July 5, 2006

Smarter.com, a shopping search engine that once only listed specific merchants who paid for traffic referred to their sites has had a change of heart.

With a new site redesign expected to launch today, Smarter.com will now include non-paying listings and wishes that the improved user experience will be good for its advertisers.

"There are more products than what some merchants were able to list with us," said Paul Willmes, product representative at Smarter.com. The company is a unit of MeziMedia, which also includes CouponMountain and MoreRebates.

Additionally, Smarter.com will try to build its index of products by welcoming cost-per-acquisition advertisers. Formerly, it focused on only those willing to pay on a cost-per-click basis.

To add to its index, the company has begun to send a spider (bot) to retrieve product listings from the open Internet. Willmes says the shift has resulted in more than doubling its products database.

The idea is that consumers will respond to the added breadth and depth of listings by visiting more often, eventually expected to result in more leads delivered to advertisers.

With the company's new comprehensiveness comes an increased emphasis on soft goods, such as clothing. For those categories, the company has created proprieteray clustering technology to allow its users to narrow down searches by attributes such as brand, color, fabric and fit.

Smarter.com believes allowing people to narrow results will result in advertisers receiving more qualified leads.

The company is playing catch-up with more well-known players that had a significant head start before it launched in 2004. For example, Shopping.com began beefing up its unpaid listings in the name of comprehensiveness back three years ago.

"Now we really feel that from a technology standpoint, we're right there with the bigger players," said Willmes.

The company doesn't plan to make any significant changes to its marketing efforts to promote the relaunch. Smarter.com gets most of its traffic from search engine marketing, buying traffic from the larger, higher-volume general engines.

Source: Click Z