Can you please introduce yourself?

I am Harry and I look after the Affiliate partnerships for idealo UK. I work closely with our Affiliate partners to ensure idealo is displaying the best quality offers at the best price. Besides onboarding new partners, I also help them optimise their performance on our platform.

Idealo is the first point of call for more and more people along the online shopping journey because they want the best deal. In fact, last year was a record-breaking year for us and this year is already shaping up to be even better.

Can you introduce idealo and its business values?

Idealo is present not only in the UK but also in Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Spain. We’re Europe’s largest price comparison site and are based in the heart of Berlin. idealo provides many fantastic features to help our users find the best offers from reputable retailers.

Honesty is our core policy. Not only do we want to provide our users with the cheapest offers, but we also want to give them access to the best quality offers. idealo now lists over a billion offers from over 55,000 partner merchants, and we’re helping 65 million users per year find the best possible price.

What are the biggest benefits for an advertiser working with idealo?

Our users know exactly what they’re looking for and are simply looking for the best price. This is what makes product comparison so successful and conversion rates so high. Offering detailed product specifications as well as user and expert reviews allows our users to make truly informed purchase decisions.

Displaying offers on idealo adds a real sense of honesty and integrity to our partners, it communicates that they believe in the quality of their offers and stand by their prices, since they’re competing against the offers of other merchants.

Tell us about your audience and what types of advertisers do you work best with?

We have a very wide range of users at idealo. The majority of these users are between the ages of 25-64 years and around 60% of them are male. In terms of best-performing categories, Electronics, Gaming and Large Appliances always do really well.

Most of our traffic has been generated through our smartphone app. This is particularly pleasing for us because we’ve invested a lot into creating the many great features of this app. One such feature is the useful barcode scanner which makes it possible to scan products on the high street and see if they cost less online.

What makes idealo an exciting company?

idealo is the true market leader in price comparison. We employ over 1,050 people who service 6 European countries. Working in such a multinational company is fantastic and each country team is inspired by the great success of the others.

Any exciting plans coming up in the next 12 months?

 idealo is currently going through a period of hyper-growth with average lead-outs across all countries increasing YOY by 12%.

More and more people are now using idealo to compare products before making a purchase and it is very exciting to be involved in this growth. In the UK specifically, we receive huge amounts of traffic for footwear, so we’re now introducing a UK shoe size filter. This new feature should greatly improve our conversion rates.

Where do you think is the Affiliate space heading to in the next year and what are the main market disruptions?

The European Court of Justice has now backed idealo in our claim that Google has been misusing its market position to promote its own services. We’ve begun legal proceedings against Google seeking damages of 500m Euros (Times article here). This is a modern-day David v Goliath story, and it sends the message that we will not tolerate Google acting in this way. I believe the next few years will see honest product comparison sites such as idealo continue to grow at a great rate.

What is the most exciting time of year for you as a business?

As you would expect our busiest times of year are Black Friday and Christmas. It’s during these seasons that users want to make their money go as far as possible and we experience a large increase in traffic. We’re also seeing a boost in outdoor clothing and winter jackets thanks to the cold weather that’s starting to creep in.

Is there anything else you’d like our customers to know?

We have lots of great features on the website that help our users compare products. Our price tracker, for instance, makes it possible to see how the price of a specific product has evolved over time. We also have a price alarm feature that allows users to set a price that they’re happy to pay for a product. Once the product falls to the set price, the user is informed.

What’s really useful is the ability to compare product specifications side by side. Offering this feature allows our users to compare important data when looking at products such as smartphones or laptops. We also have a great barcode scanner app. It was recently featured on the Lorraine Kelly show which resulted in a huge increase in our app downloads in the UK.

What is one fun fact about idealo?

Barack Obama follows us on twitter He clearly is a man who loves a bargain!