Krillion Adds Televisions as New Vertical

Fast moving product information Web site Krillion, recently written about here, today announced that it will add high-definition flat screen televisions to its millions of home appliance product listings. Its total product listings will now exceed half a billion.

It will provide product information for the 10 top retailers, covering 80 percent of the television market. This includes 50 television manufacturers, which is incremental to the 35 manufacturers in its core home appliance category.

The move to televisions is a natural fit, given the category’s propensity to online research and offline shopping.

“Ninety-two percent of televisions are bought in stores,” says Krillion CEO Joel Toledano. “People want to look at the screen first and then take it home that day. But most of the research is done online.”

Generally speaking, most retail conversions happen offline, while increasing volumes of product research happen online – a reality that is driving a lot of online product search innovation, as we’ve explored in the past.

Krillion will likely continue to move into different categories where the purchase funnel matches this behavior profile.

SEO Is the New Black

We’re generally bullish on Krillion and its SEO driven strategy (explored in past posts). The company’s efforts are also consistent with data from TKG’s annual Local Search and Directories Forecast, which point to increasing investments and considerations around SEO strategies.

For Krillion, the deep content it provides across a massive volume of individual product listings gives it a leg up in organic search results for specific products.

“On most retail sites, you can drill down and find the product you’re looking for, but many of them aren’t showing up in search engine results,” says Toledano. “Sometimes these [sites] are designed with Flash for maximum consumer appeal, but are invisible to search engine crawlers. The key for us is that we aren’t buying traffic; 95 percent comes from SEO, and we do everything with SEO in mind. It’s in the DNA of the company.”

Krillion gets the remaining 5 percent of its traffic from paid search but that is mostly done to test out certain combinations of terms as a leading indicator to arrive upon the best SEO strategy, which is then integrated and picked up by search engines over a four- to six-week period. After this, the investment made has a return that continues to live on: “It’s like an annuity,” says Toledano.

Quality and Quantity

Also key is the fact that this feeds the company very qualified traffic.

“These page views are qualified leads. Someone has gone to Google and typed in ‘Whirlpool refrigerators,’ ” says Toledano. “That person knows what they want to buy. To retailers this is one of the hottest leads imaginable. This is how we guide consumers into specific stores.”

To close the loop on this qualified traffic and to better track conversions in the offline world, the company also provides a click-to-call engine, powered by eStara, to deliver these leads to retailers.

“We’re talking about an engaged subset of users because 10 percent of them have used click-to-call in our listings,” says Toledano. This is powerful to be able to go to advertisers and say, ‘There is a real hunger for product availability among consumers at the end of the buying cycle.’ ”

These click-to-call links are provided deep into the product listing pages for individual products, which further boosts the qualified nature of the traffic. Also telling of these users’ intent to transact is the call times with retailers, which average three minutes, according to Toledano.

There is lots more in the near-term pipeline that Toledano can’t discuss yet, but we’re set to talk more next month. In the meantime, the company enjoys the increases in valued, qualified traffic, which has doubled in each of the past three months and now stands at 65,000 unique visitors per month, and 200,000 page views.

“Every month we have two Rose Bowls filled with people looking to buy appliances,” Toledano says.