Tips and Tricks to Maximize Return on Shopping Comparison Sites

In case you missed this, Rob Aronson, over at Avenue A|Razorship, knows what he is talking about in this piece written today.  We all can help each other, right?  So read on.

Here is a background on Rob:

Rob is the founder of Avenue A| Razofish’s search engine optimization department. He serves as the senior search engine optimization expert for the agency, and oversees the agency’s feed management offering. In addition he sets the strategic vision for all organic search technology product development initiatives for Avenue A| Razorfish.

...and here is his piece.

Have a Happy Halloween! (not too much sugar!!!)

-- Chip 

by Rob Aronson, Avenue A|Razorfish

You can see full article by CLICKING HERE

Tips and Tricks to Maximize Return

"There are several things that can be done to improve your ROI in the shopping engines:
Unlike traditional search engines, the shopping engines don’t employ spiders to index content; instead they rely primarily on advertisers to push content to them via an XML feed.  Fill in as much data as possible in the feed: Searchers on shopping engines often search for items with attributes in the query, such as particular sizes, by price, color, etc. The more information you provide in your feed the more likely your listing will appear against these searches. Since these searches are extremely targeted, the conversion rate for these terms tends to be high.

Once a user selects a product they often will sort through the list by price. If possible consider using bulk price or rebate pricing so that your listing will appear higher up.

Opt in to participate in user satisfaction surveys: Merchants have the option of enabling customers from the shopping site to complete a survey rating their experience shopping on the merchant’s site. Merchant ratings/reviews play a significant role in determining where a site will appear on many of the shopping engines. If your site has a high enough rating, it will be considered a trusted store and marked as such next to your listing.

Consider using logos: Many of the engines allow advertisers to include a logo with their listing. This will often lead to a significant increase in click-thru rate as it helps your listing stand out on the page. It should be noted, however, that there is a significant increase in the cost when using a logo, which can sometimes make this ROI-prohibitive.

Map your products to the appropriate engine categories: The shopping engines have their own category taxonomy that typically differs by quite a bit from that of the advertiser. In order to ensure that your categories are properly placed into the right shopping engine you will want to make sure that, in the feed, you are assigning your products to the appropriate category according to the shopping engine. Since every shopping engine uses different categories, this can be a time consuming process.

Take advantage of the shopping engines that offer the ability to bid on a per product basis, (Nextag, Shopping.com and Shopzilla). Currently most engines only allow bidding on a per category basis. It has been my experience that most merchants are not taking advantage of this and therefore there is a real opportunity to bid up your most profitable products.

Caution Flag

One of the major challenges in working with the shopping engines is the lack of a uniform format for their feeds. Currently each of the engines requires different information in unique formats. This, in combination with the difficulty in managing frequent inventory changes, is why most large retailers outsource their feed management to a third party that has the technology to seamlessly manage the building and optimizing of the feeds for the different engines.

“Let the Race Begin”! Happy Shopping."

You can see full article by CLICKING HERE