Cpcstrategy.com Wp Content Uploads Shopping Data Feed

Transcription

The Shopping
Feed Management
Guide
for Online Merchants
2
The Shopping Feed
Management Guide
for Online Merchants
You’re an online retailer with the goal of maximizing revenues and
minimizing expenses. One way to do this is through your comparison
shopping campaigns. This series will teach you how to launch your
campaigns as well as how to optimize them through effective and
strategic management.
This is the first chapter in a series of 5 that will introduce new retailers
to the world of comparison shopping and clarify minute details for more
experienced retailers. Let’s start with the basics.
CHapter 1: What are comparison
shopping engines?
Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) are sites where online retailers can
display their products side by side next to other merchants’ products. When shopping, consumers can browse a CSEs database of products,
each of which link back to an individual retailer’s website for the transaction to take place. Here are some merchant listings on PriceGrabber:
Figure 1. Clicking through on any of the featured products will take you to a retailer’s
own online store.
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Are comparison shopping engines worth my time?
The short answer is yes, if you’re an established retailer. Not every
retailer works on CSEs, but from our personal experience working with
over 200 online retailers in nearly every product category and product
count, we can say that they are indeed profitable ventures. Note the
qualifier “established” because you have to be the right fit for CSEs.
If you have a product mix of more than 500 and do more than
$1 million in yearly revenue, CSEs are definitely worth your time to at
least consider as a supplemental source of revenue. CSE campaigns
make up anywhere from 5-50% of our clients’ total online revenue.
Indeed, they can make a sizeable impact to your business.
Who is not a good fit for comparison shopping engines?
Retailers who are not technically fluent or saavy will have trouble with
major, integral aspects of CSE campaigns: data feeds and tracking pixels.
Additionally, retailers with less than 100 products will have a hard time
gaining traction on CSEs. You’ll simply have a smaller chance at receiving
and converting traffic. However, this isn’t to say that there aren’t and
haven’t been exceptions to the rule before. If you’re having trouble
assessing your compatibility with CSE campaigns, ask yourself
these questions:
• How technical are you? How easy is it for you to generate new data
feeds and export them? (If you don’t have a clue about data feeds, be
sure to read Chapter 2)
• How many products do you have?
• What’s your pricing like? Shoppers on CSEs are becoming experts
at comparing products and finding the best deal. If you sell products
that are priced to high or products that no one’s searching for, you’re in
deep, dark waters.
• What’s your expertise on the intricacies of each engine or of how to
leverage their bidding platforms to get you the highest ROI? If you’re
in the dark on this one, don’t jump overboard yet. This is what this
book is about.
Sir Allow me To Make
a suggestion...
If shopping feeds sounds like
gibberish to you, check out
Chapter 2
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When is an e-commerce retailer ready to begin or expand
their CSE campaigns?
Successful comparison shopping campaigns are essential to an
e-commerce retailer’s growth in website traffic, conversions, and overall
revenues. This all sounds good and great if you’re a budding retailer
trying to bolster your company’s internet presence, but comparison
shopping engines aren’t for everyone. Here are a couple things to
consider if you’re thinking about starting or expanding your comparison
shopping campaigns:
Budget: The majority of CSEs are paid. In the world of comparison shopping,
there are CPC and CPA campaigns. The former, cost per click, requires
that a retailer pay each time a consumer clicks on their featured product. The issue with CPC campaigns is that it requires constant management in
order to promote cost-effective conversions.
On the other hand, cost per acquisition is a more relaxed campaign style. Here, a retailer is charged a percentage of each sale for being featured
on a CSE and so it requires no management, besides fulfilling the orders. However, the reality is that the majority of major CSEs are CPC.
How much you spend depends on how many products you have and how
many CSE campaigns you’re managing. Ideally, you’d like to be on 4 or 5
of the major CSEs, and it is recommended that you have a budget of at
least $2000-3000 per month, which will go towards paying for clicks alone.
Time: Other than money, you will also be spending a good amount of time managing your CSE campaigns because, quite frankly, CPC management can
be tedious. In order to effectively manage your CPC campaigns on CSEs,
you will need to visit each campaign at least once a week. Obviously, the
more products you have the more managing you will have to do.
Your time managing CPC campaigns will be spent optimizing your product bids, meaning the removal or lowering of under-performing products,
and potentially raising high-selling products. The bidding process will
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be explained in Chapter 2 of the series. Management will also consist of
updating you inventory and data feed information whenever the product
data on your site changes.
Product Volume: Generally speaking, you want to have a lot of products if you›re
considering starting or expanding your CSE campaigns. Product volume
can be a good measure of how far along your e-commerce business is,
and so it can indicate if you have the budget and manpower to handle
CSE campaigns. However, you should have at least around 500 products,
but this depends on the category your products lie in.
Mathematically speaking, the more products you have, the better chance
you have at experiencing more conversions and overall better campaign
success. However, you should be cautious not to bid on too many products for high AOV categories like furniture, where overspending is a
common mistake.
If you have generally higher Average Order Volume (AOV) products that
are also in a rather popular category like electronics (HD TVs, Gaming
Consoles, etc.), you don’t have to worry so much about having a ton
of products because the search volume for your type of products will
already be high. Rule of thumb, you want to have at the absolute minimum 500-1000 products when starting your campaigns regardless of
what category you’re in.
a suggestion...
If you’re a retailer that is starting
his/her CSE campaigns with an
absolutely needed ROI ratio, you
may have to cut a lot of fat from
the products you list on CSEs
(a.k.a. getting rid of the
poorly-converting products). Unfortunately, many times this
will limit your sales and revenue
potential. If you’re one of these
retailers, determine if you have
the manpower and expertise to
reach your desired ROI before starting your
CSE campaigns.
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Additionally, before launching on CSEs or at least immediately after doing
so, optimize your remarketing strategy so you can keep customers coming back for your business. For a few tips, check out some of these
remarketing strategies.
Sometimes if you’re not sure whether you have the budget, the right
products, or the time, it’s best to get an expert opinion on whether or not
comparison shopping engines will be successful for you. We’ve helped
hundreds of retailers from all product categories make informed decisions
on whether to use or to stay away from comparison shopping engines.
Contact us directly at [email protected] or call us at
619-501-6138 for a no-strings-attached free consultation.
Google Adwords vs. CSEs
Let’s talk about the difference between CSEs and this Google Adwords
I’m sure you’ve heard much about. Google Adwords is the largest advertising service in the world and it will undoubtedly expand your target
audience with a well-managed campaign.
Both CSEs and Adwords are tools that any retailer can use to attempt to
reach a larger audience and reel in new customers. I’m not going to lie,
Adwords can get pretty complicated, but there are certain aspects of it
that are similar to running a CSE campaign.
To start, you’re going to be doing some bidding. In CSEs you bid on products and in Adwords you’ll bid on common search terms called keywords.
Generally speaking, your CPCs for Adwords keywords will be much higher
than your CSE product CPCs (~$1-2). One of the biggest aspects of an Adwords campaign will be ad copy testing, or in other words, seeing which
keywords are converting well for you and optimizing search terms and
phrases based on this info.
a suggestion...
Comparison shopping engines
are great for your online retail
business in terms of generating
more traffic to your website and
boosting revenues, but there
is buried gold in the increased
online presence you’ll receive
and the consequential remarketing potential these new traffic
sources will add to your business. Your site must be ready
for the increased traffic by being
optimized for producing conversions. If you’re generating good
traffic but not producing conversions, it’s like trying to catch
fish with a net that has holes in
it. You must make sure your net
is tight and ready for the high
traffic volume beforehand.
Second, and contrary to CSE campaigns, you won’t have to submit a data
feed. Instead, you’ll simply be managing the separate ads you’ll want to
be live, and these are your campaigns. When you log into your merchant
page on Adwords, you’ll be able to create Adgroups. One logical way of
setting up your Adgroups is by category, brand, or just products.
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Each Adgroup will have its own match type. A match type of “” will mean
that a search query needs to contain whatever word or phrase you want
to have in the double quotations. Another match type is [], meaning the
whole search query needs to be just that phrase you specify in the brackets. You can also just bid on one specific keyword.
Adwords will require some reading up on your behalf but the benefits
are great. You’ll be able to target a larger, more qualified audience (if
your keywords are specific) and Adgroups provides a more direct way
of trying to outreach to customers than CSEs. One of the best ways to
learn about Adwords is from Google itself, and here’s a nice introductory
video. If you’re thinking about signing up for Adwords, check out
this overview.
With data feeds and bidding in your CSE toolbelt, you’re ready to sharpen
the saw: turning your site into the ultimate conversion machine.
What are the major CSEs?
Some of the most well-known and lucrative CSEs are Amazon Product
Ads, PriceGrabber, Shopzilla, Shopping.com, Nextag, and Google Shopping. When the time comes to choose which CSE you want your business
to be featured on, you should consider each CSEs unique variations in
management that you’ll ultimately experience. All of the following CSEs
require CPC management (except Google can be CPA).
If I could, I would tell you that X CSE is good for Y product category, but
sadly this is rarely an absolute thing. The key to your different campaigns
will be finding the right product category and CSE combination, and this
is unique to every separate retailer.
In case you’re curious how these different CSEs stack up against each
other, check out our latest Top 10 Quarterly Rankings.
Google Shopping: Google has recently been converted into a CPC model, but also features
a no minimum bidding model for your under-performing products. In
terms of traffic, conversions, and overall boosts to revenues with the
right management, Google is top of the class as a CSE for all of
Shopping
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these categories. If you have very limited staff and budget to put
towards CSEs, then at the absolute minimum Google Shopping should
be the engine you launch on. In many cases, it is also a retailer’s top CSE
earner during the crucial Holiday Season.
Low margin products don’t do as well as other products on Google because it receives a HUGE traffic volume, but this is true for most other
CSEs in general, so as a rule of thumb: Low margin products (ex. phone
accessories, small office products, lighting) are going to be higher risk to
your profit potential in a CPC campaign. BUT, I don’t mean to say that
they can’t be successful and profitable with the right management, especially if you factor in the re-marketing potential you get from each new
sale.
Amazon Product Ads: Amazon Product Ads is a comparison shopping engine CPC program
separate from Amazon’s marketplace program. It receives A LOT of
traffic because, well, it’s Amazon. The quality of traffic is very high because people rely on Amazon’s good reputation for comprehensiveness
in terms of its product database as well as its good customer service.
The CSE is pretty general in terms of which specific product categories sell well on the engine, so it’s good to have an Amazon Product Ad
campaign regardless of what kind of products you’re selling. However,
it should be noted that Amazon in general also has some very specific
listing restrictions that you can view here.
PriceGrabber: This very popular CSE is great for all categories of products. It features a
no minimum bidding model, which means you can pay as low as 1 cent
for poorly converting products. This makes PriceGrabber one of the
best comparison shopping engines to start out on because of the low
risk associated with setting up a campaign. Additionally, PriceGrabber is
affiliated with and powers Yahoo Shopping, AOL Shopping ads, and also
submits its products to Google Shopping. This means that your listings
on PG will very often receive exposure from those larger co-brands
as well.
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Shopping.com:
Shopping.com is owned by eBay and recently partnered with Bing
Shopping and Google Shopping, so every product listing you have on
Shopping.com will also appear on Bing and Google Shopping. You should
be wary of when your CSE is affiliated with other websites because the
traffic numbers you receive may not reflect the actual exposure you get
from the specific CSE. You can find out how to tease out exactly what
traffic source is sending you traffic through Google Analytics using this
guide. It is not set up by default but implementing the filters described
in that blog post (^) will give you a lot more insight into who’s really driving quality traffic and conversions.
Additionally, unlike a lot of other CSEs, it’s free to include your company
logo on Shopping.com, which usually costs a merchant around an additional 5 cents per click.
Shopping.com is also well-known for its value-based pricing program
(VBP). This program is aimed to ensure that retailers will receive high
quality traffic on Shopping.com and won’t be penalized for bad, or
non-converting, traffic. A similar program is used on Shopzilla. CSEs
often have smaller affiliate partners that send traffic to and through a
large CSE like Shopping.com, and these affiliates can send poor quality
traffic. The VBP program discounts merchants for clicks from lower
quality traffic.
Shopzilla:
Shopzilla has just recently partnered with Google Shopping, meaning
your Shopzilla listings will show up on Google Shopping as well. This is
great, especially if you don’t have a Google Shopping campaign, because
then you receive traffic from both the Shopzilla and Google Shopping
pool. Shopzilla is also affiliated with Bizrate, a reputable shopping and
merchant rating company. If you use Shopzilla’s survey pixel to collect
merchant reviews, your ratings are pulled by Google Shopping and
shown when compared against other merchants.
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Nextag: Nextag is another CSE great for all categories of products. It has actually
been the #1 paid CSE in our comparison shopping engine rankings for more
than two years now, but with Google Shopping’s switch to a paid comparison shopping engine, Nextag was bumped out of that spot
last quarter.
Nextag’s quality of traffic is very good, which is probably thanks to the
fact that it doesn’t have many smaller affiliate partners. All traffic comes
directly from Nextag.com.
To learn about data feeds, the blueprints to your CSE campaigns,
continue on to Chapter 2.
Chapter 2: Start a CSE campaign - Shopping
Feeds and Shopping Feed Optimization
Hopefully in Chapter 1 you learned why your growing e-commerce business needs to launch or expand on comparison shopping engines. In this
chapter, we’re going to dive into how to set up and optimize your
inventory’s data feeds.
So what’s a shopping feed?
A shopping feed, a.k.a data or product feed, is a spreadsheet, text, or .xml
file that you, as the merchant, send to CSEs. Data feeds need to be very
comprehensive about the products you wish to be featured on a CSE. For
each individual product, the information you need to include is as follows:
• Product title, usually including brand name and model
• Product description
• Product category (ex. clothing/apparel, electronics, small appliances)
• Product SKU/part number (if available)
• Whether a product is in-stock or not
• Product weight and dimensions (required depending on your product
category)
• Product URL (the product’s link on your business’s website)
• Product Image URL
• Product price
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Setting up data feeds are really the dirty work when it comes to CSE
campaigns because they can be time-consuming, boring, and
tedious. However, the quality of your data feed is another make or
break point in your CSE campaign because its quality is in direct
correlation with the clicks and conversions your products receive. Thus, they must be diligently updated regularly, ideally on a daily basis,
in order to ensure that each product’s information is the same on both
your website as well as the CSE.
Figure 2. A remarkably exciting data feed.
Exporting product feeds from different ecommerce platforms
When it comes to a product feed, one of the more difficult aspects is
exporting it to the different CSEs. First, product feeds are extremely
sensitive things. Each comparison shopping engine has their own product
feed requirements that you must adhere to exactly or risk your data feed
not being accepted. Even worse, if you send a bad data feed to a CSE
when your products are already live, it can take all of your products off of
that website. For sample data feeds and detailed data feed specifications from each
major CSE, check this out. DO NOT make the mistake of sending the
same data feed to each CSE because you can guarantee that the great
majority will reject it.
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Second, from what we’ve found first hand and from client testimonials,
many shopping cart platforms don’t make it easy for a retailer to export
their data feed, and some don’t even allow for it without the purchase
of an extension. Here’s a quick rundown on the major ecommerce
platforms:
Magento:
Being the ecommerce platform giant that Magento is, the painful reality
many retailers soon come to realize is that it’s pretty difficult to export
your data feed anywhere. You’re going to have to buy an extension for
your Magento shopping cart, and this can range from $50-$250.
CPC Strategy’s Feed Exporter is FREE in the Magento Store. Check out
these detailed instructions on how to export your feed from Magento
(Community version) to Amazon, Google Shopping, and other CSEs using
the CPC Strategy Magneto Feed extension.
Bigcommerce:
Luckily for retailers, Bigcommerce offers step by step instructions on how
to submit a product feed to Google Shopping. For detailed instructions
on how to prepare your data feed for submission, then first check out
their resource on enabling products to be listed on Google Shopping.
Yahoo! Stores:
Surprisingly, there aren’t many good resources out there on how to
efficiently integrate your Yahoo! Stores products with Google Shopping.
At CPC Strategy, we use Aten Software. It’s pretty cheap and easy to
set up.
Volusion:
Compared to a lot of other ecommerce platforms, Volusion is quite
transparent on how you can transfer your product data feed over to
Google Shopping. Try to transfer your product feed from Volusion to
the Google Merchant Center by following these feed export guidelines
provided by Volusion.
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Life is chaotic, your online
business shouldn’t be.
Get more on Google, Amazon, AdWords, and other leading
shopping channels without logging into a platform, dealing
with technical elements of your data feed, or poring over
performance data.
CPC Strategy utilizes progressive data feed technology with the only true full
service management program to get you more revenue, more orders, more
product ad visibility, more profitable online ads, and more time.
Learn More About Shopping
Feed Management
14
Amazon Webstores:
If you’re looking to market your Amazon Webstores products on Google
Shopping, it’s worth your time to check out this webinar on Google
Shopping integration.
Netsuite:
Netsuite has a pretty simple feed export tool built into the platform. You
can refer to this excerpt from the ebook, NetSuite for Dummies, for basic
export instructions.
PrestaShop:
Catalog management and exporting product feeds from PrestaShop is
very easy compared to other ecommerce platforms. However, you’re
going to need to buy the Google Merchant Center Add On.
How does an online retailer optimize their product feed?
A product feed is basically the primary form of communication between
your business, a major CSE like PriceGrabber, and potential customers
so your goal as the merchant is to make this communication as eloquent
and comprehensive as possible. Studies have shown that more complete data on CSEs increases conversions. You’d be shocked to know how
many merchants we’ve talked to that don’t even have quality product
images for their products.
Sir, allow me to make a
suggestion...
As the merchant, it is essential
that you determine if you want
and are able to manage your data
feeds in-house or by third-party
data management specialists
based on the time and resources
you have to invest.
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This is an essential piece of data used by shoppers to complete a purchase.
Step #1: get a great product image.
Here are a few tips on how to enhance your data feed quality:
Content:
Plain and simple, your data feeds need to include a lot of information. The more content the better. This is because online shoppers
consistently purchase products that provide the most detail because it
promotes a higher level of confidence in his/her purchase.
1. Include tax and shipping information for your individual products in
your data feed.
Sir, allow me to make
a suggestion...
Be absolutely sure you optimize
your product feed. Don’t
communicate like a jackass
2. Don’t leave any blank spots in your data feeds. CSEs frown upon incompleteness and this may negatively affect your product rankings. If
you accidentally leave a required (by the specific CSE) column blank, that
product or possibly the entire feed may be rejected.
3. Ensure consistency between your website’s information and the information you provide to the CSE. This requires regular, if not daily, updates
to your data feed, especially in the domain of pricing. If you update
pricing and send a feed, it’s common to not see the updates on the CSE
until 24-48 hours later.
4. Don’t list any out-of-stock items in your data feed. If a product does
go out-of-stock, update your feed immediately.
5. It’s also important to include the MSRP (manufacturer suggested
retail price) in your feed. Shopping.com and Shopzilla will both allow you
to put the MSRP and actual price so that shoppers can see how much
you’re discounting from the norm.
Even if you don’t have an MSRP, you can create one by applying an
equation to your data feed that increases the price of your price column
by 15-30%. Then you’ll be able to get the “strike-through” feature that
these 2 CSEs offer, allowing the perception that your prices are being
marked down. It’s not a tactic that should be used for every single listing,
but your products will indeed stand out a little more
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Additionally, Nextag will allow the same feature if you pay for a marketing
message, which also allows you to list promotions and coupons.
Sir, allow me to make a
suggestion...
Figure 3. Note the strike-through feature for these merchants.
Keywords: Put yourself in the consumer’s shoes in terms of what they would write
if searching for a product like yours. Include all relevant and descriptive
keywords in your feed.
Using the Google Keyword Research Tool will help tremendously. It will
allow you to see the most common searches that customers type in when
looking for your type of products. Online product research in general
should help you in finding which keywords are relevant for your product
searches.
You may see that if a comparison
page already exists for a certain
product, and your product’s SKU
matches up with that existing
page, those products that you
submit will be titled and have
the description and image in
accordance with what is currently in that comparison shopping
engine. This can be frustrating
but don’t freak out or try to
get off that comparison page,
it just happens sometimes. It’s
the most relevant page for that
product (it has a history) and it is
where you want to be.
1. If you are selling a product made by a popular brand, put it in the title.
2. If you are selling electronics or auto parts, it will be helpful to include
the SKU in the product title for the junkies that know exactly what
they want.
3. You can also do some keyword research in your Google Analytics
account. For help with all things Google Analytics-related, I highly
recommend checking out this eBook.
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Categorization:
Make sure your products are categorized correctly. Remember to follow
these CSE-specific data feed specifications. Incorrect categorizations are
the quickest and easiest way to hurt conversions. Steer clear of meaningless categories like “Gifts” or “New Items” because CSEs find this info
to be useless. Instead, be as specific and descriptive as you can. Also, be
sure to adhere to each CSEs own guidelines for categorizations because
they do differ.
Once you’ve created, optimized, and sent out your data feeds to CSEs,
the fate of your e-commerce success in CSEs is not out of your hands just
yet. The bottom line of a well-organized, formatted and complete data
feed is to be on the good graces of each CSE so that you can rank better
when a shopper searches for your product.
However, CSEs take into account much more than your product keywords
and data feeds. Your company’s relevancy, bid amounts, and longevity
on a CSE are all significant factors when it comes to product placement.
To learn about how the bidding process works and how to rank higher
than other merchants on CSEs, continue to Chapter 3.
Chapter 3: The Bidding Process and Ranking
Ranking
Before we jump into the bid process, we need to talk about ranking.
Bidding boils down to how well you want your products to rank. But
there are other factors other than bidding that will affect your product
placement on a results page. Let’s look at the factors (sans bidding).
Account Maturity:
This is built out over time. If you have a good relationship with a CSE,
meaning no stalls in your campaign, over a long period of time (more or
less 1 year), they’ll actually start to like you. This will often factor into a
CSE’s ranking algorithm
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Seller Rating:
Seller rating is not publicly part of the ranking algorithm, but it can
certainly influence it. This can also affect whether a shopper clicks on
your listing or not, especially considering that your merchant rating
will be side by side other merchants’ ratings on major CSEs like
Google Shopping.
Free Shipping:
Free shipping is not known to factor into the ranking algorithm, but most
CSEs will make it easier for shoppers to find products with free shipping
through sorting
Price:
Not really a part of the CSE ranking algorithm, but put yourself in the
customer’s shoes. CSEs give customers the ability to rank products from
lowest to highest price, so the lower your price, the higher up on the list
you’ll be.
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Feed Relevancy:
Keywords are a crucial element of your feed relevancy. Those in your
title are weighted more than those in your description column, so make
sure you match these up closely with your website’s product listings and
include all relevant descriptive words. This, along with bidding, is certainly in every CSEs ranking algorithm.
The Bid Process:
The bid process is how big CSEs like PriceGrabber and Shopping.com
make money, and it’s your money. You, as the retailer, pay to have your
products featured on a CSE through a Cost Per Click system. As the merchant, your goal is to convert clicks (when you get them) into sales.
To put it in basic terms, think of CSEs like the lake where you go fishing.
They’ll provide the fish, all you have to do is throw your lines out and
make sure you reel in the fish that do bite (except that you pay the lake
for every bite…). Some fishermen and fisherwomen are lucky. Some
are skilled, and others are just plain terrible.
We can teach you how to be a skilled fisherman/woman, but we can’t
teach you to be lucky. Lucky or skilled, you’re paying a lot more than an
annual fee to fish on these shopping engines so you’ll want to get the
most of these campaigns.
In the merchant section of CSEs, you get to set how much you want to
bid for each of your products, or sometimes just whole categories (ex. 70
cents for electronics, 25 cents for apparel), and these are often guided
by each CSE’s specific rate card. Once these bids are set, you get charged
any time “John Smith consumer” finds interest in one of your products
and clicks on the link on the CSE that connects back to your own company’s website.
Once he/she reaches this point, the consumer has the opportunity to decide whether or not to go through with the transaction. If the consumer
does buy it at this point, the product converted.
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So how much should you bid for each product?
The main principle to take from this is that you want to bid low on products that don’t convert well (very low or 0% conversion rate) and bid high
on products that do convert well (high conversion rate). The amount you
bid indicates two things to a CSE:
1. Your bid amount tells the CSE how much you are willing to pay every
time someone clicks on the link to your own product page.
2. Your bid amount is a strong measure (of several) that the CSE uses to
determine how high they want your product to rank on the CSEs page.
The latter is important because this is why you want to bid higher on
products that convert well. It’s saying that you want to boost this
product up the CSE’s product rankings so that it’s one of the first to
appear when a consumer does a general search query because you’re
willing to bet that it’s going sell. Here’s an example scenario:
Let’s say you sell a toaster for which you set a 40 cent bid. We can
develop this potential trend, where a whole bunch of John Smith’s start
clicking on your product, get linked back to your website, and decide
whether or not to buy. This is actually the ideal scenario, but it’s up to
your company’s website to nudge the consumer to go through with the
transaction.
Let’s say you sell a
toaster for which you
set a 40 cent bid. We can
develop this potential
trend, where a whole
bunch of John Smith’s
start clicking on your
product, get linked back
to your website,
and decide whether
or not to buy.
However, this is a double-edged sword in that this could be terrible for
your CSE campaign if your website is just awful at achieving conversions.
In one unfortunate case, we have 1,000 John Smith’s clicking on your
toaster but none of them are buying it, meaning you end up paying $400
for pure clicks and no sales. That’s wasted ad spend. This is what you
can avoid through diligent monitoring of your product-level reports and
respective bids.
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Figure 4. Shopzilla bidding page in the merchant center.
This is why it’s important to constantly pay attention to and manage your
product bids in order to ensure your CSE campaigns are cost-effective for
your business.
Once you’re comfortable with your bids, there are a few strategies on
how to get online consumers to click on your product and, in turn, boost
your website’s traffic. Here’s a few:
The Golden Rule of CSE Bidding:
Bid high on top-sellers, bid low on poor sellers or remove them entirely
from your data feed. However, be careful with high bids because bidding
high on a high conversion product works under the assumption that the
quality of traffic you’re receiving is good and qualified.
Promotions:
Include your promotions right on the CSE rather than only on your
website. This is just another lure for the customer and could be make
or break when it comes to clicks and conversions. For info on how to
include your promotions on CSEs, check this out.
Sir ALLow me to make
a suggestion...
When you bid high on a product,
you’re making an investment,
and so high bids need careful
and constant monitoring. You’re
potentially putting a lot of
money down on the table and
you need to ensure that they’re
producing conversions.
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Not all promotions on CSEs are free of charge. In fact, only Shopping.
com allows you to list promotions for free. So whenever you’re paying a
CSE extra (on top of the CPCs you’ll be charged) for a marketing promotion, you NEED to be sure that it’s actually producing results.
After listing a paid (usually 5-10 cents) promotion, check on the product
reports 20-30 days afterward to see if there were any increases in conversions. If not, you should probably just stop paying for that promotion.
Figure 5. Listing coupons and rebates on PriceGrabber.
General Bidding Tips & Strategy
Don’t get carried away with bidding too high on products you think will
convert well. Sometimes bidding too high above the minimum on a
product is a bad thing when your product isn’t necessarily relevant for
that category. For example, if you’re bidding 30 cents on a product and
see no traffic, you may try to boost the bid to $1. If you still don’t see an
increase in traffic despite your increased bid, odds are that your product
isn’t very relevant for that category and you should lower the bid.
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Sold SKU Method:
Let’s say you’re on Nextag, Shopzilla, Google Shopping, and Pricegrabber.
All of your campaigns are working great except for Nextag. It comes to the
point where you think it would be best to just drop your Nextag campaign
all together. Don’t make that mistake. The Sold SKU method maintains
that you should identify the products that have sold on a CSE, in this case
Nextag, in the last 60 days or 90 days.
You could also implement a top products strategy and pull the top 100,
500, or 1000 products via your Google Analytics reports. After doing so,
just send only those products in a limited data feed to Nextag.
The 30/30 Rule:
Use this when you’re on the fence about cutting a product from your
feed entirely. This rule entails that you should cut a product out of your
feed if it doesn’t produce a conversion/sale after 30 days or 30 clicks.
Once you reach any of these benchmarks, either 30 days or 30 clicks, you
need to assess whether it would be profitable if the product did convert
in the next click or day. If not, get that product out of there.
The Reality is that
95% of your
revenue will come
from 10% or less of
your feed on any
given CSE.
If it does take the extra day or click to convert and you profit, then just
be sure to monitor that product closely in the next 30 days/clicks.
Identifying those products is essential. The bottom line is that your
campaigns and the respective feeds you send don’t have to be an
all-or-nothing thing, and it is often to your benefit to send a feed of
only the cream of the crop of your products to a struggling CSE.
So what do you do with the struggling 90% of your products?
Well, at this point you don’t know if they’re not converting because their
bids aren’t high enough (not enough push) or if they just plain old aren’t
going to sell in any lifetime. If you can garner click data on a product,
such as whether it has received 30-100 clicks with no sales, you can be
pretty confident to assume that for whatever reason, that specific product won’t and, thus, you can set a lower bid (down-bid).
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For products that you don’t have any click data on, you can increase their
bids to find out if consumers want to buy them. Simply try to push them
by bidding up 5-10 cents and checking the results after a week or so from
your product-level reports. If you don’t see any traction, you can bid them
up another 5-10 cents until you begin to see traffic. The point is that you
want to crawl, rather than leap, to find your product’s sweet spot.
By bidding up or down 5-10 cents at a time, you’re essentially trying to
find your product’s sweet spot in the most effective way possible. The
sweet spot is the point at which your product’s bid allows you to pay the
lowest amount per click for the highest amount of profitable conversions.
It’s never a set-and-forget style campaign.
However, the perfect bid amount will change over time as your competitors change bids, new merchants join CSEs, your prices or budget change.
This is one of the reasons why CSEs are difficult for small businesses to
manage. An eye always needs to be kept on bids to make sure you’re
getting the highest ROI possible for each product.
Major CSEs’ Bidding Processes
Bond hits the
sweet spot
every time.
Unfortunately,
you’ll have to try a
little harder.
Each individual CSE differs slightly from the other CSEs, but in general
they follow the same idea: bid low or remove from your data feed the
products that aren’t converting into sales and bid higher on those that
are. Here are the basic bid processes and differences for each major CSE:
Check out all the major CSEs’ rate cards here.
Google Shopping:
Google has recently been converted into a CPC model, but also features
a no minimum bidding process for under-performing products. Google
also offers a Cost per Acquisition (CPA) model, but you should be hesitant to subscribe to this. Your campaign will require less management,
but Google has an algorithm that, based off of the percentage of each
sale you set to give to Google, creates a projection for what your CPC bid
would be.
Shopping
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Thus, if you offer a lower percentage in the CPA model, your rankings will
be as low as an equivalently low CPC bid. This can really hurt your
sales volume.
The cool thing about Google Shopping’s rate card is that there is none
really. Google Shopping allows for open market bidding, meaning there’s
no minimum bids that you have to adhere to. You can choose to bid as
low as 1 penny for any product in any category.
For premium Google Shopping support, check out our ultra comprehensive
guide on Product Listing Ad Management.
Amazon Product Ads:
Amazon Product Ads (APA) follows a tiered CPC bidding model. This
means that you can’t just apply one safe bid for an entire category like
electronics, but rather your CPC bid has to be higher the more expensive
your products get. Here’s an example. If you sell a camera for $50 and
another for $150, the minimum bid you can make on the $150 camera
will be higher than the minimum bid you can make for the $50 camera.
Another key aspect of APA bidding is that it only allows for category-level
bidding. This means that you can’t adjust specific product-level bids, so
all of the products within a category will be affected by a given set category-level bid. You should seek the benefits a 3rd party analytics service
(like Google Analytics) can provide with product-level conversion reports.
Using Google Analytics or another 3rd party Analytics platform is essential
to a profitable APA campaign.
View the Amazon Product Ads Rate Card here.
PriceGrabber:
PriceGrabber follows a CPC model that features a no minimum bidding
process, meaning if you have a poorly converting product (a.k.a. it’s getting a lot of clicks but no sales) then you can set the product bid to 1 cent.
So now you can pay virtually nothing for a click on a product that doesn’t
sell that often. A 1 cent bid, however, will hurt your product’s rankings,
but it’s better than removing that product from your feed completely.
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One of the cool things about PG is that because it’s so customizable,
there’s really no excuse for you to not be profitable with the right bidding
strategy. This can be done by identifying your product’s sweet spot. By
slowly and gradually testing bids below the minimum (say increments of
5-10 cents), you will be identify ranges where you can maintain the same
volume of traffic at a lower bid. Eventually you’ll find a point where your
traffic plummets, letting you know when you’re bidding a little too below
the minimum. Do this instead of going straight from the average minimum bid to a 1 cent (penny)-bid.
Shopzilla:
Shopzilla follows a CPC model that does feature a minimum bid process.
However, if an under-performing product is hurting your budget, you can
zero-bid the product so you don’t have to remove them from your feed.
Zero-bidding essentially adds your product to a backfill that Shopzilla
keeps in its back pocket.
So, your product will be removed from a general query search unless
there are too few overall products in that category, at which point
Shopzilla will add it back to the rankings, which would be a great scenario for you because your product is featured and you don’t have to pay
for clicks. Thus there is no reason to ever have to completely remove
a product from a feed. It is recommended, however, that you check
zero-bid products after about 30 days to see if any have converted, and
if this is true, you should go ahead and raise the bid to the minimum or
slightly above that.
Another pro to Shopzilla is that it features probably the easiest bidding
tool to use of all CSEs. You can zero-bid a product at the standard merchant login or even in the data feed. There’s also a product search bar in
the merchant bidding tool, thus allowing for easier, more efficient product-level bidding. The Shopzilla filter option in the merchant center also
facilitates placing specific bids.
Shopping.com:
Shopping.com follows a CPC model that allows for only category-level
bids. This means that you can’t alter each individual product’s bids but
rather only the categories they fall under (ex. electronics, apparel, etc.).
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This gives you less control over how cost-effective this CSE campaign can
be. Fortunately, Shopping does allow you to pull your product reports,
thus allowing you to determine which specifics products are under
performing so that you can down-bid or remove them from your
data feed.
Shopping.com, like Amazon Product Ads, is price-tiered. If you log in to
the merchant page, hit the “campaign” tab, then go to “reports,” you’ll
be able to click on one of your product categories. Shopping.com will
then break down the price buckets (typically 3) for those products within the category and you can view such metrics as # of orders and COS.
Based on this information, you can identify if only one or 2 of 3 price
points are working and thus zero-bid the poorly converting buckets.
Conversely, you can raise the bid of a price bucket with a nice, low COS.
You’ll have to review the reports in the “reports” tab then transfer over
to the “bidding” tab when you’re ready to update your bids. Here’s an
example of such a report:
Figure 6. Price Bucket Reports on Shopping.com
Nextag:
Nextag follows a CPC model that is one of the few that allows for brand-level
bids. In this case, you can set a different bid for each brand of camera, for example, so that you can bid lower on the brands that usually don’t sell so well.
Nextag also allows for product and category-level bidding.
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Nextag has also recently rolled out some new reporting tools, including
a brand report. Be wary, however, because we’ve seen varied reports
on the effectiveness of brand-level bidding. Try to stick to product and
category-level bids.
Continue on to Chapter 4 to learn how you can prime your site for the
traffic that CSE campaigns will bring.
Chapter 4: How to Optimize Your CSE Campaign
So now you may have a good handle on data feeds, bidding, and the
general differences between each CSE, but now you need to seal the deal
and start converting all this activity into actual sales. That’s where your
website comes in. As the e-commerce retailer, your goal is to make your
CSE campaigns as lucrative and efficient as possible, and there are several methods to facilitate this.
In this chapter, we’re going to discuss how you can make your campaigns
highly effective primarily through website optimization. Your site needs
to be sharpened and fine-tuned for the increased traffic that effective
CSE campaigns will bring in. The reality is that your site should be optimized regardless of whether you’re running CSE campaigns or not.
This truth is especially important to keep in mind when your CSE campaign numbers aren’t ideal but your overall business numbers are solid.
In this case, the last thing you want to do is pause the activity of your CSE
campaigns. This is because CSEs are your little pathways to an exponentially larger ecosystem on the web, so keep your faith! Remember, it will
take about 5-7 “touches” or interactions with your website before a given
online shopper decides to give you their business.
Website Optimization
There are many approaches to site optimization but the whole concept
boils down to one goal: increase conversions. Luckily, there are services
and strategies that you can employ to focus specifically on how to turn
clicks into sales on your website. www.CPCStrategy.com |
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Here are a few you should be aware of:
1. Site speed: There’s nothing more annoying and frustrating to a
consumer than a website that loads slowly. Online consumers are all
about getting results ASAP, so if your site is consistently making it difficult
for a shopper to complete a sale, then you can pretty much mark that visit up to a wasted click and overall fail. The research is there, conversions
suffer as site speed goes down.
Take it from me,
you don’t want to
be slow
In terms of ways you can improve this aspect of your website on your
own, your choices are limited. You’re usually going to have to pay to
see an improvement in your site speed because website development is
generally something you either got right (by hiring a great developer) or
wrong when you first launched your site.
Speed Analysis:
Fortunately, there’s a service called Pingdom that offers a free aspect
of their service that measures your website’s performance, in terms of
functionality and speed. Their full service can also analyze each aspect
of your site to see what’s loading slowly so that you can take action to
improve or remove it.
Speed Improvement Provider:
You should also consider CloudCache, or the higher-end solution NetDNA, which are services that utilize content delivery network (CDN) technology, a.k.a. multiple servers, to ensure your website is functioning as
fast as it possibly can. This way, you don’t have to rely on just one potentially not-so-reliable server.
There are similar services to Pingdom and CloudCache that you can seek
out, but as a rule of thumb, take a speed test to ensure your site performance isn’t hurting your conversion rate.
2. Site Design: Simply put, your website should look awesome. There’s
no worse scenario than an interested shopper visiting your site and being
so turned off by your site that they ditch the sale entirely. Again, this
may be an area outside your domain of expertise, so you may have to
hire a developer and designer to optimize your site appearance.
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In the interest of converting sales, your site design should focus
primarily on:
Product and category pages: This is where online shoppers will be sent to when clicking on your product on a CSE. Your product page should be aesthetically very pleasing and
should present all the relevant details about your product very clearly. Before creating your ideal product page, find out what some of the
leaders are doing in your product category. For example, if you sell
shoes, check out what Zappos is doing for some ideas on how to enhance
your site. Then do an analysis of specifically your customers and think
about the features they would want to see on a product page. This
analysis and planning stage is critical.
Additionally, your product image(s) should be high quality. Figure 7. A Sperry’s Topsider Product Page, complete with a clean design, 360-degree
product imaging, and full feature list.
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Homepage: If a customer gets a good enough impression from your product page,
they may even feel inclined to check out the rest of what your site has to
offer. Your homepage should only add to a shopper’s confidence in
purchasing a product from your website, and so it should obviously
appear professional, legitimate, and seemingly as if you’ve been in the
business for a while (even if you haven’t).
We did a webinar recently with ConversionIQ, a conversion rate
optimization (CRO) company, that runs multiple tests on how trust-seals
increase conversions. You can check out their presentation in the 2nd
half of our webinar here (the 1st half is on Google Shopping).
Buttons:
Where checkout buttons are placed on your product page, what they say,
and how they look are all key factors in closing a sale. You won’t really
know how effective (or ineffective) your buttons are until you run them
against alternative layouts and designs.
Fortunately, there are several services that specialize in exactly this area.
You can check out Optimizely, a self-service site that allows you to run
experiments (A/B testing) to see how different layouts and designs of
your website affect your calls-to-action (a.k.a. your checkout button). As the merchant, you can test to see how different buttons and button
locations affect your conversions. Another cool site is CrazyEgg, where they use some pretty high-tech stuff
to generate heat maps of your site. These maps indicate which areas on
your page are looked at most closely by visitors.
3. Site Search: Your website’s internal search engine bar can also be a
deal breaker for some online shoppers. This ties back to the idea of how
well your website works efficiently for the consumer. After all, if a
shopper is searching for a specific product on your page, you already
know they’re interested in buying so you just have to provide them with
the product page. Consider adding a Google, Nextopia, SLI Systems, or
PicoSearch search bar to your website. www.CPCStrategy.com |
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4. Product Recommendations and Promotions: Nothing helps your CSE
campaigns better than using the traffic you get from CSEs to sell additional products straight from your site. This way, you don’t have to pay for
the clicks and you get to sell a product that probably wasn’t ranked high
on a CSE anyway. You can do this through product recommendations
mixed in with some well-featured promotions. A simple section on a product page or on the checkout page that proclaims “this product x goes well with products y and z” can get an excited shopper to keep filling up that shopping cart. Check out an example
from Victoria’s Secret below.
Figure 8. “Just for you” is just one way you can phrase “buy more stuff.”
Now tie this with a promotion that states “free shipping for purchases
over $75” or “15% off your purchase of $100 or more” and you give your
customer another incentive to buy more. A healthy mix of product recommendations and tiered promotions will not only facilitate conversions
but also increase your average order volume (AOV).
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There are technologies that can help specifically with creating
great, well-featured promotions. You should consider checking out
Certona. Certona specializes in personalizing the online shopper experience on your website through product recommendations and
individualized content.
Google has recently come out with a digital coupon service called Zavers.
It’s just another way for the retailer to create, distribute, and optimize
coupons. Zavers is designed for both manufacturers and retailers and
is aimed at providing real-time coupon redemption data and facilitating
digital coupon usage for shoppers. Better yet, they’ll charge you on Cost
per Redemption model, meaning you won’t have to pay until your coupons are actually seen and used.
5. Remarketing: Remarketing or retargeting is an idea focused on the
goal of customer retention and is a good way of getting more out of your
non-converting clicks. A very simple, self-sufficient remarketing strategy
is giving shoppers, or anyone that visits your site, a cookie. This cookie
will follow them long after they leave your site, and it can appear in the
form of your banner ads on other sites he/she visits. There are services
that can do this for you.
Chango is a marketing agency that specializes in retargeting to keep customers coming back to your site. They will charge you on a CPM model,
or cost per 1000 impressions. This means you’ll be charged every 1000
times a shopper sees your ad not on your website. Chango, however,
works best with businesses that are doing more than $20 million in revenue per year. Buysight is another marketing agency with great retargeting programs,
and they’ll charge you on CPC model, or every time an internet-surfer
clicks on your cookie-generated ad. These retargeting services can really
be worth it for your e-commerce business, especially if you have a lot of
non-converting clicks. Buysight works best with companies doing around
$5 million a year in revenue.
Marketing agencies like Chango and Buysight work more effectively for
bigger retailers, and remarketing in general is most effective for websites
with more than 30,000 unique visits a month.
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Google Dynamic Remarketing is a new program and a great option you
can pursue when trying to optimize your marketing efforts. The great
thing is that you can set this up yourself and it complements Google Shopping well because it works off of the same shopping feed. To get started
with this, be sure to check out our Google Dynamic Remarketing Guide.
The great thing about retargeting campaigns is that they often have
extremely high returns on the investment made. If you have a large
enough traffic pool that goes to your website each month, a retargeting
campaign can boost your profits further.
The downside of a retargeting campaign is that you’re only going to get
sales from a small percentage of the total traffic pool that visited your
site, so the campaign in terms of it’s total value will be relatively small.
But every little bit helps and it’s pretty much a set-and-forget ordeal once
you get it up and running.
Email Marketing:
Another really easy remarketing strategy is email marketing, where you
can use the information a shopper inputs at checkout to keep them coming back. A simple email blast featuring your current promotions or your
hot products can go a long way for a customer who had a successful,
positive experience shopping on your website.
Consider Aweber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp for your email
marketing campaigns.
A good strategy you can pair with email marketing is to infuse a shopping
cart abandonment program. This means a shopper filled up their cart on
your website and input their information but never went through with
the sale. You can target these people in emails, offering a 5-10% discount on whatever stuff they left in the shopping cart.
There are agencies that specialize specifically in shopping cart
abandonment programs if this is a problem area for you. One example
you can consider is SeeWhy, who targets those online shoppers who
abandon their shopping carts with real-time optimized email blasts.
UpSellit is another course you can take, and they help increase shopping
cart recovery through engaging hesitant customers with real-time chat at
the moment when the shopper is about to abandon your cart.
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6. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Specialists: There are
agencies that you can employ that will help you specifically with your
lack of conversions. Conversion IQ is a cool agency where they will
identify your site’s problem areas and not only help your conversions
but also your AOV’s. They feature many case studies that you can take a
look at as proof of their delivered results. Widerfunnel is another helpful
specialist that’ll help you with your conversions issue. If you’re hesitant,
check out this case study they featured.
7. Competitor Analytics: The reality is that price is the bottom line when
a shopper is considering making an order. Because of this, it’d be awesome if you could constantly monitor your competitor’s prices to ensure
that you could be charging the highest, low price you could, if that makes
sense. Check out UpstreamCommerce or ChannelIQ for price analysis
solutions.
8. Phone Orders: Last, and certainly not least, is an ancient tool that
could be the golden key to your customer service efforts. Just look at
retail giant Zappos, whose glorification of the phone is central to their
outstanding customer service. First and foremost, do not outsource your
call center sector of your customer service. Let’s be honest, no normal shopper wants to talk to someone thousands of miles away with a
less-than-casual grasp of the English language about one of your products. Besides, it would be a reflection of your company’s lack of commitment to customer service.
SIr allow me to make
a suggestion...
Your products are an obvious
factor that will be a make-or-break
point for your shoppers. In this
domain, your product category is
something that will immediately
affect who’s looking at your products and in what volume. However, regardless of your category,
there are ways to optimize your
actual products.
Second, empower your call center workers with all the resources and
information they need to handle any possible request a shopper may
make. There should never be a need for a call center worker to have to
refer a shopper to a manager.
Third, be human. Don’t use call scripts and, this may sound intuitive,
don’t hire uptight, introverted workers because the fact of the matter
is that those workers are going to be the sole interaction between the
customer and your entire company.
Don’t make the mistake of underestimating the power of the phone,
because even if you receive only a few phone orders, it presents a remarkable opportunity to intimately interact with a customer. Consequentially,
intimate interactions can be the lifeblood of your customer loyalty efforts.
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Your relationships with your distributors and manufacturers will affect
how well you can fix your prices, in terms of your ability to offer lower
shipping costs as well as actual product prices. Your pricing is going to
be a key factor in producing conversions, but if you can’t compete in this
domain then consider this. You could simply be in the business of charging more for your products
while also providing excellent customer service. Your focus should be on
what products are offered, how much information you can provide about
your products so that customers can feel confident in an informed purchase decision, and what your overall unique selling proposition (USP) is.
A USP can consist of providing first-rate customer service, free giveaways,
extremely low prices, fantastic shipping and shipping rates, or combination of all. Learn more about USPs here.
Continue on to Chapter 5, the final chapter, of this series to learn how to
manage your CSE campaigns effectively over the long-term.
Chapter 5: Long-term Management of Your
CSE Campaigns
Once you have your CSE campaign up and running, you need to focus on
your long-term management strategy. There are several aspects of this
that we are going to discuss, but the truth is that this is an undertaking
that will require the lion’s share of your attention as long as you wish to
effectively sell your products online. Here are a few key points you need
to capitalize on:
Be Consistent!
The last thing you want to happen to your CSE campaigns is for them to
go offline. This can happen two ways. One, you forget to pay the CSEs
(if you pay manually), or two, your budget for clicks runs out before the
end of the month. When this happens, CSEs will see your company as
unreliable and your overall traffic volume and quality will go down the
drain. Your consistency with your campaigns is a major part of your relationship with CSEs, and your account maturity will literally be computed
into the algorithm they use to determine how well your products rank in
consumer queries.
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Customer Reviews
You should really look at and collect your customer reviews. It may not
always seem like it, but customer reviews are certainly a significant factor
that will influence a customer’s, myself included, decision to purchase.
CSEs like PriceGrabber and Shopzilla send their reviews, which are accumulated at the end of the sale, to Google Shopping, which in turn will
affect how your store’s rating is displayed on Google shopping.
Thus, if you receive bad reviews on PriceGrabber and Shopzilla, you’re
going to look like bad merchant on Google Shopping, and because Google Shopping receives A LOT of traffic, you might as well be putting up a
billboard outside your office that says “Don’t Bother.” Check out these
customer reviews on Google Shopping below:
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Consider enlisting the services of eKomi if you’re interested in using ratings
and reviews to help your conversion rates. eKomi gives you the opportunity to send a mass email to everyone that bought your product for a review.
Sounds spammy, but if you send out 1000 emails and get 100 reviews out
of them, you can consider that a success. You could even offer a coupon as
an incentive for them to review their shopping experience.
Tracking Pixels
Tracking pixels are a crucial part of your campaign management and
should be something you implement early on in the process. They are essentially bits of code that you can add to your website in order to receive
customer data. Every time a shopper visits your site or buys a product,
you will receive important information about the visit, information you
can later use to optimize how you manage your CSE accounts and product
listings.
Tracking pixels are absolutely vital to your CSE campaigns’ success
because they unlock a lot more options for you in terms of how you can
optimize them. They will allow you to perform product-level analyses
and the longer you have the pixels installed, the more data you can use to
make more informed bids in the future. For example, if one week there’s a
click spike for a given product, you’ll be far more informed as to why this is
so with tracking pixels. Here›s some of the key metrics they›ll tell you:
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• Number of Orders: This tells you the gross number of sales that a product, category, or CSE overall generated for you.
• Average Order Value/Volume: This tells you how much, on average, a
consumer spends on your website in one visit.
• Conversion Rate (%): For a given product, this tells you the number of
clicks that converted divided by the total number of clicks it received. If 10
clicks out of 100 lead to sales, that product has a conversion rate of 10%.
• Cost of Sale (%): For a given product, this will tell you the ratio of your
spending to your revenues. Literally, it’s the product’s click expenses
(spend) divided by the product’s accrued revenues. CSE’s use this to
explain a product’s given return ratio.
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Failure to install tracking pixels will really hurt your strategy in terms of
how you bid and manage your listings at the category and product levels.
You can find tracking pixels in each of your CSE merchant login pages,
where you can also make changes to and optimize your bids on the fly. Google Analytics is a free tool you can use to gather this information. However, like any analytic device, it can be unreliable occasionally
so it shouldn’t be your only source of retrieving metrics but rather as a
reference you can use to cross-check with another source. Use the data
from tracking pixels to optimize your bids and product listings.
Google Analytics Metrics - Traffic Sources > Sources > All Traffic > Ecommerce
Bid Management and Optimization
Each CSEs tracking pixel metrics will allow you to pull and analyze reports on both the product and category levels. You should do this at
least once a week. Obviously this benchmark can vary depending on the
retailer, and you may end up updating your bids daily or even once every
2 weeks. Remember, bid higher on products that have high conversion
rates and zero-bid/penny-bid those that are doing very poorly.
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However, be wary of how qualified the traffic is that you’re receiving
from each individual CSE. A good tip is to raise your under-performing
products’ bids a few cents above the minimum bid allowed, so as to get
a leg up on the other retailers bidding at the minimum without spending
much more. You can refer to Chapter 2 for a more detailed explanation
of the bid process. In case you haven’t visited your CSE merchant pages
in a while, just remember the old adage: [insert this specific Back to the
Future pic with “we have to go back” text]
Promotions
The reality is that when a shopper is looking for a specific product on a
CSE, their decision oftentimes simply comes down to overall price, so any
leg up you can gain here is great. If you’re offering any promotions, you
need to make them well known, and ideally before a customer even visits
your site. Sir, allow me to make
a suggestion...
Update your data feeds at least
once a week but really most
retailers need to update their
feeds daily.
Thus, it’s key that you sync your promos up with your CSE campaigns so
that they appear on your CSE product pages. For a detailed explanation
on how to set up coupons on PriceGrabber, check this out. For more general promotional listing info, find out each CSEs different guidelines here.
Data Feed Updating
Update your data feeds at least once a week but really most retailers
need to update their feeds daily. This entails referring to your tracking
pixel metrics to determine how well your products are performing and
potentially cutting some products from your feed. I know the prospect of
removing a product entirely from your data feed may be unnerving, but
it’s good business.
A product that receives 250 clicks and produces 0 sales needs to be
cut. It’s a reflection of unqualified traffic and is literally wasting your
money. You will need to assess products like this regularly. Remember
to employ the 30/30 rule mentioned in Chapter 3. If a product doesn’t
convert after 30 days or click, it’s time to penny/zero-bid or remove
that product. Also, check out each CSEs own version of a data feed error-checker to make sure everything runs smoothly.
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When a product needs to be removed from a feed is also dependent
on your product category, be it furniture or electronics, your products’
AOV, and also how much you’re willing to spend. If you’re in a high AOV
product category like furniture, you can wait a little longer than 30 days
or clicks for a conversion. These are products where people usually like
to weigh their options a little before purchasing, and so the high rate of
clicks or time elapsed is expected.
If you’re in a low AOV product category like small electronic accessories,
you may want to consider lowering your click/day threshold. Additionally, how long you wait before cutting depends on your budget. The more
you’re willing to spend, the bigger window you have to wait, and
vice versa.
New Opportunities
As a business owner, it’s in your blood to always be looking for new
channels and sources of wealth. One basic way to do this in the comparison shopping world is to research and expand onto new, lucrative CSEs
that you may not have already known about. Three that are often
overlooked are Become, Pronto, and Sell.com.
Once you’re up and running with the major CSEs, don’t hesitate to assess
what these can provide to your business. You can find some of these
hidden treasure troves in our most recent comparison of the major CSEs.
Measure the Total Impact of Your Campaigns
The worst thing you can do is pause a campaign you thought wasn’t profitable when, in reality, it really was. Remember to consider the bigger impact a CSE campaign has on your business and try to assess it both before
you launch a campaign and then shortly after. This means phone orders,
total orders per month, total profit per month, and even just plain traffic.
Even though it’s against your intuition, don’t look at comparison shopping
engines as Y cost for X number of sales. The impact is broader than that.
Because shoppers are converting on your site, you have the potential
to add hundreds of loyal customers that will continue to visit your store
for years to come. The total lifetime value of a new customer is hard to
assess, but it is something that should be looked at very carefully.
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Likewise if you stop a CSE campaign, over the next couple of weeks
watch your site-wide metrics closely to see if there was a bigger negative
or positive impact from stopping that campaign than you anticipated.
Often marketing campaigns are more inter-connected than you think,
in terms of the driven traffic and the consequential relevancy it adds to
your store.
A Revolutionary
approach to
Stay Current
It can be easy for you to be so immersed in your business that you
remain stagnant to the major changes in your industry. E-commerce
is certainly a dynamic field that has been known to change often and
dramatically, and so for the sake of your business, you need to be aware
of them. In the field of comparison shopping, and I don’t mean to be
biased, CPC Strategy provides up-to-date news and expert analysis of
major industry changes, and you should feel free to use our regularly
updated blog as a resource.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is an option you should consider when in-house management of your CSE campaigns is no longer time and cost-effective. You
may choose to outsource simply because your business doesn’t have the
manpower or expertise to handle CSE campaigns, or perhaps your business simply has more stressing matters to focus your time and energy
on. One thing is for certain: you do not want to miss out on the money,
traffic, and overall substantial growth your retail business can acquire
with effective comparison shopping campaigns.
SHOPPING FEED
MANAGEMENT
Leverage your business with
Shopping Feed Management
from the pros.
Learn More
We have the tools to make you successful on comparison shopping
engines so you can focus your skills on what you know best: growing
your business
You can check out our full-service comparison shopping management
solutions for guidance.
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Questions? Comments? I’m sure there are many.
The CPC Strategy team will be happy to answer any
questions you have, or if it’s a personal inquiry, you can email me at [email protected]
Thank you
for reading
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