early insights on how to best leverage the full range of channels and formats. In a vastly competitive marketplace for consumer interest, our combination of data, statistical processes and scale ensure we deliver to our merchants traffic with the highest ROI.

Here are some of the latest formats we’re using, and what we think merchants should know about them.

Google

Google is the most robust search ecosystem, and digital ecosystem period, for most advertisers. Their evolving ad formats tend to be rigorously tested with clear ROI.

Top placement gets far more clicks than a right-rail ad, and Google knows and now exposes exactly what advertisers must bid to secure that spot. The key is to understand, from an ROI standpoint, if it makes sense to bid up to that amount. To do this effectively, automation and predictive technology are essential.

Parameter-based ads have been available on Google for years, but few advertisers take advantage of them. Copy can be approved once, with parameters such as pricing and stock availability updated dynamically in real-time. When fed with the right parameters, copies can be more impactful leading to increased click-through-rates and revenue.

This new ad format, now in Beta, allows merchants to show multiple images per product, which increases ad quality and CTR.

Wize Commerce has been working with the Google platform for over a decade, which puts us in a unique position to get the most value from these new ad formats. For example, we have a very rich data set to pull from for parameter-based ads, including social signals, purchase intent, and prices… and analytics on exactly how these signals drive click-through and conversion.

We can also precisely and successfully target SEM ads at product pages, and not just search result pages, which dramatically helps with conversion.

Facebook

Facebook has been rapidly expanding its available ad formats for desktop and mobile.

Facebook is a younger platform than Google, so its formats tend to be inherently more experimental. Google advertising is all about the keyword, but targeting on Facebook is trickier, since Facebook user behavior gives fewer clues around purchase intent.

When used expertly, Facebook newsfeed ads for desktop and mobile can drive significant traffic and revenue. As is the case for Facebook right-rail ads, the correct mapping of ads to interest-based segments of users is extremely important.

Twitter

Twitter ads are the newest of all. Some Twitter ad formats allow targeting at a keyword level, making them somewhat more analogous to SEM ads. In particular, ads can be targeted to users who use the Twitter search feature. More recently, Twitter has rolled out new ad formats that allow targeting based on what users have tweeted. Wize Commerce is one of the first providers with access to this API, which will be launching later in June.

Contact us to learn more about how we can help your business optimize traffic and growth for your digital business.

Public data suggest that over Thanksgiving weekend, the large internet retailers changed prices more than 2 million times. It’s fairly clear that they did so for reasons related to revenue optimization and competition. But what about the “rest” of retailers… did they change prices, how fast, and how optimally?

Our examination suggests that the science of dynamic pricing—dynamically changing prices to optimize revenue—is a new practice at most retailers and at many it’s not yet in practice at all.

Price competition in retail has always been intense, but it used to take weeks or months to play out. Now changes can happen by the minute. With the growth of online and mobile phone-based shopping, fast-changing prices create real-time sales implications that many retailers aren’t equipped to manage.

In the wild world of travel, millions of prices are in flux each minute and technologies have long been established to extract every marginal revenue dollar from the system. But in the retail world, we still live in an environment where prices are often set for a season, and coupons or some similar sales-period-based merchandising program are how price stimulation or competition is managed. Even the stalwart price sticker represents a limitation to effective management today.

Where do we go from here?

I think it’s clear we’re witnessing the rise of the always-connected, price-conscious consumer as a permanent and growing segment. But the mobile devices and back-end technologies that allow these consumers to search for the best deals anytime and anywhere also make it easier than ever for merchants to target them, match prices if necessary… and importantly, monetize.

Here are 5 ways merchants can maintain profitable relationships with price-conscious shoppers:

1. Implement a smart approach to dynamic pricing: A smart approach to dynamic pricing is one that’s driven by strategy, governed by algorithms, and as close to real-time as you can get. The Wize Commerce price and search APIs that support our Shopping Network and Silhouettes allow merchants to do just that, by aligning specific search terms to specific products and current prices across a wide variety of competitors.

2. Make comparison shopping work for you in-store: Our in-store optimization service, now in prototype, allows merchants to offer real-time mobile price matching guarantees and upsells to targeted shoppers currently in your store. By integrating POS, Web, and existing loyalty programs, merchants can create more personalized relationships and increase shopping cart size, while ensuring that the right percentage of sales and customers stay margin-positive.

3. Optimize your online channels: Make sure your online presences offers broad product assortment, easy and clear access to product information, expansive marketing customization, and expedited delivery. Optimize (in other words: redesign) your online experience for mobile and tablet.

4. Provide unique value in-store: Head towards unbundling the services in your store so that your in-store and online experiences fully complement each other. Innovate with new touch points to create new customer benefits. Empower your associates with information and the best mobile devices. At every touch point, acknowledge the online shopper in your store. If an in-store function isn’t equal to or better than its online equivalent, change or get rid of it.

5. Create new channels specifically targeted at price-sensitive shoppers: Our new site Price Machine is an example of this strategy—giving merchant customers already using our Shopping Network the ability to add an online channel for price-conscious shoppers without undercutting their current channel strategies or performance.

Contact us to learn more about how our price optimization services can help your business thrive.

As Wize Commerce continues to grow both its suite of services and its client base, the e-commerce industry is taking notice.

Here’s an interesting look at Wize Commerce by Hendrik Laubscher, an e-commerce blogger based in South Africa. In his post, Laubscher notes how Wize Commerce is more than just the company that operates Nextag, and he’s right. We’re increasingly recognized for the broad and powerful set of monetization and traffic optimization technologies that we provide to some of the world’s top merchants.

As our own EVP of Sales, Mike Fury, said in response to the post: “Wize Commerce is about the platform. Our Shopping Network and Silhouette service allow us to meet diverse merchant needs through that platform.”

If you’d like more information about our suite of services, or if you want to learn about how Wize Commerce can help your company grow its online business, contact us.