eCommerce Website Solution
Shopping Comparison Engines
(PPC Advertising) - Using a Shopping Comparison Engine as a marketing channel consists
of providing an optimized data feed (usually csv or xml format) set up per the specifications
provided by the individual shopping comparison engines. In order to get a good return
on investment, there are tips and strategies that we recommend to ensure your success.
There is a warning that goes along with this particular form of advertising, though.
It’s tempting to create a data feed and submit it across all shopping comparison
sites. Don’t do this. It’s a sure way for your products to end up in the wrong category
where the chances of a shopper finding you are slim to none! Creating a data feed
for each shopping comparison site is time consuming but well worth it in the long
run.
Here’s a Listing of Some of the Most Popular Shopping Comparison Sites.
Shopping.com
Nextag
Shopzilla/Bizrate
Become.com
Froogle (free)
PriceGrabber
Smarter.com
Yahoo Shopping
MSN Shopping
In order for your products to display correctly and to be found in the shopping
comparison sites, there’s a certain amount of optimization that needs to be done.
The following guidelines will help you optimize your data feeds to drive successful
campaigns:
1. Create a separate data feed for each shopping comparison site utilizing attributes
specific for each shopping comparison engine. (These attributes/data specifications
are listed by each Shopping Comparison Engine)
2. For each shopping comparison engine, always include a specific product link for
tracking conversions in your web analytics program.
Example:
http://www.rinvio.com/Product/Colibri-Quantum-Viper-Satin-Silver.aspx?location=googlebase
you can change your extension to ?location=shopping.com or ?location=nextag, etc.
depending on the advertising channel.
· Optimize each feed based on Shopping Comparison
Engine criteria – One data feed won’t work across all engines. Each shopping comparison
site requires specific information and giving them the information required will
help your product rankings.
· Submit Feeds daily with updated content
· Place bids per category or per product where
applicable
o Check individual engines to see if product bids can be placed within the feed before upload
· Follow bid amount strategy: Look at product
margins and sales data to determine if they fit into the following categories:
o High Margin Products with
High Sales – promote these if possible to a top position
o Low Margin Products with
Moderate Sales – bid at a minimum
o Products with No Sales –
minimum bid or delete from feed
· Data has to be analyzed on a product by product
basis
· Recognize market trends
o Ex. Solar Panels are hot
so you’d want to bid to top position for solar panels
Froogle/Googlebase (FREE) – Using Googlebase to upload products is one of the easiest
and most cost effective ways to drive traffic to your web site. Products submitted
to Googlebase are picked up in Googles regular pages and in Froogle. And it’s free…wait,
did we mention, it’s free!
Check it out. Googlebase in action…
If we do a Google search for “Colibri
Quantum Viper”
(which happens to be a sleek silver lighter) you’ll see the top two products search
results are from the www.rinvio.com
web site listed at the top of the page under product search results. If you go to
Froogle and use the same search phrase, you’ll see the same product in the number
two position
as seen here
PPO (Pay Per Order) Sites are slightly different from straight shopping comparison
engines and ppc sites. These shopping portals collect a percentage of each sale
made through their web sites. Amazon.com is the biggest followed closely by Shop.com.
Fees are not collected on a per click basis. Instead, commissions are charged per
product sold and can range from 10%-20%. You can negotiate based on your product
margins. In fact, we highly recommend you do this! Who wants to pay a high commission
out on a product that has a low margin? These types of sites require a data feed
similar to shopping comparison sites and require set up fees. Amazon.com will go
out of their way to make the set up as painless as possible. They charge a $40/month
service fee and you can cancel the service at any time. However, there’s not a lot
of negotiation room on the commissions they take. On the other hand, Shop.com initial
requirements are more stringent and costly, especially for a small e-commerce site.
But they will negotiate on commissions and fees. The best advice we can give is
to know your products and know your margins. That way you can use these shopping
portals to get the best return on investment as well as exposing your brand to the
millions of users who traffic them daily.
Google Adwords (PPC)
· Advertise to potential customers when they
are searching for your products
· Reach a wider audience than any other medium
- Google AdWords are seen by 80% of the users on the Internet
· Specifically target Internet users who are
most likely to buy your products
· font-family: 'Verdana','sans-serif'">Target customers geographically
Yahoo! Search Marketing (PPC) is a web-based marketing channel providing companies
a cost-effective medium to advertise their website and services. Ads placed on Yahoo!
Search Marketing (Overture) are served on Yahoo! AltaVista, Lycos and MSN
The Newest Frontier! Mobile Search Advertising (PPC)
Sponsored search results on
Google Mobilework on a pay per click as well as a pay per call basis. Every ad contains a headline
and a description with a maximum of 18 characters each. The third line contains
the site URL or a telephone number or both. Advertisers can therefore choose to
connect to customers via two mediums - phone or website.
Datafeed Tools:There are tools and
services geared specifically to datafeed creation and implementation. One of the
best is the Chanalyticssm tool by Merchant Advantage.
It provides the small to mid-sized online merchant the business tools to manage
their product catalog feeds. Merchants can configure, optimize,
and analyze product information to any pay- per-click or pay-per-order marketing
channels and reduce clicks on non-performing products while increasing clicks on
performing products.
Merchant Advantage
provides other tools for small businesses that compliment Chanalyticssm:
· An Order Management online system which incorporates automated consumer emails,
task management, vendor access module (including drop ship vendors), multiple storefront
support and support for marketplace orders.
· Comprehensive surveys, polls and a statistical view of data gathered from those
surveys and polls for marketing or to enhance consumer content.
MerchantAdvantage’s greatest advantage is that they provide merchants the functionality
of expensive third party solutions at a fraction of the cost. This allows clients
to take full advantage of the online marketplace just like a large company.
Their business systems and software are designed to work easily with other applications
so the online merchant never has to worry about missing out on next generation product
developments.
Entry Level Pricing for Chanalyticssm is $295/month and order management
with Chanalytics is $795/month
and no long term contract is required.
Analyze This!
Data collected from web analytics is invaluable information for any web site owner
but especially so for e-commerce sites. The information collected can provide you
with just the details you need to make site changes and improve your conversion
rate, explore new sales channels and predict consumer behavior. A product like webstats.com
is only a few dollars a month and provides specific details.
There are very expensive solutions, however, we’d suggest you save your money unless
you like having fancy toys. The tools provided by Google are probably the most cost
effective and make the most sense.
Google provides a suite of tools for merchants one of which is a statistics program
after recently acquiring a company that specialized in statistics.
http://www.google.com/analytics/
WebStat.com provides a nice stats system for a low, reasonable cost. It’s very basic
but does a nice job and is reliable.
http://www.webstat.com/
We’ve worked with web trends over the years off and on. We’ve also seen how Web
Side Story works. If you’re doing at least $500k+ a year in gross sales, these more
costly solutions can offer you more detailed statistics, tracking, reporting and
analytics tools.
http://www.webtrends.com/
http://www.websidestory.com/
*note - You should pay particular attention to your exit pages in your statistics.
For example, it could be that you have a checkout page on your site that is confusing
or doesn’t make sense to your customers and as a result they aren’t completing the
transaction. Honing in on those pages will enable you to see where changes are needed.
It’s been our experience that using this data to make changes is often very effective.
It clears up customer confusion, builds trust and can create $1000’s more in revenue
in completed transactions.
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