ECOMMERCE SERVICE AND TECHNOLOGY PROVIDER Mercent
on Monday upgraded its existing offering with analytics data, which
quantifies keyword performance by retail metrics, including per-product
revenue, profitability, inventory velocity--or how quickly products
move through the warehouse--and return on inventory investment. The
goal is to give its merchant clients a clearer picture of ROI across a
variety of shopping portals. Mercent, founded
by veterans of Amazon.com, is offering the new service to its existing
subscribers at no additional change. Mercent takes a small percentage
of the transactions that it facilitates, and charges merchants a system
integration fee that ranges from less than a thousand dollars to the
tens of thousands, depending on the complexity of the network.
To calculate specific retail metrics for clients' SEM campaigns,
Mercent collects sales, conversion, and ad spend information from
Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Submit, and Microsoft AdCenter, and
compares that information with merchandising data from back-end retail
systems--per-product cost of goods sold, gross profit, average
inventory value, and impact on inventory velocity.
Search professionals can no longer count on standard SEM measurements
such as cost per acquisition and return on ad spend to do their jobs,
said Mercent CEO Eric Best. "Merchants now can optimize a product's
advertising campaigns down to the SKU level," said Best.
