As local businesses increasingly transition their advertising dollars online, they expect agencies and publishers to furnish them with simple, consolidated solutions supported by tangible, trackable ROI. MerchEngines built its white-label “relationship generation” system to enable online marketing providers to do just that for their SMB clients.

In a crowded online marketplace, where bigger firms such as ReachLocal, Yodle and WebVisible also compete to service SMB agents, MerchEngines’ value proposition is the comprehensiveness of the toolkit that publishers can implement and local merchants can benefit from.

There are eight key features in the suite, including a “SocialStream” layer that tracks activity across four prominent social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google Buzz).

PPC search campaign management is fundamental to online search offerings, and MerchEngines is no different, supplying a single interface to customize, amend and track campaigns across multiple search engines. Tied to both SEM and social is CallAnalytics, the branded service that allows SMBs to establish call-tracking numbers and monitor traffic from both search and social.

Also of note is OneList, which disseminates a local merchant’s listing across more than 40 business directories (Yelp, Superpages.com and many more). The eight-tool portfolio is encompassed in a single online dashboard that agencies and publishers can conveniently access to monitor and change campaigns.

MerchEngines was founded in 2005 by longtime Internet executive Andy Steuer. In 2009 it sold to Hostopia, the Web site hosting unit of Deluxe Corp.

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