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.

SKU Level Bidding

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

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

Armies of Bots Raise Click Fraud Rates

Once again, a much better person than me provides valuable information on click-fraud and how to combat it.  I love to turn to the experts!  I hope the commentary helps you -- Ed

Traffic from botnets doubled from Q1 to Q2 of this year, according to a new data from Click Forensics’ Click Fraud Network. At the same time click fraud has risen. Coincidence?

by Helen Leggatt

Please click the link below for information on Helen Leggatt, the expert, and to contact her.

http://www.bizreport.com/authors/helen_leggatt.html

"Botnets, or ‘zombie armies’, refers to a group of computers that, although their owners are unaware of it, have been set up to forward data transmissions, including spam and viruses, to other computers on the Internet. In the U.S. alone, the FBI has identified around 1 million such computers.

Traffic from botnets increased slightly from 14.1 percent in Q2 2006, to 14.8 percent in Q1 2007. However, between Q1 and Q2 of 2007 it jumped to 15.8 percent.

In addition, Click Forensics found that click fraud on content publishing networks has also risen from 21.9 percent in Q1 2007, to 25.6 percent in Q2. They conclude that botnets are driving up click fraud.

Click fraud costs advertisers money. Advertisers have long complained that they are being unfairly refunded for fraudulent clicks. Both Google and Yahoo keep relatively schtum about their click fraud data but both insist their records shows click fraud rates to be well below Click Forensics’ findings. Instead of the 25 percent that Click Forensics' calculates, the search engines report rates of around 10 percent (Google) and between 12 and 15 percent (Yahoo).

Recent Google upgrades have made it easier for advertisers to manage their sites and better avoid click fraud hotspots such as ‘made for advertising’ websites."