• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, May 23, 2006

Ecommerce service and technology provider Mercent on Monday upgraded its existing offering with analytics data, which quantifies keyword performance by retail metrics, including per-product revenue, profitability, inventory velocity--or how quickly products move through the warehouse--and return on inventory investment. The goal is to give its merchant clients a clearer picture of ROI across a variety of shopping portals.

Mercent, founded by veterans of Amazon.com, is offering the new service to its existing subscribers at no additional change. Mercent takes a small percentage of the transactions that it facilitates, and charges merchants a system integration fee that ranges from less than a thousand dollars to the tens of thousands, depending on the complexity of the network.

To calculate specific retail metrics for clients' SEM campaigns, Mercent collects sales, conversion, and ad spend information from Google AdWords, Yahoo Search Submit, and Microsoft AdCenter, and compares that information with merchandising data from back-end retail systems--per-product cost of goods sold, gross profit, average inventory value, and impact on inventory velocity.

Search professionals can no longer count on standard SEM measurements such as cost per acquisition and return on ad spend to do their jobs, said Mercent CEO Eric Best. "Merchants now can optimize a product's advertising campaigns down to the SKU level," said Best.