Shopzilla’s Rebrand As Connexity Opens Search Marketing Technology To Retailers

Shopzilla, best known for its comparison shopping engine, changed its name in September to Connexity Inc. to reflect a change in focus. The company still operates its consumer-facing sites, but now makes its B2C assets and shopping data available to marketers as managed services. As part of the rebrand, the company rolled out new and expanded search marketing services.

The company is essentially turning its own internal systems into a search marketing technology stack for retailers with PLAs, text ads and SEO offerings.

For search text ads, Connexity’s platform automatically generates keywords and scores them based on conversion performance. Ad groups are dynamically organized, and bids adjustments are automated daily.

Connexity’s product feed management platform automatically fills in missing product attributes and organizes product groupings and manages bids.

The platform also offers dynamic creative optimization for text ads and PLAs — testing product titles and dynamically pausing keywords that don’t perform.

The SEO platform is designed to support large retailers managing millions of products and pages and facing issues around duplicate content, faceted navigation, internal search, deep crawling and pagination. The platform offers real-time page scoring, advanced crawler management and dynamic XML sitemap generation tools among other features.

Last year, the company says it managed more than $60 million in ad spend on paid text ads and product listing ads, bidding on over 1.8 billion keywords for 100 million products. Connexity claims that $60 million in ad spend generated $1 billion in gross merchandise sales.

“Now marketers can leverage all that we have learned and built in our paid search operations to optimize every aspect of their campaigns,” says Bob Michaelian, EVP Marketing Services at Connexity. “With our proprietary bid management, automated keyword generation/landing page selection, and advanced ways to group and structure campaigns, we are now a one-stop-shop for all things search in retail.”

The company also plans to grow its programmatic display arm. Connexity harnesses data from its own sites, including Shopzilla and Bizrate, along with its product marketplace which syndicates across 3,000 publishers to create and target shopper audience segments.