Extreme Site Search Makeover

If anyone knows remodeling, it’s a construction equipment site. So it’s not surprising that when NorthernTool.com decided to make substantial alterations in their Web presence, they knew enough to reach for the proper tools: automated data feeds and on-site search optimization.

The company saw in early 2003 that comparison shopping engines were growing in popularity and becoming a consumer force to be reckoned with. Northern Tool had advertised some of its 14,000 products on affiliate sites through simple banner advertising, but it was clear that future sales growth would require a more organized affiliate strategy, one that included such high-volume shopping engines as Shopping.com and BizRate.

“But we were concerned about not having the MIS resources to develop the data that these sites required,” says Nathan Miller, e-Commerce marketing manager for Northern Tool. “Each site has slightly different format requirements. Fulfilling those requirements gets you better placement in the site rankings, but the time needed to tailor those feeds individually would strain our IT department.”

The answer, in Northern Tool’s case, was an automated data feed platform supplied by SEM agency Performics. With this solution, Northern Tool was able to send one consolidated feed of product data—pricing, descriptions, SKU numbers, inventory and other data—to Performics and have it adjusted to fit the different specifications of some 21 affiliate sites, including eight shopping engines.

The program went into operation in 2003. Northern’s sales through affiliate channels have grown 85% in the last year, and partners using the company’s data feed now account for 40% of total affiliate marketing sales. And that happened without requiring Northern Tool to make any additions to its in-house IT staff.

Shopping engines and other comparison sites are a marketing necessity for any consumer product company looking to build affiliate sales. “A few years ago, they were start-ups, but this year BizRate and Shopping.com are expected to have some of the highest traffic volumes of any Internet sites this holiday season,” Miller says. “They are definitely players. More and more consumers are finding value there. Rather than checking out ten sites, they go to one and make their choice there.”

According to Miller, some 75 affiliate sites now accept data feeds, and some won’t work with advertisers that don’t supply those feeds, on the theory that the greatest user value lies in partners that offer the most product information available. Northern is constantly maximizing the amount of information in its data feeds. “They want everything,” Miller says. “Product descriptions, sale pricing, in-stock, shipping information.”

And since shopping engines are continually refining their technical abilities, they will continue to add new fields for merchants. In the past, shopping sites showed only one price; now several have added the capacity to display both list and sale prices, so that sellers like Northern can highlight special values and price promotions.

Northern has made a point of including an actual destination link with each product listing sent to affiliates, so that a visitor who clicks on the product in Shopping.com is then handed off to the NorthernTool.com Web site. “That where we think he belongs,” Miller says. “That gives us the most control to supply full product information and feature cross-sells and upsells.” Affiliate listings are designed to be particularly informative, easily readable, with consistent images—another effort to control the presentation to the customer, who may after all be looking at five different cordless drills from five suppliers.

With all that affiliate-generated traffic coming to the Web site—visits increased 118% between 2003 and 2004—Miller knew something had to be done to make that site more user-friendly. He also knew that clean-up effort would take serious time and effort; by comparison, launching the data feed and hooking into shopping engines was a quick-fix grab at low-hanging fruit.

Ultimately, Northern opted to integrate a search and navigation solution from Endeca, and an optimized Web site (www.northerntool.com) launched in November 2004. The main search feature is a category box that adjusts depending on the search result set. Click on “air tools”, for example, and you’ll see results broken out by brand, price, and type; click on a brand, and the categories adjust to feature prices and types for that specific brand.

“The redesign took us from a stagnant result set to a more dynamic, user-friendly one,” Miller says. “It gives visitors the control they need to drive through categories and find an item. With 14,000 products, a lot of your marketing focus has to be on helping the consumer find that one golden nugget they’re looking for.”

Now that Northern Tool has the framework for its online marketing effort in place, Miller is tinkering with the design details. Among those wishes: A membership log-in feature that would push special pricing and shipping options to good customers through a value program, and the incorporation of more A/B testing of Web features—the kind of adjustment that’s common in the catalog world but all too infrequent online.

Still, he’s content that the online house that Northern’s built will stand for a good long while. In particular, the use of a single data stream to feed an array of affiliate sites has been a sales boon to a company as multichannel-minded as Northern. “It’s opened a whole new door for us,” Miller says. “I hope there’s another one like that out there. I’m always looking for the next new door.”