ChoiceStream

So clearly we are all excited about the article on performance marketing that appeared in the Wall Street Journal. I didn’t get the quote I was hoping for – I am a bit of a press junkie. But the quote from Patrick Byrne detailing the performance lift we’ve delivered for Overstock—“a sevenfold increase in clicks on the ads and a threefold increase in sales relative to other display ads”—tells the most important story.

As I’ve shared these results with prospective customers, it’s become clear that these kinds of lift numbers are a step above what they have seen with other ‘dynamically-generated’ performance ad solutions. The Journal article references SmartAds and Teracent as two of the options.

The difference? It’s in the data and how we use it.

ChoiceStream uses actual shopping and browsing behaviors from the advertiser site.

Shopping and browsing data is an advertiser’s most valuable data. The holy grail of data. It’s been used for years to drive better onsite ecommerce experiences, but never to drive more effective online advertising. What better way to predict what a consumer is in market for now, or most likely to purchase next, than to look at what they – and hundreds of thousands of others like them – have shopped for in the past?

Other solutions drive off of behavioral targeting profiles generated by observing consumers’ web surfing or by simple age/gender/geo profiling. While this is a fine way to find prospective new customers, it won’t help you prompt that consumer to buy now. This is where ChoiceStream’s second big differentiator comes into play: how we use the data.

ChoiceStream converts shopping data into actionable product recommendations in display ads that get consumers to buy.

At ChoiceStream, we know how to take reams of data on millions of transactions and use it to generate 1:1 personalized product recommendations that really work. (We’ve been doing it for years in the product recommendations and content personalization space with great results.) It’s not easy. It requires really smart technology that looks way beyond mapping consumers to broad product categories or repeating simple shopping cart abandons in retargeting ads.

ChoiceStream’s personalized recommendations actually create brand new occasions for consumers to purchase – and drive significant increases in revenue—by predicting what each individual consumer is most likely to want next.

Put those 1:1 recommendations in an ad, and not only does the ad cut through the clutter to get noticed – it prompts the consumer to click and buy as we are starting to see.

Now, personalized product recommendations might look somewhat similar to other types of recommendations you’ve seen, like ‘best seller,’ ‘category’ or ‘merchandized’ recommendations; but I guarantee that the results aren’t similar. We’ve seen ChoiceStream ads double the performance and deliver twice the revenue of identical-looking campaigns powered by ‘merchandized’ and other non-personalized recommendations.

We still have a couple more slots left in our Q1 Beta. Final participants will be chosen by the end of the month. It’s a great opportunity to try the product for free – with no obligation – plus get extra attention from the ChoiceStream team around optimizing your results and having your voice heard as we develop our self-service tools.

Just like what Overstock is doing with ChoiceStream ads, “…We are ramping it up as quickly as we can."