Bid Goodbye to High Pay Per Click (PPC)

Using comparison shopping engines ("CSEs"), that work on a pay per click ("PPC") business model, can get expensive, if an online merchant does not manage and monitor these marketing campaigns daily. 

I have many clients who get upset when their PPC costs are almost equal to the amount of sales revenues generated from leads from CSEs, or worse, the PPC costs are actually higher each month than sales revenues generated by those PPC leads.

Most of the CSEs, that use a PPC business model, realize that to keep an online merchant as a client they need to make them money by providing a high enough return on investment ("ROI"), often known as return on add send ("ROAS"), or else the online merchant will simply stop working with that CSE.

Shopzilla, Smarter, Nextag, Pronto, PriceGrabber and others, provide online merchants an excellent solution to work with them more effectively by allowing the online merchant to use an "active bidding feature" to manage their PPC bids and get their product catalog listed/ranked higher on their respective CSE. 

I highly encourage all online merchants to take advantage of these features as these CSEs work hard to ensure that all online merchants have a high enough ROI/ROAS to justify working with them. If you are unsure if a particular CSE supports the "active bidding" feature just ask -- many do.

Now, the next step to managing your bids across each CSE, that uses a PPC model, is to ensure that you have a tool which helps you manage these active bids from a simple dashboard solution.  One of my technicians at MerchantAdvantage explains below how and why you should do this. And if you are working with a company that does not support this essential "active bidding" feature ask them why, as it really helps to increase the effectiveness and ROI/ROAS when using a CSE.

I hope his advice helps and if you need a Channel Management, product catalog feed tool with robust analytics, that also supports "active bidding" options on CSEs, please feel to contact Brett, or another MerchantAdvantage technical representative, at 800.550.9466.

I hope this helps!

-- Chip Arndt

by Brett, Technical Liaison at MerchantAdvantage

"As more and more shopping destination sites support PPC bids, merchants are utilizing active bidding to lower PPC. When bidding at Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs), there are two options to define bids.

Bid for Pay Per Click (PPC) on the data-feed, and Bid for PPC in the CSE Dashboard (back office). When editing in the CSE dashboard, you must login, find the screen that edits PPC, and edit each specific category or product each time you want to change your bids. An easier approach to modifying your bids is utilizing a data feed tool like Channel Management, from MerchantAdvantage.

PPC Bidding can be utilized to optimize your product appearance on the CSEs. If there is a high margin product or a product that needs to be moved, the bid can be adjusted to be high for higher ranking on the CSEs.

If a product has a low margin, instead of pulling the product from the feed, the bid can be lowered and it will still appear on the CSE at a lower level in the search result. But what if there aren’t many products like yours in that category? If you bid low your product will appear on the top."

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