Greenlight launches paid search real-time price comparison platform

For retailers, a lack of real-time intelligence on their most competitive products can prove costly from both a campaign and financial perspective. In fact, in a survey undertaken by Greenlight, 60% say they view price as having the highest impact on a customer's decision to buy. Over half said they would change their bidding strategies if they had insight on how price competitive they were against their competitors for the same product.

Just 28% of retail respondents to Greenlight's survey said they put the price of products in their pay per click (PPC) ad copy. Of those who do, a huge 87% manage this process manually.

Access competitor prices

With adapt, Greenlight says retailers across multiple sectors can, within seconds, access 24/7 intelligence on competitor prices on like for like products, helping them to immediately identify and compare those products they are most competitive on, price-wise. The price comparison algorithm shows search results and price position for all a retailer's products against other advertisers in real-time. This insight ensures they can build a paid search strategy focused on aggressively advertising their most competitively priced goods as opposed to pushing 'price war losing' ones. By incorporating specific real-time pricing information into their ad copy, marketers can optimise their paid search campaigns further.

adapt, says Greenlight, also allows retailers to develop paid search strategies around specifics of products, for example, pushing those with a higher price margin. Working with Quant, Greenlight's intelligent automated bid management platform and SearchSentry, Greenlight's third paid search technology, which provides real-time brand and competitor monitoring, retailers can make far more accurate bids on terms and ad positions online, thereby improving click through rates (CTRs) and lowering their overall paid search expenditure.

Customised

adapt is customised to meet the needs of businesses with multiple product ranges and stock keeping units (SKUs). It instantly converts a retailer's frequently changing product updates into live PPC ads, accurately reflecting their most price competitive products. It can link campaigns to promotions, stock levels and pricing. It will even pause campaigns on specific ads if the product advertised is not the lowest priced on the market and vice-versa, when stock is low and/or product lines are deleted.

adapt is designed to facilitate the generation of new campaigns as products are added and promotions introduced. When prices are changed in a database, they will be reflected in the live ad copy. This automation makes it easy to exploit the cost efficiencies of long tail search terms, offering up-to-the-minute product data without compromising the quality or quantity of adverts.

"Having all the data needed to be visible in the right place at the best price is a mammoth task for retailers", says Greenlight co-founder and director, Alicia Levy. "It requires a huge investment of time and manpower and even then, once the process has been completed, the opportunity is often already lost. The development of adapt is a natural progression in finding a solution to one of the biggest problems in search."