Google Analytics Webinars and Education: A Must for Online Retailers Looking to Increase Sales

eTaildTail friends over at MoreVisibility are offering training on Google Analytics, which I think you all must explore to see how your website is performing. I am a big fan of analytics. It is the only way to really see how potential customers are interacting with your site and marketing campaigns.

I actually helped introduce "Chanalytics", at my company MerchantAdvantage, to assist online retailers analyze how their product data feed marketing campaigns -- using comparison shopping sites and marketplaces -- perform in conjunction with other marketing efforts.  Chanalytics compliments Google, Yahoo! or proprietary analytic packages and acts as an important "check" to other statistics you are receving on a daily basis.

I also think that these webinars (see below) are important to helping online merchants understand how people are interacting with your website in order to improve sales and then act on those findings.

You can also check out Yahoo! Analytics, as they are also free, after attending this webinar by MoreVisibility.

There is a cost for the webinars, but I think these costs may be worth it, especially if you are using Google Analytics or are considering using it.

 

The two webinars are offered at these times:

May 13 & 15 @ 1:00 pm: Launching Google Analytics & Integrating with AdWords

May 20 & 22 @ 1:00 pm: Using Google Analytics Beyond Google

<<<CLICK HERE>>> to find out more and register, if you want. I highly suggest checking it out.

-- Chip Arndt

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."

<<<CLICK HERE>>> to see full commentary...scroll to the bottom after the jump

Market America's James Ridinger Announces Strategic Partnership with MerchantAdvantage to Create Comparison Shopping Solution

Well, it continues to be a wonderful 2008 and I am proud to announce another major strategic partnership for MerchantAdvantage, which I co-founded.  The below annoucement follows our recent strategic partnership with Everest Software, please click here for that story.

I am particularly proud of this announcement, as it shows that our technology is one of the best in the industry, that it can be used by a diverse group of online retailers with little online retailing experience and a lot of online retailing experience, and that we are staying ahead of the curve on strategic thinking about providing the most cost-effective, tool-based marketing solutions to ALL online retailers.

If you have any questions on how I can help you with your online business don't hestitate to email me at chip@eTaildTail.com - we are all in this together.

-- Chip

Market America's James Ridinger Announces Strategic Partnership with MerchantAdvantage to Create Comparison Shopping Solution

<<<CLICK HERE>> for full press release, or read below.

Market America Partners with MerchantAdvantage to Streamline and Push Product Data to Comparison Shopping Engines and Marketplaces

Greensboro, NC (PRWEB) February 26, 2008 -- James (JR) Ridinger, president and CEO of Market America, Inc., announced today the company has reached a strategic partner agreement with MerchantAdvantage, LLC. The agreement allows Market America, its distributors and Webstore division to work closely with over 100 comparison shopping engines and marketplaces as well as enable any online merchant to list their product catalog into the Market America Mall Without Walls® marketplace at www.marketamerica.com.

MerchantAdvantage's superior, tool based Channel Management products allow Market America and its partners to seamlessly feed, optimize and analyze the performance of their product catalog data to any online marketing channel, reaching a consumer anytime they shop online or via their mobile device. Additionally, MerchantAdvantage technology will be used to enable any online merchant to list their product catalog directly with Market America and bring more vendors' products into Market America's Mall Without Walls® and to over 160,000 Market America Distributors.

The strategic partnership allows users on www.marketamerica.com, to make purchases from any of Market America's over 2,000 partner stores and return customers to Market America's website to complete their transaction. The robust all-in-one solution from Market America and MerchantAdvantage also empowers online merchants to analyze sales and respond to marketing campaigns in real-time, ensuring the highest return on marketing investment.

Each Comparison Shopping Engine ("CSE") aggregates a list of products from many sellers into a single portal, delivering an efficient shopping experience for the Internet shopper. While the CSE is an essential marketing channel for the online merchant, working with CSEs can overload the SMB, as each CSE requires a different process for merchants to publish their product details.

"Now, Market America gives our online merchants an easy way to manage their CSE feeds and simultaneously increase sales and reach," said James Ridinger. "Market America and online merchants leverage their Market America web store with MerchantAdvantage to push their product catalog data to those marketing channels that bring the greatest sales and leads. Having this type of advanced and easy to use feed management capability permits Market America to more effectively match products with people, leading to greater sales for Market America partners, our webstores and our own exclusive products."

Market America and MerchantAdvantage affords partners the ability to:

- Push product information to over 100 online marketing channels including CSEs such as Ciao, CNet.com, JellyFish, Market America, MSN Live Search, PriceGrabber, Pronto, Shopzilla, Google Product Search, and Yahoo! Shopping

- Discover which marketing channels, product categories and individual products are meeting expected return on ad-spend and adjust accordingly

- Manage SKU level bidding at supported shopping CSE sites

- Expand market reach while maintaining current marketing budget

- Sell Market America products across the internet and mobile devices

"Effective CSE strategies focusing on channel, category, subcategory, and individual SKU performance can increase ROI sometimes five fold," stated Michael Lambert, CEO of MerchantAdvantage. "MerchantAdvantage products give Market America and their Webstore owners the tools to manage profit-margins on marketing campaigns at the product level and the power to reach millions of potential new customers through a user friendly Web-based tool. We are honored to be an integral part of the Market America group of products to help partners grow their online business efficiently, intelligently and cost-effectively."

About Market America, Inc.

Market America is a product brokerage and Internet marketing company that specializes in One-One-Marketing. With more than three million customers and 160,000 Distributors worldwide, the company has generated over $2.4 billion in accumulated retail sales. Headquartered in Greensboro, NC - the company was founded by James Ridinger in 1992 and employs over 500 people globally with international operations in the United States, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Australia. Through its revolutionary One-to-One Marketing concept, Market America combines the Internet with the power of people - creating the ultimate online shopping destination. More information is available at www.marketamerica.com.

About MerchantAdvantage, LLC

MerchantAdvantage (MerchantAdvantage.com) is an ecommerce software solutions company committed to championing and helping the small to mid sized online merchant address complicated online and mobile commerce issues. MerchantAdvantage takes a systematic, controlled and proactive approach to online product marketing by providing long-term, cost effective, web-based software tools that enable an online business to grow by reaching the widest audience possible via online, broadband, and wireless devices.

MerchantAdvantage's applications are designed to connect the online retailer to their marketplace partners in a seamless motion of communication, allowing online merchants to take control of their e-Commerce and m-Commerce channels, marketing strategies and IT solutions. MerchantAdvantage currently markets over $1 billion worth of product value daily, representing over 600 online storefronts and is changing the macrocosm of ecommerce by staying ahead of the curve in providing business solutions to the growing online retail marketplace. We are here because our commerce future is online and wireless. For more information, please visit www.MerchantAdvantage.com, e-mail us at sales@Merchantdvantage.com or call us at 1.800.550.9466.

Buying Into Comparison Shopping Sites and Engines: Just Do It!

Happy Valentine's Day, now don't forget to buy your loved one something special...using a shopping comparison engine of course...or better yet make it from scratch! :-)

As I have said before to my friends of eTaildTail, I like to refer to experts to "drive home" the point about the utility of shopping comparison sites, how to use them properly, and the importance of a diverse online marketing strategy when using shopping comparison sites.

The below article, which I paste in its entirety below, is an excellent overview of how an online retailer used large shopping comparison sites, niche shopping comparison sites, and off line marketing to create a unified marketing strategy to drive sales, reach and brand recognition.

It also dovetails nicely into the recent webinar I did with mPoria.com and MyCoupons.com, both new online shopping destinations which can give you greater reach, cost-effectively.

To view that archived 30 minute educational webinar for FREE please <<<CLICK HERE>>>

In the meantime, enjoy the reading below and please never let any marketing company ever tell you again that "...you can't market somewhere because they don't 'suport that marketing channel' = all marketing channels can lead to sales and revenues, if you try them, test them, analyze their performance and then try new channels if the ones you pick did not work. 

MerchantAdvantage supports over 150 marketing channels and no else in the marketplace does. Don't believe me?  Then check out MerchantAdvantage and ask!

-- Chip

By Tessa Wegert

The Click Z Network

<<<CLICK HERE FOR BIO ON TESSA>>>

<<<CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE>>>

"Comparison shopping sites and search engines have long been an integral part of strategists' online marketing plans, particularly in product categories such as CPG, electronics, and gaming. Combining the results-oriented elements of CPC (define) and CPA (define) advertising with a consumer audience that's highly qualified and motivated to buy, they're a great way to help generate both online and offline sales.

Add to that an already sizeable (and growing) user base, and the appeal is only greater. According to a recent Hitwise study, traffic to leading comparison shopping sites during one pre-holiday week last November increased 56 percent over the same week in 2006.

Most marketers are familiar with the major players in this industry: Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, NexTag, and Shopzilla (formerly BizRate). But these don't represent the only opportunities out there, nor does the traditional comparison shopping engine advertising model tell the whole story of what's available to media buyers.

So claims Michael Brown, president and CEO of HealthPricer.com. Founded in 2003 as a manufacturer of custom health supplements, the site has morphed over the years into a technology company, one aspect of which is a comparison shopping tool for health products. In addition to living on HealthPricer.com, where consumers can search over 400,000 products from about 100 hand-selected merchants, the tool is now white-labeled and built into third-party sites, including HealthLine.com, HealthCentral.com, and QualityHealth.com.

The shopping tool allows consumer health publishers to add value to their sites in the form of a dynamic marketplace section. Meanwhile, users can access the HealthPricer feature within the context of their favorite health content sites. The technology employs a robust tagging system that is critical to building an effective shopping engine, Brown said.

"If you're going to allow people to find products online without the context of retail store aisles to guide them, they need to know the process will be easy and that they'll find the items they're looking for," Brown said.

The notion of context is also at the heart of the comparison shopping engine media buy. Shopping engine placements are contextually relevant because they're delivered, along with other related products, on a keyword basis.

HealthPricer takes a similar approach, but has also begun to marry comparison shopping with display advertising to offer advertisers something beyond the product listings themselves. Through a select group of ad networks, merchants can now purchase keyword-driven banners surrounding its white-labeled comparison shopping tool.

This creates the potential for conquest advertising -- the kind automakers and dealers are known to employ on automotive research sites. As with any comparison shopping search, a merchant's product listing will appear (HealthPricer crawls its merchants' sites free of charge). But advertisers can increase their exposure and presence among competitors with prominent display ads, theoretically boosting the likelihood that consumers will notice and plan to purchase their products.

There's plenty of potential for this type of tool to attract users. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports 80 percent of adult American Internet users (about 113 million) have searched for information on health topics on the Web, with most employing general search engines early on. If those consumers have even a vague idea of what type of health product they're searching for, they can bypass several steps and quickly obtain a list of what's available, while educating themselves on where to find the best deals.

Like its more prominent competitors -- which typically offer many product categories for consumers to choose from -- HealthPricer's engine offers the same active and attentive audience that makes comparison shopping appealing to advertisers in the first place. However, it has made the decision to remain specialized. There's something to be said for mastering a single category and delivering that perceived expertise to consumers and advertisers who are specifically interested in health-related searches and searchers.

Sites, portals, even social networks focus on singular topics for the benefit of their users. Why should comparison shopping engines be any different?

If we're lucky, this is a sign of the direction comparison shopping is taking as a whole. The focus should continue to be on offering more robust and customized features for consumers. This is a healthy industry, after all, and it only promises to grow stronger in the years to come."

<<<CLICK HERE FOR FULL ARTICLE>>>

SLIDES AND AUDIO Now Available of "Online Marketing Alternatives Webinar for Small to Mid Sized Businesses"

Hello eTaildTail community....I thought the webinar today was full of great information and great examples of some sample marketing campaigns you can execute with as little as $1,500 a month.

If you missed today's MerchantAdvantage webinar on "Alternative Online Marketing Methods for Small to Mid Sized Online Merchants" you can download the slides and audio from the front of MerchantAdvantage's site.

>>>> CLICK HERE and it is FREE! <<<<<<<<<

Over 250 people participated in the webinar, so don't miss out!  Enjoy

--- Chip

Analytics to Measure Shopping Engines: Critical for ALL Small to Mid Sized Online Merchants to Manage ROI

I finished doing some reading over at www.ComparisonEngines.com, where Brian Smith, a friend of the eTaildTail community, has some wonderful commentary on online shopping, trends, and using shopping destination sites.

Here is a comment about how important analytics are for everyone to use.  Please read it and then click on over to read what other insights Brian has for you. 

As I say, it is wonderful to have experts and Brian certainly knows his stuff and please make sure that you have the proper analytics package included in your data feed management solution!!!

-- Chip

-- the below quoted from Brian Smith, please CLICK HERE to read his full commentary for October 27 titled --  Shopping Search Engines Questions and Answers

"Q: What is your opinion of the value to retailers of being on second-tier comparison shopping engines as well as, or instead of, the major comparison engines?

A:The most important piece of advice I can give any merchant is to use an analytics program to track results. Once a merchant has this in place, I’d definitely recommend starting out on some of the main shopping engines, but also testing a couple of the second tier engines. The shopping engines get their traffic from a variety of sources and a merchant might find that Smarter or Become outperforms Shopping.com or PriceGrabber. Most of the world has categorized the engines by traffic - first-tier engines being the highly trafficked ones, second-tier engines being the lesser trafficked ones. However, traffic isn’t the only thing that matters to a merchant. The quality of the traffic matters, too. So if a merchant is properly tracking clicks, costs, and sales, that merchant might find through testing that some of the second-tier engines perform much better than the first-tier engines."

-- the above is quoted from Brian Smith, please CLICK HERE to read his full commentary for October 27 titled --  Shopping Search Engines Questions and Answers

Analytics: Get the right ones, own them, use them!

So, I was in Europe the past two weeks and online merchants kept asking me how best to use analytics.  There are several answers , and I will be writing about the myriad of uses of anayltics, albeit for monitoring marketing campaigns, email campaigns, onsite traffic etc....but this article today from Internet Retailer sums up nicely why any online merchant should ensure that they begin, if you have not already done so, why analytics are critical to increasing your ROI and managing your online business better.

Have a great weekend and I will be on my regular daily blog schedule next week.

Go Red Sox!!!

[Okay I am from New England -- indulge me!]

Chip

Web analytics lead to a 50% boost in sales at BestBuyEyeGlasses.com

CLICK HERE FOR FULL STORY

A web site makeover correcting problems found by an analytics program has resulted in a 50% boost in conversion rates and online sales at BestBuyEyeGlasses.com, says Daniel Kandler, president.

“We’re absolutely thrilled with the results, which far exceeded our expectations,” Kandler says.

BestBuyEyeGlasses, also known as BBE, hired Reditus Web Strategy Consulting to enhance its high-end eyewear shopping site to attract more visitors and convert a higher percentage of sales. After analyzing the site, Reditus concluded that the retailer would benefit from a more powerful and efficient shopping cart solution.

Reditus also found problems with BBE’s on-site search engine, which left a percentage of visitors unable to locate products that were available on the site. BBE then upgraded its search component with the dtSearch Text Retrieval Engine, which can index over a terabyte of text in a single index. DtSearch also can create and simultaneously search an unlimited number of indexes, typically in less than a second.

“The dtSearch component alone is invaluable to our business,” Kandler says. “It helps us ensure customers are finding our products. And, in the event we don’t have what they’re looking for, we can act on it and add desired products to our catalogs. It benefits our bottom line, promotes customer satisfaction, and helps keep our customers coming back.”

In addition, Reditus has integrated a tool to allow BBE to monitor search trends and manage custom content displays. “The eyewear industry is incredibly competitive, which made it especially important to let analysis and hard data tell the story rather than speculation,” says Yuval Karjevski, principal web consultant at Reditus. “Even the smallest miscalculation could put our client several steps behind their competitors.”

Comparison Shopping Engine Analytics: The Final Word…Well Almost!

Never let anyone tell you that analytics are not important. 

The two questions many small to mid-sized online merchants have for the eTaildTail community are:

“What are analytics? and “Why should I care about analytics?"

Simply stated, analytics are the sum of statistics and raw data as they pertain to understanding the performance level of an activity. So what is an activity?  There are thousands of activities which we all engage in everyday.  Here are just some examples of “activities”:

1. gas mileage on your car
2. batting average of a baseball player (Big League all the way down to Little League) :-)
3. sales person’s efforts
4. radio marketing campaign
5. political campaign
6. hurricane activity in the southern part of the USA to gauge appropriate insurance rates
7. SAT scores to get into college
8. stock market average
9. bartender sales at busy Saturday nightclub in New York, and, of course,
10. performance measures of online marketing/advertising campaigns, to name just a few.

or even...."Troup surge success in Iraq." (yes, I did just say that)

And to answer “Why should I care about analytics?”

You should care because analytics give you essential information to establish benchmarks for success in all that you do in life. There are hundreds of times in which “analyzing” performance is essential to living your life, but for the purpose of this blog I will limit my comments to the world of eCommerce and mCommerce and marketing efforts when using shopping destination sites.

Using shopping destination sites, marketplaces (Amazon, Shop.com, Underbid, affiliate sites (Commission Junction, LinkShare, Performics), couparison shopping engines (Mycoupons.com, Couponmountain.com), and comparison shopping engines (lots of them) are all simply places where online merchants hopes to garner sales and/or sales leads. 

These “online malls” portend to act as “THE” place where the consumer comes to find products, services, and other items they want to purchase.  Therefore, these “online malls” have three major responsibilities to be successful = valuable = worthy = worth you doing business with them daily:

1. bring in lots of consumers who want to buy products to their URL (example: www.PriceGrabber.com)
2. provide the best products from the most reliable companies to make purchases, i.e. getting online merchants to list their products on the “online mall” , and
3. ensure that their business model of being an online mall is “value-add” for 1 and 2 above.

The only way to monitor if these “online malls” are doing their job is to analyze who is coming to the online mall, who is actually buying vs. “looking” via the online mall, and how much revenue, quality leads, and branding these online malls bring to you, the online merchant.  In turn, it is essential that managers and owners of businesses understand/analyze how there business decisions are working, or not working, when using these online malls.

The Ongoing Issue and Conundrum with Analytics

Now that I have your attention, and hopefully you see the value of analyzing your market efforts using online malls, there is one very important assumption I have made, up to now. 

That assumption is that whatever analytics you use are actually accurate.  This has become a big problem for online merchants when using analytics to monitor their site performance whether you use Google Analytics, a home made version, or a myriad of professional solutions and thus the same holds true for analytics as they relate to your online marketing efforts to marketing channels/shopping destination sites. 

A quotation from the Las Vegas, Shop.org summit this week sums it up nicely:

“Web analytics can bring more questions than answers,” said Kim Weller, senior manager of web analytics for multi-channel consumer electronics retailer Circuit City Stores Inc., who appeared on a web analytics panel. Weller was joined on the panel by retailers Dylan Lewis, senior manager of web analytics for the Intuit Turbo Tax unit of financial software retailer Intuit Inc. and Michael Fried, director of strategic analytics for outdoors sports gear retailer Backcountry.com. Indeed, 80% of retailers in a recent study noted that they have doubts about the accuracy of their web analytics data, said Eric Peterson, CEO and founder of consultants Web Analytics Demystified.”

On the other hand when you have accurate data: 

“We put the same focus on web analytics data as on financial data,” said Fried. The retailer breaks down analytics data so that it can compare “apples to apples” in viewing changes in site activity, and it also combines analytics data with the results of direct surveys of customers about their shopping preferences."

So in summary:

“It’s a challenge, however, to make sure that all people within a retail organization charged with using analytics data actually know how to interpret and use it, Fried said. “We teach people how to use it and what the value of it is,” he said. “Then we hold them accountable to actually use it.”

The Solution for Shopping Destination Site Performance Analysis

Here are 5 simple guidelines to ensure that you work with shopping destination sites, or any marketing channel, properly:

1. Understand why analytics are crucial to the success of your business (if you don't understand why they are essential by this point -- email me at chip@etaildtail.com)

2. Ensure that you ask for analytic information from each shopping destination site/marketing channel you are using

3. Use analytics as a guide and not as rule to manage your business

a. how you analyze the data is as important as having the data
b. sometimes analytics will tell you that a product is not selling on a certain shopping destination site -  this result might first lead you to pull that product from the shopping destination site where the solution actually might be to better manage how you market that product on that shopping destination site

4. Use tables, pie charts, and graphs to understand trends to define new, and adjust existing, business strategies

5. Make time each day to use the data you are getting to adjust business strategies to increase ROI (return on investment) = this is not an option = make time!

Every marketing channel worth their salt will provide you with information on how your marketing campaigns are performing.  This data is not always 100% accurate, even though it should be and they try to make it 100% accurate.  By definition there will be anomalies (see above).  Thus, it may behoove any online merchant to have a complimentary analytic solution that also tracks how your marketing channels are performing all in one place.

There are very inexpensive and excellent solutions in the marketplace that will analyze and compare all of the analytics you are getting from all of your marketing channels in one place.

No marketing channel will do this for you, as it is not in their interest to show you how they are performing against their competitors, but it is in your best interest to compare which marketing channel is performing best and which marketing channel is best for certain SKUs, product categories and the like. 

When you have all of the data in one place, presented in a visual way with charts and graphs, it will be much easier to:

1. see if the data your getting from each channel is accurate
2. compare the performance of each channel and marketing campaign against the other
3. provide you with critical data from which to you can adjust your marketing campaigns

I recommend looking into several companies that I wrote about in a prior blog to find an analytics solution that can work for you -- which they combine with the abilty to act on that information to adjust product catalog data feeds.  I am not here to recommend one over the other, so call them all and compare.

Some are very experienced, some offer “parts” of the whole package I recommend, some offer analytics as a “side thought” and are not really helpful, some are service based models which can be expensive for the small to mid-sized merchant, some don’t work with the shopping cart platform you have, and others are simply wonderful and are dedicated to this field;  I will let you decide after contacting them.  :-)

Here is a list of companies.  Make sure you ask the following questions to ensure that you make the most of all of your marketing and analytics efforts using shopping destination sites:

1. Do you work with my shopping cart technology?
2. Do you feed to any shopping channel that might work best for me? If not, Why don't you give me the option to feed anywhere? There over 100 shopping destination sites.
3. Can I analyze all of my shopping destination feeds in one place?
4. Can I see how an individual SKU or product category is performing in real time across all shopping destination sites and within each shopping destination site
5. Can I see what IP address a lead came from and then follow what that “buyer” bought or clicked on throughout my site = where did they click once they came into my site
6. Can I identify graphically what page the buyer was looking at when they clicked on my product at the shopping destination site?
7. Can I identify graphically where they went to on my site when they clicked over
8. Do you have support to help me with my online marketing campaigns: i.e. newsletters, weekly help webinars, online help tickets, 24/7 support, interactive blog, and the like, and
9. Can I afford your service = how much do you cost?

Company Suggestions:

www.MerchantAdvantage.com (the pioneer in the industry of tool based solutions)
www.SingleFeed.com
www.FeedPerfect.com
www.GoDataFeed.com
www.ChannelBrain.com
www.SmartFeed.com

Also, there are service based companies such as: www.ChannelIntelligence.com , www.ChannelAdvisor.com, and www.Mercent.com.  They are all very good but can be expensive.  Ask them how they charge, i.e. SKU count, revenue share, transaction costs...other.

ChannelAdvisor and ChannelIntelligence have also introduced tool based offerings, which are similar to the ones above but are more expensive and there "all in costs" should be clearly understood and demarcated before signing up.  Mercent also just introduced a "one stop -- we will do all of your online shopping destination site marketing for you" package. Check them all out to see what works for you.

HELPFUL HINTS FOR THE DAY:

1. Understand why analytics are crucial to the success of your business
2. Ensure that you ask for analytic information from each shopping destination site/marketing channel you are using
3. Use analytics as a guide and not as rule to manage your business
4. How you analyze the data is as important as having the data
5. Use tables, pie charts, and graphs to understand trends to define new, and adjust existing, business strategies
6. Make time each day to use the data you are getting to adjust business strategies to increase ROI (return on investment) = this is not an option = make time!

-- have a great weekend -- Chip Arndt

Product Catalog Data Feed Strategy: Why an Online Merchant Should Feed to Several Shopping Comparison Sites

I have received many mails about where online merchants should feed their product catalog data to get the most sales and drive traffic back to their online storefront. 

My answer is simple.  I don’t know...AND FRANKLY...no one has the exact answer....even the so called "experts."

The reason I say this is because there are many, many shopping destination sites that can help you get sales and drive traffic back to your online storefront/your website. I believe that the best way to find out which sites work best for you is to experiment and use a tool based solution that lets you experiment.

It is true that the big four, namely, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, and Shopping.com drive almost 70% of all “pay per click” traffic to storefronts.  Add in Amazon and that probably goes up to 75%.  Add in an eBay store, that you can set up and feed your product catalog into, and a feed through an affiliate, as Linkshare, Performics, Commission Junction, and that number might go up to 80%.  And then add in three FREE listing sites as Google Product Base, TheFind.com, and MSN Live Search (not their marketplace) and you certainly reach 80%.

But does just listing your product catalog to these marketing channels lead to more sales?  Or does it lead to more exposure and clicks with little sales?  The only way to find out is to:

1. experiment
2. analyze and then,
3. choose!

Outside of the better known sites, there are over 150 other shopping destination sites that, while small and less well known, are none the less destinations that have potential buyers. 

These sites don’t have 10,000 merchants selling the same products, sometimes they have only 25.  These sites certainly don’t have the “traffic” of the bigger sites, but they do have consumers looking for products, and are a cost-effective alternative that just might lead to a higher ROI (return on investment) = less clicks but more clicks lead to sales.  So why not try them?

As I have said many times over, it is always critical to first master the science of getting one data feed properly to a shopping channel and then to master the art of marketing that feed properly into that channel.  If you do not do this then the likelihood of realizing the effectiveness of that marketing channel diminishes greatly. 

But, I am always surprised that online merchants think that they only can, or should, feed their marketing data to just a few destinations to realize sales.  If you understand and actually market your feeds properly, why would you not take the opportunity to market your product catalog to as many places that might work for you?  Why limit yourself?

If I said to you that you had the opportunity to open up a brick and mortar store in 10 cities cost effectively, as opposed to just 3, wouldn’t you try it?

If I said to you, that when you do open those stores that you are not obligated to stay in that city for more than three months and would have no more obligations, if you decide that those store fronts were not performing well?  Wouldn’t you do it? Wouldn’t you try it?

Of course you would. 

Any person, advisor, expert, or company that tells you that you can only make money feeding your product catalog to shopping destinations that “they” choose is absurd.  You certainly can make money feeding your product catalog data to just a few places, just as you can make money feeding your product catalog to just one marketing channel – but why limit yourself -- especially if you know how to use shopping destination sites.

My advice?  Don’t limit yourself to just a few marketing channels, as the marketing channel you don't try just might be the one that "could" have worked the best for you and ensure that any advisor or company that you work with gives you:

1. choice
2. the ability to analyze how your marketing efforts are performing in real time = never market without the ability to understand how effective those efforts are, and
3. the ability to change how you market your product catalog into each unique channel

If you have figured out how to optimize your feed correctly for 1 or 2 of the more of these well known sites (either on your own or though a service based or tool based company), why not take a few minutes to try different ones?

You might be surprised that you do better, or just as well, in terms of ROI.  And at the very least, you will get more exposure, branding, and a better education for yourself on how all of these sites can work for you. 

To help you all, I will continue to list shopping destination alternatives here at www.eTaildTail.com, that you can experiment with as time and resources permit.  Some of those channels may work magic, others may not work at all – but any scenario, never limit yourself. 

Oh yeah, and if you are wondering if you can afford to experiment with other channels, after you understand how to work with 1 or 2 channels effectively, here is a quick financial analysis that shows you can:

Example:

Sample 12 month marketing feed spend campaign: $3,000 per month/$36,000 per annum

Per month:
$ allocated to affiliate feed marketing (Commission Junction, Linkshare, Performics) = $500 (pending your type of product catalog = not always a recommended strategy)

$ allocated to adword/key word marketing (Google, Yahoo!, Ask.com etc) = $1,000

$ allocated to a product catalog feed based tool = $150

$ allocated to FREE channels (Google Product Base, TheFind.com, MSN Search) = $0.00

$ allocated to commission based sites (Amazon, Underbid, JellyFish.com, Shop.com) = $0.00

$ allocated to larger destination sites (Shopzilla, Yahoo! Shopping, PriceGrabber) = $1,000

$ allocated to smaller destination sites (see MerchantAdvantage for list) = $350

Makes sense. So now what? 

1. You are insane if you do not list all of your products to Google Product Base, MSN Live Search, and TheFind.com = all FREE and you can do this easily by using a tool based feed solution for $145 per month. 

2. You are insane if you do not list “higher margin products” to commission based marketplaces as Underbid, JellyFish and, if you can get them to agree to work with you, Shop.com and Amazon.com with the following caviat: always make sure you know their all in costs for commissions because sometimes it can be high.

3. You are insane not to try 2-4 marketing channels outside of the big ones listed.

More Help = tool based solutions in the marketplace to help execute the above

If you want help to make sure your feeds are perfectly optimized to one or many shopping destination sites try the following companies. 

They are tool based offerings, cost-effective, and will save you tons of IT headaches as they solve the taxonomy issues for you – each company works differently and has drastically different levels of support, webinars, newsletters, sophisticated online triuble ticket support, analytics, etc…, so make sure you compare:

www.MerchantAdvantage.com (the pioneer in the industry)
www.SingleFeed.com
www.FeedPerfect.com
www.GoDataFeed.com
www.ChannelBrain.com
www.SmartFeed.com

Also, there are service based companies such as: www.ChannelIntelligence.com , www.ChannelAdvisor.com, and www.Mercent.com.  They are all very good but can be expensive.  Ask them how they charge, i.e. SKU count, revenue share, transaction costs...other. 

ChannelAdvisor and ChannelIntelligence have also introduced tool based offerings, which are similar to the ones above but are more expensive and there "all in costs" should be clearly understood and demarcated before signing.  Check them all out to see what works for you.

Google Analytics: Not The Only Helpful Analytic Service In the Marketplace...There are Others.

I am often told it is taboo to not support Google across the the board in all that they do -- and frankly it is hard not to like everything that Google does, as their products and services are excellent.  But.....call me a maverik, I guess, or maybe I am just an entrepreneur's entreprenuer, who loves to help other small businesses and we all love choice.  Well at least some of us do. :-)

Today, I read over at Internet Retailer (CLICK HERE to read full article) about one such small business that seems to be making headway in helping small to mid-sized bsuiness with general onsite performance analytics. Basically, they are competeing against Google analytics in their own way and seem to have found their niche.

I won't edit the article and just let you read it for yourself to draw your own conclusions.

If you want my opinion, I am all for analytics and I am all for choice, even though Google Analytics is generally very good = the free market can be wonderful.  It seems that you can try out www.StatCounter.com for little money and the best part about these type of companies...if it isn't working for you then stop using them...but for my money, why not try them out, especially if they are affordable and have the same functionality...uh oh....I hear Google calling me now....gotta run. -- Ed

From Internet Retailer
September 5, 2007

"Angie Lynch, a former schoolteacher who started her web site Goodforthekids.com a year ago to sell baby and children’s products, is using www.StatCounter.com  to track where visitors come from, what terms they type into search engines and what pages they visit.

That data helped her decide to discontinue advertising on a site that delivered her only five visitors in a month, for instance. She also watches for signs that several visitors are coming from a particular site in a short period, to learn what’s bringing them to her online store. “If it’s from a message board I can post to it, saying I’m the owner of that site and here’s a coupon code,” Lynch says.

Lynch prefers StatCounter to the free Google Analytics program because StatCounter does not put a visible counter on her site. “I don’t want people to be able to compare me to other sites,” she says. “If another site is more popular, they might decide to order from the more popular site.” The site attracted nearly 9,000 unique visitors in August, she says.

Lynch started with StatCounter’s free service, which provides lifetime summary data and a more detailed look at the last 500 page views, but then upgraded to get detailed data on more site visits. For $9 per month, StatCounter provides data on the past 1,500 page views, and prices go up to $29 per month for tracking the last 25,000 page views. Ireland-based StatCounter also earns revenue by placing ads on the user log-in page.

Another small online retailer, Fleur de Lis Fashions.com, is using the free StatCounter service. Rene Fletcher, president of sales and marketing for the New Orleans-based firm that sells apparel, accessories and other items with the fleur de lis that has come to symbolize the hurricane-ravaged city, says StatCounter has provided data showing that the two-month-old site is showing up more in search engines. With more visitors coming to the site through natural search, Fletcher says she has been able to cut back on pay-per-click advertising and focus more on marketing offline, such as with brochures and postcards.

In business since 1999, www.StatCounter.com says it tracks 2.1 million web sites for 1.5 million customers and a total of 9 billion page loads per month."

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. Building a web storefront without knowing who is interacting with it, where they are interacting with it on your site, and where they are "finding" your site via adwords, keywords, startegic partner links, blog entries, and other areas where you might be marketing your site is not wise.  Always have some way to track how, when, and where people in the marketplace are interacting with your site.

2. Small to mid-sized businesses MUST use analytics to access all of the hard work you have done building and marketing your websiteand AND there are affordable solutions from which to choose. 

3. Marketing anything and anywhere without "constant" feedback analysis on how your marketing is performing is wasting money.

Feeding Product Catalog Data to Shopping Comparison Engines: Feeding Data Is Only The First Step...

…If you Don’t Have The Other Elements You Are Wasting Money and Time.

Company Profile: www.MerchantAdvantage.com

MerchantAdvantage helps small to mid-sized online merchants manage, feed, optimize and analyze their product catalog feeds to shopping comparison sites, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, PriceRunner and marketplaces as Amazon, Shop.com, and Underbid, (and over 100 other channels) themselves.

Some new companies have popped since we pioneered this “tool” based, do-it-yourself technology”, but none of them actually have the two most important applications/processes of data feed management – analytics and choice.

Just feeding correctly optimized product catalog data is only 10% of what it takes to use over 100 shopping destination sites and marketing channels effectively.

Many companies might have you think that just feeding your data correctly each time is the most important aspect of successful marketing campaigns using these many channels, they are wrong.  Many, many, many online merchants get burned and waste a lot of money on pay per click campaigns using shopping destination sites without increased sales.

Why? Because they think that just feeding data to a channel is sufficient.

Actually, to be successful using these channels you must do the following and have an application that can do the following:

1. create perfectly formatted data to send to ANY marketing channel

2. have choice to where you can send your product catalog data – just sending data to Shopzilla or Yahoo! Shopping is nice, but they might not be the best performing channel for your products.  You should test, experiment and find those channels that sell your product well.  Thus, work with companies that can help you send your data to over 100 marketing channels that are available to any online merchant. they work with over 125 marketing channels.

3. Analyze how your feeds are performing in real time to save money, increase ROI, and increase sales.  You should have a tool that helps you monitor how your product catalog feeds are performing within each shopping destination site and marketing channel, and across each channel.  This tool should measure individual SKU, category and sub category, and click cost performance….daily!

Check out the marketplace for a cost effective tool based solution that feeds and analyzes product catalog feeds to ANY channel you want to feed to and that also does not charge a transaction fee, revenue fee, or set up cost. 

Once you have scanned the landscape, check out www.MerchantAdvantage.com, they are the only ones who can offer all of this to you in the marketplace that is very, very affordable and are adding on new features in 4Q 2007 that will enhance and make your other marketing efforts more efficient into general search engines, as Yahoo!, Google, and others.

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. Create perfectly formatted data to send to ANY marketing channel

2. Have choice to where you can send your product catalog data – just sending data to Shopzilla or Yahoo! Shopping is nice, but they might not be the best performing channel for your products.  You should test, experiment and find those channels that sell your product well.  Thus, work with companies that can help you send your data to over 100 marketing channels that are available to any online merchant. There are more than you think....I count over 125 marketing and shopping destination site channels.

3. Analyze how your feeds are performing in real time to save money, increase ROI, and increase sales.  You should have a tool that helps you monitor how your product catalog feeds are performing within each shopping destination site and marketing channel, and across each channel.  This tool should measure individual SKU, category and sub category, and click cost performance….daily!

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft: Year-To-Date PPC Report Card

Many of you have asked questions about PPC and their effectiveness.  Once again a friend/expert has done an excellent, straightforward analysis that I share with the eTaildTail community that will help all online merchants better manage and understand PPC advertising, spending, and expectations of performance theirin.  This is a must read! -- Ed

By Alan Rimm-Kaufmann

For complete analysis and story please see: http://searchengineland.com/070731-081817.php

"As 2007 is now half over, it seems a good time to compare the performance of the Big Three search engines year-to-date.

The punch line: Google reigns dominant, providing the lion's share of clicks, and Google clicks convert well. Microsoft offers strongly converting clicks at a lower-than-expected cost—good efficiency, but sadly almost no volume. Yahoo commands 22% of ad spend, but lags in click quality.

The Sample

My agency provides paid search management for about 100 sites, some from the Internet Retailer 100, most from the IR500. About 85% of our clients are B2C; about 15% are B2B. Our client base is largely direct response advertisers—catalogers and pure-plays who buy clicks to sell product, in contrast to advertisers who buy clicks for branding or traffic.

Nearly all of our clients instruct us to run their paid search campaigns to achieve their economic goals. That is, none of our clients establish a priori budget levels by engine. Our portfolio bidding platform optimizes ad budgets, buying the most effective clicks first. Thus, an increase in ad spend on one engine, relative to the others, reflects an increase in click quality relative to the others.

We've aggregated our results across all our clients for these observations.

The Methodology

Our agency has grown steadily during 2007. Because of this growth, graphing absolute spend and clicks says more about our performance than about the performance of the engines.

To remove the effects of our own growth and of seasonality, we've normalized the data by dividing each engine's data by the monthly total of the three engines, thus expressing each engine as a percentage of the monthly whole.

To simplify this analysis, we've excluded data from Ask, paid inclusion, and the shopping comparison engines.

In all the graphs which follow, Google is represented inblue, Yahoo inred, and Microsoft ingreen.

Ad Spend

As we've previously reported, Google comprises about 73% of our total agency pay-per-click ad spend that goes to the Big Three engines. Yahoo comprises 21%, and MSN at 6% takes up the rest...."

<<<<CLICK HERE FOR ALL CHARTS, MORE COMMENTARY AND COMPLETE INFORMATION -- it is an excellent analysis and must for everyone>>>

For complete analysis and story please see: http://searchengineland.com/070731-081817.php

Inexpensive Site Search Tool for Small to Mid-Sized Online Merchants! A Great Product? Looks Like It is A Winner!

"New Google fee-based service, Custom Search Business Edition, lets users build search pages for their own Web sites!" -- PC Commerce

I am excited for small to mid-sized online merchants by this announcement of the Google Custom Search™ Business Edition.  There are wonderful companies that do sophisticated on site search, such as www.SLISystems.com, but now many, many small businesses can experiment at a price they can afford.

This tool can be used by any online website, but we will limit comments for the www.eTaildTail.com community to how it helps small to mid-sizd online merchants who want more sales and branding.

For the possible naysayer out there: Yes, it is Google that is launching this product. Yes, they are a billion dollar company that seems to be controlling most aspects of our online life. Yes, they are leveraging their existing technology. Yes, they are introducing news ways to get their adwords campaigns used more to make even more money, but so what…this new product is useful and might really help online merchants retain more customers and sell more product. 

The best part of about this new product is that the onsite search product is very affordable to try. And if it does not work for you then stop using it. How easy is that? 

Here is an overview for you and how you can implement this onsite tool right away.

What Is This Onsite Search Service All About?

Custom Search Business Edition is a feed-based service that visitors to your online storefront can use to search within that web site, on a customized search page, for relevant products.

Google has a version of this product, that was introduced last October and is FREE, but ad-supported. A key difference with the paid edition is that businesses can customize the search page with their own logo and color scheme. They can also modify results by manipulating an XML (Extensible Markup Language) feed of the raw search results, to guide visitors toward products the company wants to sell.

Custom Search Business Edition uses the same index Google uses to deliver its other search results, and Google's own servers are used for searches. To set up the service, customers follow a set-up wizard and copy a small amount of code to their Web site. They get access to a reporting graph with daily and monthly views of how many times people used the search engine and what search terms they used.

Google markets the product this way: “In three simple steps, businesses can sign up online for the hosted service, and in less than 10 minutes customers and visitors are able to search their site using the power of Google's search technology, for more relevant results.”

What Will It Cost Me?

Small to Mid-Sized Online Merchants: The service is priced at $100 per year for Web sites with up to 500 pages, and $500 for up to 50,000 pages.

Larger Online Merchants: Google also sells the Google Search Appliance, starting at $30,000 for 500,000 documents, which indexes material in file servers, content management systems, databases and other sources. It also offers the Mini Search Appliance starting at $1,995 for 50,000 documents.

How Do I Start?

To set up the Custom Search Business Edition, businesses simply:
1. Identify the site(s) to search, and select either all or selective searching of content
2. Add the search box and customize the appearance by adding logo and matching the site's look and feel
3. Further customize search results with refinements that reflect site content (such as sectional groupings)

What Are The Benefits of On Site Search?

With the Custom Search Business Edition, small businesses get:

• Site search hosted by Google, eliminating the need to install and maintain their own technology
• Power and reliability of Google's infrastructure
• Relevant results and sub-second query response times characteristic of Google.com
• Ability to easily set up, purchase, and manage results online
• Full customization of search results available through an XML API
• Reporting features that give insight into visitor behaviors
• Options for email and phone support available through the Google Enterprise group
• Choice about whether to include ads or not

What If I Need More Help Setting Up and Using This New Service?

For more information about Custom Search Business Edition and other enterprise search products, visit http://google.com/enterprise/csbe Google is pretty good at supporting their products!

Helpful Hints for the Day:

1. This quotation below sums it up pretty nicely and no I don’t own any Google stock!

"Millions of businesses have a web presence but offer users no ability to search their site," said Dave Girouard, vice president and general manager, Google Enterprise. "While many of these businesses invest in search advertising and search engine optimization to help customers find their business, customers are left on their own to navigate content once they land on a site. As Google continues to make search technology more accessible to businesses of all sizes -- first with our appliances and now with hosted search services -- we are reducing the hurdles of cost, complexity and time so that small businesses can help customers find what they need every step of the way."

2. Remember that site search can help retain customers and lead to more sales.

3. If you don’t like the product, the risk/cost to you is $100-$500 for 1 year to experiment with an online site search tool that might really help make your site more user friendly and lead to more sales and better customer interaction. 

4. This is a no brainer, if you have some time to spare to implement it.  My suggestion: "Make the time."

Google Analytics for your Website: Upgrade/More Power/Simplified = Try it...It's Free!

I love Google. 

Yes the free market is scared that somehow Google is going to take over the world of online “stuff” but I say garbage.  That is like saying that Starbucks is taking over the world of coffee drinkers…well…er…ummm…bad analogy…heck if they do "it" better than anyone else, and the price is right, then why is this a bad thing? And furthermore, the world of online “stuff” is bigger than Google will ever be…it is a new frontier which seemingly has no bounds, so relax folks and just ride the Google wave. If they start turning out terrible products then you can tell me “I told you so”, oh yeah, and switch to a better product.

I have to hand it to Google, they have some very bright people working for them and have the luxury to create loss leading businesses to service us all, so why not take advantage of what they are doing?  My only precaution is that if you get hooked on Google Analytics (yes, much like we do with Starbucks) and they start charging you be aware of what you have in your budgets to keep up their service.  But for now it is FREE.

Some of you may be asking: “Why should I use analytics at all?” 

Well, it is like the gauges on your car which tell you the performance of your vehicle.  A proper analytics tool will give you pertinent and important information to how your site is performing on many levels -- data is concentrated into combinations of reports, which help users to make informed decisions, and put the data in perspective.  You should always demand that any product you use online has a robust analytics feature, or how else do you know it is working for you?

As the folks as Google state: "[Google Analytics] is not just one lonely number sitting on the page, telling you if your traffic went up or down. We present it with other data, so you can see if the data show that things are good or bad. Maybe your visits are down, but your conversions have tripled. Once you have the reports, you still need to understand what the data is telling you,” states Brett Crosby, Senior Manager.

The part that I like about the new Google Analytics tool is that advanced users can do sophisticated analysis and less technically savvy folks -- yes me included -- can benefit from the myriad of reports. When I went to it today, I saw that I could set up a customized dashboard and e-mail myself the relevant reports that I want to see and then send the same or other reports to other folks.  The simplicity of the reporting is very valuable to analyzing how your site and storefront are performing and then quickly communicating that to your “team.”  I like that a lot.

Now I am not naïve, I do understand that by getting all of us to use Google Analytics provides Big Papa, or is that Mama, Google new platforms to sell us their other products, especially Adwords and Adsense.  But hey, those are good products as well.  So if you want to try it out check out Google Analytics and if you are already a user you may want to note what I read on the net:

“New users who sign up as of today will get immediate access to the new version. Existing users will be transitioned over the next few weeks, beginning today. Those users will be able to access both versions of the application for at least 30 days, and all historical data will be preserved in the new version.”

HELPFUL TIPS FOR THE DAY:

1. You must have a good analytic tool to monitor your storefront/website performance.

2. Google Analytics has maybe come out with the best product in the marketplace, that is easy to use, comprehensive, and is FREE!

3. Google is not the big bad bully on the block and are giving us very valuable tools = don't miss out and it maybe even be worth using it even if you use another company -- to cross check if they are telling you the truth! ;-) 

4. Oh yeah, did I say it was FREE?  If you don't like it then you can always cancel.