SKU Level Bidding Mandatory to Increase ROI Using Shopping Comparison Sites
I know that many of you are trying to use shopping comparison sites and or other types of marketing channels, such as mShopper, mPoria, myCoupons, NetGain and many other wonderful, unique, places to market your online webstore and grow revenues. MerchantAdvantage has a list of over 50 over at www.MerchantAdvantage.com, under "Resources" and then see "Channels", so check it out.
In the interim period, for those feeding to NexTag.com, Shopping.com, Shopzilla.com, Pronto.com, or Smarter.com you now have (and did...LOL) the option to manage your SKU level bidding, which is critical when using these sites, and others that support SKU level bidding, to ensure that you are maximizing the bids you make for listing certain SKU and categories of products.
CNNMoney.com and Fortune, picked up this announcment about why it is important to managing ROI. If you want to better manage SKU level bidding check it out, and if you are Yahoo! Store or ProStore WebStore or Monster Commerce store, you can integrate and set up SKU level bidding in about 5 minutes, if you having another shopping cart technology it takes about 30 minutes. Here is the link to the story from CNN -- it is a quick read and worth a quick look.
Okay, many of you might be asking what is SKU level bidding, why is it important and how can it help me manage my business and grow revenues?
SKU Level Bidding: What is it and Why Can it Be good?
When sending your product information to various comparison shopping engines, you typically pay a particular amount of money per click. That amount of money sometimes changes per category within a CSE.
In many cases the expensive PPC categories just don’t seem worth the high click cost…so what do you do, pull the products? But then there’s no marketing for those products on that CSE – also not good.
So, how about if you were willing to pay per click, just not the total amount! Aha, that would do the trick. I’ll pay full amounts for most of my products as my margins are good, my conversions are OK etc… But when I’m selling these "widgets", there’s NO WAY I’m going to pay the full .45 cents required for this category of product on this CSE because I will certainly lose money.
But, you know, if I got clicks at, well lets say .35 cents, that would probably work. It would allow me to sell more products (specifically "widgets" in this case) while providing some costing control on marketing.
Well, that’s the decision, now how do I make it so?
SKU Level Bidding Execution: How do I do it?
Well, one way to do this is within the CSEs back office, or online administration tool. An easier way to do this, with all of the CSEs that support SKU level bidding, is to send the Click Bid Amount along with the other product information, like product name, price, url etc… all at once!
By putting the click bid amount in the feed, you are managing the product information and bid amount in the same place. And so you are now offering to pay .35 cents for clicks in a category that typically costs .45 cents. EASY!!!
My Parting Suggestion on SKU Level Bidding:
PLEASE understand that this is "process" without a doubt is better than pulling the product as it gives control in degrees instead of sraightforward “yes/no” to listing products. Now you have choice, which I love, and while this process does not assure identical marketing performance as paying full price, it is a viable and real option.
Even better, if you use a third party tool, you can automate these functions based on your goals and marketing plans, AND eliminate many of the human errors that typically occur when doing these things manually.
MerchantAdvantage supports SKU level bidding and I think we are the only tool based, affordable, product on the marketplace that does this along with feeding your product catalog data to ANY shopping destionation site in one dashboard.
The reason that other companies have not done this yet is because it can be confusing to program and support. But call them up yourself and find out. I am sure they will catch up after they read this entry....LOL.... but that too will be good for all online merchants as you then will have choice! That is good.
Have a great weekend, besos from Miami and have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday where ever you may be!
I will posting tomorrow and then taking the Thanksgiving week off with family up north in Maine and Boston, so please check back entries as they pertain to categories of interest to you. Just see left hand side of this blog and click on a category of interest and enjoy the information. I hope it helps.
Oh yeah, please feel free to send me any questions or tips at chip@etaildtail.com
-- Chip
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