BloomReach Delivers First Machine-Intelligence Tool that Guides Digital Merchants and Marketers to Key Content Optimization Decisions

Compass gives big-data power to front-line business users to maximize performance of all products, categories, user experiences, promotions and search terms

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BloomReach

Sep 30, 2014, 07:30 ET

SEATTLE, Sept. 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- (Shop.org Annual Summit) –– BloomReach, the personalized discovery platform company, today announced BloomReach Compass, a big-data application that collects and understands online retailer data across channels and devices, then provides prioritized content opportunities that drive top-line revenue and site performance. Compass gives site-optimization, site-merchant, and search-marketers specific, content suggestions to optimize for any business goal including revenue, add-to-cart rates and conversions.  

Compass is the only tool of its kind that uses algorithmic intelligence and natural-language processing to identify content-performance opportunities – such as improving conversions on queries, products or categories. It also uses machine-learning to intuitively suggest fixes to issues - all while tracking the results in real-time. Compass visualizes the data and intuition that drives BloomReach Site Search, Navigation and Personalization (SNAP) and BloomReach Organic Search.

Merchandisers and digital marketers at large retailers make hundreds of decisions per week to determine which products to promote, adjust and feature in campaigns in the face of constantly changing consumer demand. But they have hardly any product-specific data to guide these decisions, relying mainly on natural instinct and educated guesswork. Existing digital tools are not designed to meet their needs and business-intelligence resources are both costly and lack real-time solutions to improve digital commerce.

During a closed beta period, BloomReach Compass delivered significant value to three major U.S. retailers including Neiman Marcus, and is now generally available. At each retailer, as many as 40 merchants and marketers are using Compass, with some specific content suggestions generating more than $50,000 overnight.

"Neiman Marcus merchants aim to present the most relevant and curated products to our discerning customers. BloomReach Compass uniquely speaks the language of merchants and draws our attention to those products, categories and queries where we can deliver improved results," said Peggy Trowbridge, Vice President, Web Merchandising of Neiman Marcus Direct. "The data and actions in BloomReach Compass paired with the instincts of our merchants drives meaningful growth in revenues, engagement and margins, which is why our web merchant team at Neiman Marcus leverages BloomReach Compass in our daily decisions."

BloomReach Compass gives a panoramic view of how overall and specific content is performing, determines how consumers explore across products and intuitively tells merchants and marketers where there is potential for more revenue and better experiences through specific product promotions, navigation changes, and content enhancements that reduce duplicate, thin or irrelevant content. Armed with the specific suggestions of what and where to adjust based on product-level metrics, users have a continuously prioritized set of actionable and testable improvements to drive hundreds of content decisions a week that maximize revenue, engagement and consumer experiences.

BloomReach Compass includes a comprehensive set of tools and features, including:

  1. Playbooks – For every key activity of a user, BloomReach Compass has a playbook that presents the highest potential opportunities in a single click. Using proprietary analyses such as association scores – which calculate the strength of the relationship between two products – and co-viewed products – products in categories or search results that better match consumer intent – BloomReach's unique algorithmic abilities distinguish consumer signals from noise and to present it visually to business users.
  2. Explore - Merchants can search the way they naturally think and speak, identifying improvement opportunities or asking questions in a free-text search. For example, they can access dashboards for products, brands, promotions, categories and queries that aggregate important reports. BloomReach Compass has a data-visualization interface that avoids clunky Boolean logic or outsourcing to groups disconnected from product and content decisions.
  3. Activity – All actions based on BloomReach Compass suggestions from are easily tracked to measure and demonstrate the impact of the user's action. Through the Solution Guides, accessible from any prioritized opportunity, users are guided to specific suggestions. For example, BloomReach Compass identifies poorly performing category pages due to thin or irrelevant content. By extracting all content attributes, the Solutions Guide identifies which related products consumers co-viewed after visiting that category page, which can be compelling additions to that category to increase conversion. The Solutions Guide also can improve site-search, by recommending highly converting synonyms and redirects for each query and product across an entire catalog.

"Merchants are among the most important and powerful professionals within retailers because they make many decisions every day that can make or break entire profit margins, but ironically have the least access to data and tools to support those decisions," said BloomReach co-founder and CEO Raj De Datta. "The entire e-commerce industry is experiencing fatigue around 'big data analytics' and 'business intelligence.' Digital teams don't want more historical snapshots. They are highly capable people who need applications that put big data to work and allow them to make better strategic decisions looking forward – down to individual products."

The prioritized opportunities and insights gained from BloomReach Compass also can fuel other digital marketing activities and campaigns. Search marketers can aid canonicalization and improve paid-search bidding strategies. Compass makes content more discoverable through organic search, while ensuring good site quality by identifying duplicate, thin or poorly linked content using BloomReach's duplication reducing technology. Marketers also can plan email and social campaigns using the content-performance and co-viewing data.

Leveraging the Personalized Discovery Platform

As part of the Personalized Discovery Platform, BloomReach Compass's integration process is simpler and less expensive than other merchandising solutions – requiring a single, integrated pixel.

BloomReach Compass is powered by the Web Relevance Engine, which understands content and consumer demand using search data, the most intimate indicator of consumer intent at a specific moment.

BloomReach also announced today its official launch in the United Kingdom, and released findings from a UK consumer and marketer personalization study, which revealed significant disconnects between consumer and marketer attitudes toward online personalization.

Additional Resources:

About BloomReach
The BloomReach Platform makes your content and products more discoverable with applications for organic search, site-search and digital marketing and merchandising. BloomReach's core technology – the Web Relevance Engine – uses natural-language processing and machine-learning to algorithmically understand content and visitors, matching it with demand and intent data from across the web.

Created in 2009, BloomReach is headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., with offices worldwide and is backed by investment firms Bain Capital Ventures, NEA and Lightspeed Ventures. BloomReach's portfolio of customers includes Neiman Marcus, Sears Outlet, Kohl's, Staples, Drugstore.com and Williams-Sonoma. Learn more: www.bloomreach.com.

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