• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 31, 2015

Content Analytics engineers are working to integrate the company’s merchandising technology into ad-serving platforms to improve conversion rates for search and display advertisements that link to retail Web pages or ecommerce sites. Merchandising takes into consideration online out-of-stocks and the ability for the brand to present its best image to provide consumers a better experience.

Dave Feinleib, CEO of the two-year-old company, says the data from Content Analytics could become another feed into ad-serving platforms. The data would run through an application programming interface (API). The company’s technology analyzes content, out-of-stocks and rankings. It creates scores to determine to tell retailers about their industry position and how to improve it.

WPP Group’s Kantar Retail, Saatchi & Saatchi, and GroupM as well as Procter & Gamble, Clorox, Dickies, Haines, Paris Presents, and Wal-Mart Stores are clients, per Feinleib, who describes his company as one run by “super nerdy engineers nerding out over data.”

"The technology originated as a search engine optimization tool, but when we got in there with the suppliers, we uncovered the other issues like out-of-stocks," Feinleib says.

That data combines online merchandising with advertising supported by analytics to help brands quantify their ecommerce strategies closer to real-time. Sometimes paid search or display advertisements will send consumers to product pages or Wed site pages with out of stock products, poor images and product recommendations that don’t convert well. 

Content Analytics sends an alert to the manufacturer. It also keeps an eye on competitive price tracking and checks the quality of pages and images.

James Green, CEO at Magnetic, told Search Insider Summit attendees earlier in December that systems will integrate with advertising in 2016 to help brands better understand how much merchandising influences sales.

It may seem simple to determine whether products are available for purchase, but the data isn’t always available. Consumer product goods companies and original equipment manufacturers typically don’t have the time to check partner sites daily to determine whether the products are in or out of stock or have run out.