Hi Everyone,

Sometimes you have a specific vision of what kind of ecommerce site you'd like to target for your campaign.

E.g., Say you recently worked with “Death Wish Coffee” - a direct-to-consumer Fair Trade coffee brand, and you’d like to find similar brands as them, since they’re more likely to purchase your product/service knowing you have experience in their space.

The Category filter - which allows you to filter ecommerce sites based on what industry they’re in, can get you pretty far, with 100s of industries/sub-industries to choose from. Although, it might not be specific enough for this case, as the closest you can get to “Coffee”, is “/Food & Drink/Beverages/Coffee & Tea”... which includes Tea and not just “Coffee”, and isn't exclusive to Fair Trade brands.

Another tool you could use is the Meta-Description filter. A Meta-Description is a short description of a site, that web developers can write about their business to describe it better for search engines (it’s that short description you see under each Google search result), and oftentimes it’s auto-generated by the ecommerce platform (Shopify, etc).

Knowing this, you can combine the “Category” and “Meta-Description” filters to generate a report of sites that are categorized as “/Food & Drink/Beverages/Coffee & Tea”, and have “Fair Trade” in their description, but don’t have the word “Tea” in their description. Here’s a report that does this.

Now, that’s pretty specific and will likely generate a sound list! But let’s say the site does still, actually sell Tea, but they just don’t have it in their Meta-Description, or they’re actually Fair Trade Certified, but that was missed because they don’t say that in their Meta-Description either - after all, they only have a small space to describe their site!

This is where you can lean on Custom Matches, which essentially allows you to create your own filters in Store Leads. With Custom Matches, you can type any word/phrase and we’ll scan various pages of each ecommerce site to see if that string pattern exists. So, if the site has the words “Tea” on their product page, or if they have “Fair Trade” in their About Us page, that’ll be detected.

So, you could build a Custom Match for “Tea”, another for “Fair Trade”, then remove the first from your list and include the second. Please see more on Custom Matches here.

Also, Custom Matches offer a more precise way to search "Meta-Descriptions" and "Meta-Keywords" because they allow you to use exact string matches. This can sometimes be better than the Meta-Description filter in Advanced Search, which simplifies words to their base form. E.g., if you search for "Fishing," it might also retrieve related terms like "Fish," "Fishery," and "Fisherman." But, if you're looking for the exact term "Fishing," Custom Matches allow you to specify and find that precise term.

And, if you prefer to have a further layer of quality assurance to scan through sites before adding them to your campaign - you can use the List Scrubber feature in Store Leads which allows you to open multiple sites in your Chrome browser at once, and using the Store Leads Chrome Extension, you can quickly confirm if the sites are a good match, before adding them to your CRM. Here’s a quick video tutorial.

As always, please let us know if we can help with setting any of this up!

Best of luck with your campaigns,