Steps to Conduct Before Indulging into Full Fledged Shopping Engine Campaign

It is true that comparison shopping engines help online retailers acquire new customers and drive sales. While choosing a comparison shopping engine, most online retailers don’t look beyond the advertising model and the cost incurred for listing their product catalog in the CSE. Besides these key factors, there are many other aspects an online retailer should consider and learn off pat about each comparison shopping engine before starting the campaign. To get most out of the comparison engine channel follow the steps given...

Educate yourself about CSE Market: The best way to gain more information about comparison shopping engines is by visiting blogs, forums, webinars, research reports by market research companies etc. In the United States alone, there are close to 150 shopping engines and some of the big names are Shopping, Shopzilla, Smarter, Yahoo shopping, Pricegrabber, Nextag, etc. Remember, not all comparison shopping engine drive sales! You need to test run and identify which CSE would give you positive ROAS (return on ad spend).

Opt for right comparison shopping engine: CSE’s Popularity and Reliability: It is not a sensible decision to put your product catalog on “not so popular” comparison shopping engines. Do a basic research on how popular the comparison shopping engine is in terms of getting targeted traffic. There are few ways to find out. You can use traffic ranking tools like Alexa, Compete, etc or check in Google trends for website to know the CSE’s traffic pattern, its listing in organic search and paid search result for competitive and long tail keywords, reviews and ratings about the comparison shopping engine, press releases about the shopping engine and so on. Conducting this kind of research will give a reasonable understanding on how popular and reliable a CSE is, and that could result in opting for right comparison shopping engine.

Bind Advertising Model and Budget: CSE advertising models are perhaps the most important factor in deciding the comparison shopping engine mix. There are various pay models offered by CSE, some of them are CPC – Cost per Click, CPA/CPS – Cost per Acquisition/Cost per Sale, Cost per Impressions, Cost per Redemption, Free Listings, and Flat Fee. You need to decide on the pay model that suits your budget.

Check your In-house expertise

Data Feed Complexities: Every comparison shopping engine is unique and each has its specific guidelines and instructions for data feed creation and submission. Online retailers have to spend time in understanding the data feed complexities involved in data feed creation, data feed optimization and submission. Most CSEs request merchants to provide a handful of information about their product which are commonly termed as mandatory fields, highly recommended fields & optional fields. For successful CSE campaign understanding the data feed complexities will help in managing your data feeds effectively.

Big Management Awareness: Bidding is just one among the multiple factors that CSEs consider while determining the placement of offers (merchant's product) in shopping engine’s result page. Understanding the bid management process of each CSE is very significant and it will help retailers avoid overbidding.

Analytics: Analytics will help you track the performance of the shopping engine campaign. Each CSE would provide you the traffic and sales data, but it is not wise to collect data from each CSE and then aggregate it to analyze the shopping engine’s campaign result. Instead, look out for paid or free analytics tools such as Google Analytics, where you can easily tag the URL and submit it to the CSE to find the performance of the shopping engine.

You may go for 3rd party DFM solutions if you don’t have in-house expertise to handle data feed marketing campaign.

Effective Landing Page: Landing page can make or break your conversion, no matter what type of online marketing campaign you run. Poor and unorganized landing page is one of the reasons for high bounce rate and shopping cart abandonment. View your online store as a physical store where products are placed in the right place so that people (shoppers) can find them easily. An effective landing page should have a professional look, and it should feature easy navigation, ease of use functionality, comprehensive product information and so on.

Choose Catalog Wisely: Not all products you promote in CSE will sell. You need to select the most performing products from your previous sales data.

Study Your Competition: There could be a tough competition for the products you sell. To get the most out of the CSE, you need to study your competitors. Conduct competition analysis in the context of:

Who is listed for the products you sell?

What is the price they have quoted to sell the product?

(There are few merchants who quote different product price in different CSE)

Campaign Test: Consider the most appropriate CSE and run a test campaign to identify if it will really turn out to be a sales generator. It is always advisable to test the shopping engine campaign with free product search engines like Google product search during the initial stage. This will help you to learn more about the shopping channel with no expenses from your side, and all lose is your time and effort. Once you are a little more confident, you can test with paid CSE’s.