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Local online marketing products and service provider WebVisible announced Merchant Center 1.6, aimed at providing small business advertisers with visibility and control over their online campaign performance. The upgrade comes with a battery of enhancements to the company’s interactive campaign dashboard, providing local online advertisers and reseller partners 24/7 access to a search campaign’s performance, activity and results.
New to Merchant Center 1.6 is a call mapping capability that enables advertisers to see where calls are coming from on an interactive map and focus marketing efforts on high or low penetration areas. Call mapping shows top locations by call volume, pegged to the advertiser’s service area. Additional enhancements include call grading, which allows advertisers to rate calls to identify strong and weak leads; merchants can use data to help tune campaign keywords and advertising content that drives the highest-value leads.
A call blocking feature prevents unwanted callers, such as solicitors, from calling inbound sales lines by blocking their phone numbers, but without losing call history, while call exclusion removes non-sales calls from campaign reports without blocking numbers, to increase accuracy of campaign metrics, also without losing call history. The call control panel consolidates Merchant Center 1.6 upgrades in an intuitive user interface, providing graphical analysis and push-button controls over various leads and channels.
“This is all about opportunity cost control for small business owners who can’t afford to waste time on low-value leads and distractions,” said Kirsten Mangers, CEO of WebVisible. “Our Merchant Center 1.6 enhancements help them to see and attract the highest value business opportunities, and tune campaigns to make sure their ad dollars are working for them in the right service areas.”
Working alongside the Merchant Center 1.6 enhancements are upgrades to the Geneva Platform. These upgrades extend the ability to locally target ads by city, ZIP code or radius across all search engines-even those where radius targeting is not natively supported. In addition, Geneva can now test multiple ad variations and measure campaign performance across ad networks. Geneva technology powers the search engine marketing offerings of companies including Intuit, British Telecom, European Directories, The New York Times Company and others, a company release noted.
“Our goal is to give advertisers unmatched visibility and control at the front end of the application, which is only achieved by innovating at the back end,” said Doug LaBahn, WebVisible’s vice president of product. “For example, the call mapping feature of Merchant Center is a visual representation of geographic targeting enhancements that we made in Geneva. No other provider offers the same flexibility, scalability and interactivity that we’ve developed into our solutions.”