For marketers and retailers alike, the greatest challenge is to ensure that their campaigns and paid search advertisements can transform instantly using 100% accurate information, while minimizing resources and maximizing ROI.

Leading search marketing specialist and technology firm Greenlight recently released its real-time price comparison platform for paid search. The launch forms part of its latest upgrade to adapt™ their automated inventory management platform.

“Having all the data needed to be visible in the right place, at the best price, is a mammoth task for retailers”, says Alicia Levy, Greenlight’s co-founder and director.

Current bidding tools cannot cope with these multilayered business needs and demand an enormous amount of direct human input. The time spent bringing together the search specialist and Internet retailers/marketers to translate their needs into practical steps, means the prospect is usually lost to the competition. So for retailers, a lack of real-time intelligence on their most competitive products can prove costly from both a campaign and financial perspective.

In a survey undertaken by Greenlight, 60% said they saw price as having the highest impact on a customer’s decision to buy. Over half said they would change their bidding strategies if they had insight on how price competitive they were against their competitors for the same product. Just 28% of retail respondents to Greenlight's survey said they put the price of products in their pay per click (PPC) ad copy; and of those who do, a huge 87% manage this process manually.

adapt™ should enable retailers and marketers across multiple sectors to access, within seconds, 24/7 intelligence on competitor prices on like for like products, helping them to immediately identify and compare those products they are most competitive on, price-wise. This insight ensures they can build a paid search strategy focused on aggressively advertising their most competitively priced goods as opposed to pushing ‘price war losing’ ones.

“It requires a huge investment of time and manpower and even then, once the process has been completed, the opportunity is often already lost. The development of adapt™ is a natural progression in finding a solution to one of the biggest problems in search.” said Levy.

By Ralph Leonard