Comparison Shopping Engines: The Neglected Marketing Channel

Today’s guest blog post comes to us from Mary Weinstein, Account Manager at CPC Strategy

When discussing comparison shopping engines (CSEs), generally merchants find themselves in one of three boats:

1. I don’t know about CSEs, or I have limited knowledge of them, and I am not currently using them as a marketing channel.
2. I have limited knowledge of CSEs, have products live on them, and manage my accounts infrequently or not at all.
3. I have proficient knowledge about the CSEs and I optimize my CSE accounts frequently.

If you’re in boats 1 or 2, this post is for you.

What Are CSEs?

CSEs allow users to find the lowest priced item from multiple sellers. CSEs list products from multiple sellers on search engine result pages (SERPs) like the one below from Google Product Search:

Why You Should List On Comparison Shopping Engines

• Increase traffic, sales, and introduce your products to a new consumer group.
• Promote your products for free on Google Product Search, the largest CSE online.
• CSEs give the ability to micro-manage your inventory at the product level, giving you a high level of control over your ROI.
• Most online retailers manage CSEs incorrectly, or often do not manage them at all (Are you in boat number two?).  This gives you the opportunity to carve out your niche in the CSE market.

How Do I List On The CSEs?

A Cautionary Warning

Before you sign up, make sure you understand the resources required to manage this marketing program effectively:

• You need the technical expertise to build a feed based on each CSEs technical specification.
• You’ll want to have quality product data, which increases the ability for the CSEs to direct the right customers to the right products.
• Depending on your product count and category, you’ll need to invest time to suppress products which get lots of clicks and no sales, and increase bids on products that convert at a high rate. This needs to be done at least once a week.

I talk more about management optimization techniques later in the post. If you are familiar with CSEs, data feeds and how to send them, feel free to skip to the section on optimization below.

General Account Setup

The first step to selling on a CSE is setting up a general account. Most CSEs have a fairly simple step-by-step process which requires choosing a payment plan and listing information about the seller, such as shipping rates, tax, and return policies.

Here are some links for setting up accounts on the top 10 CSEs:

• Google Product Search (free)
• Nextag
• Pricegrabber
• Shopping
• Shopzilla
• Become
• Pronto
• Bing (free)

Sending A Feed

The last step in setting up an account on a CSE is sending a feed. To list products on CSEs a seller must send a product feed to that CSE, which will then list those products on their site.
Before sending a product feed, make sure you are abiding by that CSE’s technical specifications, and double check that your data is complete. Data quality plays a large role in whether you will be successful or not on a CSE.

Check out our resource page here for the most up to date product feed formats and product feed examples.

Optimize Your Comparison Shopping Campaigns

CSEs give you the ability to optimize account performance on multiple levels, including the category, sub-category, product, brand, and price bucket. This flexibility gives you a high level of control over campaigns if you manage them actively.

You can increase traffic to products that convert by up bidding products or categories 1-10 cents if they have a low COS (COS=cost/revenue) and high ROI. In the example below, you could up bid Product A if the COS met your goals.

You can also eliminate unnecessary spend by suppressing products, brands and categories which do not have a desirable COS. Products B and C in the above example would be good candidates for product suppression as they have a high number of clicks but no sales.

To suppress a product, simply remove it from your feed. Here’s a trick: Pricegrabber (screenshot shown above) allows you to bid below the minimum bid for each product’s category. So instead of removing products which don’t perform well on PG, you can penny bid them. This will greatly decrease their exposure, but allow them to still be live, and cost you a fraction of what they did before.

A similar bidding technique can be done with Shopzilla. You can zero bid prods or categories in the login, giving them the potential to stay in Shopzilla search results to fill gaps in their content catalog.

Don’t Miss Out!

The number of CSEs and their corresponding management tools such as bidding strategy, product suppression and special promotions can amount to quite a lot of time and energy on the part of the seller. Don’t be overwhelmed!

I will be answering any questions in the comments, or if you would like to discuss CSEs in more detail, please Contact CPC Strategy.