What is the Popularity Index on SpecialChem?

At SpecialChem, we have set up a Popularity Index to help the suppliers measure their popularity over time within our material selection databases.

A few words about SpecialChem in case you are not familiar with us. We provide free product databases of specialty chemicals and materials to technical buyers. Our mission is to give them access to all the products from every supplier in the world. This is why your products are most likely already listed on SpecialChem.

When talking about "Popularity", there are 2 possible definitions:

1. You are a popular supplier if you have the highest traffic share in your specific technology segment, for example 1,000 product views vs. 500. This is the way we measure our TOP 100 most popular suppliers rankings every year.
   
   OR
   
   
2. You are popular if you have the highest traffic relatively to the size of your product portfolio. For example 1,000 views with 1 product vs. 1,000 views with 1,000 products.

And this second definition is the reason why we created the Popularity Index — to be able to compare suppliers with different size portfolios by normalizing them on the same scale.

In this post, I will explain you how the popularity index works on SpecialChem, and how to interpret your index.

What does the Popularity Index tell you?

Your Popularity Index represents your relative popularity vs. all your competitors in a specific product category (for example antioxidants, emulsifiers, pigments etc.).

This is a simple indicator that tells you whether your products are popular or not on SpecialChem, no matter how big your portfolio is vs. your competitors' portfolio.

How is your Popularity Index measured?

Your popularity Index is the ratio of your traffic share to your product share, as illustrated below:

Let's take 2 practical cases:

• If your products represent 10% of all the listed products on SpecialChem, and attracts 50% of the product views, your Popularity Index is 5.
  
  
• On the opposite, if your products represent 50% of all listed products, and only attract 10% of the traffic, your Popularity Index is 0.2.

How to interpret your Popularity Index

There are 3 possible scenarios:

How can you improve  your Popularity Index on SpecialChem?

If you want to become a popular supplier in your product category, or increase your current popularity, here are my recommended tips and campaigns to make it happen.

#1 Choose a Premium or Lead Generation Product Listing

If your Popularity Index is below or equal to 1, may be some your competitors are actually capturing "your" traffic, precisely because their products appear before yours in our database.

Let me explain.

With the Premium and Lead Generation Product Listings, your products appear on top of search results. So, whenever a technical buyer is searching for ingredients or materials like yours, you drastically increase the chance that your products appear on top of the result pages.

Suppliers and products with a Lead Generation Listing appear in the 1^st tier, Premium Listing in the 2^nd tier, and the free listing at the end, alphabetized from A to Z suppliers. Get all the features of our Product Listing plans here.

So, this is how you may be losing traffic on your products, and the reason why a Premium and Lead Generation listing is a must-have to increase your popularity.

#2 Sponsor your product category for a long-term popularity boost

In 2020, we measured that 1 month of a brand advertising campaign increased the popularity index for 3 months, with a peak at +300%.

Having that in mind, my second recommendation is obvious: make your brand visible by sponsoring your product category. We call these banners Exclusive Category Sponsorship Banners and they look like this:

These sponsorship banners are monthly and exclusive — only your banner can be displayed on both the leaderboard and top rectangle positions for your sponsored category. They only appear when the search results match your sponsored product category.

The sponsorship banners are ideal to target the technical buyers and grow your popularity in your segment, over the long term. Plus, they are very economical compared to our high traffic area banners, so that you can book several months to ensure your brand is imprinted in visitors' memory.

Tip: if you want to be THE most popular in your category, why not booking the whole year? There is no place to grow for your competitors then! 😈

#3 Run brand advertising campaigns to gain quick and massive popularity

According to the same survey that we did in 2020 — mentioned in the previous section, High Traffic Area banners are ideal to give a huge and massive boost to your Popularity Index.

High traffic area banners are ideal to give a quick and massive boost to your popularity. But the price and competition for these banner positions are relatively high that it might be difficult to sustain a strong popularity over the year with only high traffic banners.

2 to 3 High traffic area banners per year is a good benchmark to start with.

#4 Optimize your product keywords

With the Premium and Lead Generation Listings comes the possibility to book up to 5 keywords per product. Whenever someone is searching for this keyword, your product will be considered for the search result ranking.

These keywords are key to make your product appears on the relevant searches.

And no worries, our Client Success Manager are here to help you select the right keywords.

#5 Attach documents to your products

And my last tip is this one. When you subscribe to a Premium or Lead Generation Listing, you can attach as many documents as you want to each product.

But how do the documents impact your product views?

Well, when you see a product without any document vs a product with 7 attached documents, which one are you most likely to engage?

I would certainly visit the one with documents to see what additional information I can get. And maybe your visitors are behaving this way too. So, make your products stand out from the search results with attached documents.