• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 30, 2014

Following the search trend into content marketing, BloomReach Tuesday announced two platforms to help retail merchants and search marketers optimize content based on data recommendations. Compass collects and analyzes online retail data across channels and devices, then prioritizes the information to present opportunities to serve content on sites to consumers.

The platforms -- Compass for Merchants, and Compass for Organic Search -- make recommendations for specific product-level content changes to optimize based on specific goals.

Retail and search marketers make hundreds of decisions weekly to determine the products to promote, adjust, and feature in campaigns. Without data, marketers must rely on instinct and guesswork.

Peggy Trowbridge, VP of Web merchandising at Neiman Marcus Direct, recognizes that a combination of the data and actions in BloomReach Compass and plain old instinct can drive revenue, engagement and margins growth. Most digital tools and business intelligence resources today do not. Those that can are costly and lack the capability to deliver real-time results.

Joelle Gropper Kaufman, head of marketing and partnerships at BloomReach, said Compass relies on algorithms and natural language processing to identify opportunities to increase content performance, such as improving conversions on queries, and products or categories. It uses machine learning to recommend fixes to issues while tracking results in real-time. "You can run a report in the platform that shows the performance of the category 'homecoming dress'," she said. "I don't want to know what pages to add more content, but I want to understand how to make the content better on the page."

Compass shows merchants and marketers the performance or content by device. It will calculate the number of conversions that came from mobile on a specific dress, or how consumers found the dress in search results and whether they clicked on the product description from a mobile or desktop device.

BloomReach also announced plans to expand into the United Kingdom, building a small team to focus on the European market, per Kaufman. "Ecommerce is major strategy in the U.K. for retailers, and they're looking to compete against Amazon online," she said, similar to what we see in the United States.