Comparison Shopping Engine Strategies

The Feed Doctor's Catalyst After-Action Report, or “Catalyst: I Love You Man!”

2013-05-06T10:45:37-07:00

I just flew back from Las Vegas, and boy are my arms tired...because I spent the flight typing up this blog post. *Rim Shot*

But the truth is that I had such an experience at Catalyst, and learned so much from interacting with our attendees, that I just couldn’t wait to talk about it. During the two-and-a-half days of the conference, I spoke with over two dozen attendees, listened to over a dozen presentations, and lost more than…well, you get the idea. And while those numbers are just a fraction of the total attendees and talks, it’s overwhelming for us engineers to be that social.

Before I go further, I just want to say that my workload was a cakewalk compared with what the rest of the ChannelAdvisor Catalyst Crew handled. The Marketing team in particular deserve a special recognition, of course (they’re also editing this post…), but everyone there put in an almost superhuman effort.

Though the biggest thanks go to YOU, our attendees. I’ve been to every US event so far (I was talking about this with Marshall Smith: he calculates he’s been to at least 15, including some in the UK), and I love seeing long-time customers coming back each year, and also seeing how many new faces we add each year. Both of these things—loyalty and growth—make me proud to work at ChannelAdvisor.

Not everything is sunshine and roses, of course. Almost everybody at Catalyst has some kind of business challenge he’s trying to solve, and our job is to help him do that. I made it my mission to try to help everyone I spoke to solve at least one problem, even if all I could do was point out somebody else who was the expert on that problem. I also made it a point to ask if there was anything about our software that we could change to help make their lives easier. And, of course, I had the opportunity to help quite a few folks write some business rules. I’ll write about one of those in the near future.

Once again, thanks to all who attended. To those I met and spoke with, it was certainly a pleasure. Come back and see us again next year!

Blog post by Anthony Alford, a.k.a. The Feed Doctor, who you can follow @thefeeddoctor and DM with any additional business rules suggestions!

Google Shopping Outperforms Google Product Search

2013-04-16T07:13:36-07:00

Recently we compared US Google Shopping March 2013 numbers against Google Product Search results from March 2012. We looked across our clients for which we are tracking their Google Shopping campaigns and found that their revenue soared, averaging 3X more revenue with Google Shopping in 2013 versus with Google Product Search in 2012.

ChannelAdvisor calculates these trends based on the gross merchandise value (GMV) processed through the ChannelAdvisor platform by CSE customers that have been using ChannelAdvisor software for at least a year, removing any customer additions or attrition.

There are several factors that have contributed to these results:

1) More PLAs on main search results

Google has focused on delivering more Product Listing Ads (PLAs) on Google.com. PLAs show up for more queries, in more page locations, and frequently in greater number than prior to the change. If you are not in the US, you are probably experiencing this now.

2) Amazon is not advertising on PLAs

Amazon certainly commanded a lion’s share of Google Product Search traffic in the US. Now, that traffic has been distributed to other retailers.

3) More difficult economics for other marketplaces

In addition to Amazon, other marketplaces had a lot of shelf space in the free Google Product Search. Now that they have to pay, the margin may not be there to pay for placement for many of their listings.

4) Less competition due to fewer retailers

How many retailers never made the change to the paid model, either by choice or the inability to get started? Further, how many retailers just put one low bid on All Products to earn the Google incentive but have never optimized their data or bids?

Adding it up:

With more overall traffic and less competition, opportunities are there for retailers with a budget and the means to manage it. A good product target strategy and tools to monitor performance and adjust bids have been key tools for successful retailers.

We’ll keep an eye on how our retailers continue to perform and report interesting information as it arises.

Blog post by Jim Dechow, ChannelAdvisor Product Manager

Wondering how you can improve your sales on Google Shopping? Download our free Tip Sheet: Google Shopping: What's Next, for 7 tips to get your Google Shopping strategy on the right track.

It’s almost the 12th April, have you signed up for the Google Shopping incentive?

2013-03-28T01:51:12-07:00

Back in February, Google announced the international rollout of its new Google Shopping model, replacing the free Google Product Search program. The result was that ten more countries began the transition to a new experience built on Product Listing Ads, with a complete roll out of Google Shopping to be completed by the end of June.

A Product Listing Ad is an AdWords ad that appears on google.co.uk’s commercial site and also on google.co.uk/shopping. Whenever a customer searches for a product, Google will show several PLAs that include the picture, price and store name for that product. Users who click on the Product Listing Ad will be taken to your website where they can complete the purchase or shop for other products. Ranking in Google Shopping, when the full transition is complete in the countries listed above, will be based on a combination of relevance and bid price.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple months and you don’t know about this--or if you just haven’t had the chance to get up to speed with Google Shopping --you can find everything you need to know on our Do You Understand Google Shopping blog from last month.

If you haven’t begun thinking about how this transition will impact your business, then you need to begin today. The PLA ad format has been around for two years, meaning that some retailers have the advantage of experience and have optimised listings already in place. Others began experimenting when the transition occured and are experiencing success today. Consider the impact on your business; how will you cope with the drop in traffic to your site once the free Google Product Search program is pulled? Have you allocated a marketing budget to maintain traffic in this new paid program? Have you a strategy in place for PLAs?

To entice retailers to get the ball rolling on their Google Shopping campaigns, Google have an incentive running until the 12^th April 2013. Merchants in the UK, Australia, Japan, Brazil, Spain, Italy, France, Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland who create a PLA campaign listing all of their products that are already in Merchant Centre may be eligible for a £75 credit. Eligible merchants with a Product Listing Ad campaign will also receive a monthly credit for 10% of their total Product Listing Ad spend from 15 February 2013 to 30 June 2013.

This transition occurred in the US last year, and data from our platform indicates that our retailers, on average, more than tripled their revenue using Google Shopping as compared to the same time last year when they were using Google Product Search. We highly recommend you begin experimenting with PLAs and availing of this Google incentive today. This will not only help you save on your Feb-June advertising spend, but it will also help you avoid a loss of traffic as Google Product Search is phased out.

If you’d like to learn more about Google Shopping you can download our Top 12 Tips to Google Shopping Success tip sheet.

And the Oscar goes to…The Feed Doctor for his work on REGEXGET

2013-02-25T11:40:57-08:00

Since there was nothing on TV this weekend except the Oscars, The Feed Doctor decided to write some award-worthy business rules.

Often I get requests for help extracting data from a larger text field. For example, people want to get image URLs from a large block of html. REGEXGET is useful for this, since the image tags follow a definite pattern. For example, let’s say the description attribute looks like this:

Stuff <img URL=’http://www.mysite.com/image1.jpg’ /> and more stuff

We know we need to look for the img tag, so we could do this:

REGEXGET ($description,”img URL=’[^’]+’”)

This pattern matches the text “img’, the space, the text “URL”, the equal sign, the quote, then any number of characters that aren’t a quote, then finally the closing quote. Perfect, right? Except, here’s the output:

img URL=’http://www.mysite.com/image1.jpg’

It’s almost what we want, but not quite. We still need to do some more processing to remove everything that’s not the actual URL. Now, we could change the pattern to just match the URL, like this:

REGEXGET ($description,”http://[^’]+”)

But what if there’s, say, a hyperlink in the description before the image tag? And for that matter, what if there’s more than one image tag? REGEXTGET only gets the first match, so if you really wanted the second image tag (assuming there were one), what would you do?

The good news is that regular expressions are extremely flexible, and so this weekend I updated REGEXGET to have two new optional parameters.

The first parameter is the “match index.” This is for the case when your pattern may occur more than once, and you want something besides the first one. Let’s say the description has two image URLs:

Stuff <img URL=’http://www.mysite.com/image1.jpg’ /> and more stuff. More stuff <img URL=’http://www.mysite.com/image2.jpg’ /> etc

If you want the first image URL, the rule we’ve got will work. But what if you want the second? Let’s update the rule:

REGEXGET ($description,”img URL=’[^’]+’”, 2, 1)

The 2 is the match index. It tells REGEXGET to get the second piece of text that matches the pattern…if there is one. But what’s that 1 for, after the 2? That’s the “group index.” If you’ve done some serious regex stuff, you’re probably familiar with capture groups and back references. Capture groups are a way to mark off parts of your pattern as “reusable” chunks. The way you do it is with parentheses, and it’s how we’re going to pull just the URL out of the image tag. Let’s update the rule one more time:

REGEXGET ($description,”img URL=’([^’]+)’”, 2, 2)

Two things are different. First, I put parentheses in the pattern; notice how they are just inside the quotes, which means they surround the part of the pattern that matches the URL. Next, I changed that last input parameter from a 1 to a 2. This means to get the second capture group. Well, the first one is always the entire thing that matched the pattern. The second is just the part that matched what’s in parentheses; in this case, the second image URL.

I had a big long list of people to thank, who helped make this happen, but the music is playing now and I have to get off stage. Just one reminder: this change will be released with our next update, in March.

For more information on Business Rules, check out the SSC guide to Using Text Functions Business Rules.

Blogpost by Anthony Alford, The Feed Doctor @thefeeddoctor

Do you understand Google Shopping?

2013-02-11T04:08:27-08:00

With just two days until the transition to Google Shopping begins around the world, many retailers are still unprepared for this drastic change. Many others have overlooked this update until after the Christmas and January rush and are only now considering the impact on their business. If your business is reliant on Google Product Search campaigns for traffic, you need to begin ramping up your Google Shopping presence as soon as possible in order to maintain your momentum.

So what is Google Shopping and how will this impact your business? In layman terms, Google Shopping is a new, paid advertising format from Google. This advertising format will be highly visual and focused on improving the customer experience. This format was rolled out in the US in 2012 and will now begin transition in the UK, Australia, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Italy, Spain, Brazil and the Netherlands.

The reason this change is so important for retailers is that Google Product Search traffic will soon fade away and that in the near future all Google Shopping traffic will be paid. Also, for many retailers this change of format means action is required in order to participate.

You will begin to notice a shift in traffic in the coming days, so an understanding of your campaigns and this program is vital. We’ve compiled a description of the core elements of Google Shopping along with advice to help you get started.

Product Listing Ads

Google Shopping is driven by Product Listing Ads (PLAs), which are visually compelling product advertisements that include product information such as image, title, price and merchant name. A Product Listing Ad is a unique ad format that Google offers to promote specific items alongside text ads on Google search results pages. PLAs are displayed when Google matches a search query to information in a retailer’s product data feed. This ad type is typically priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) bidding model, where you are charged based on the number of clicks your advertisement receives.

The Product Listing Ad format works on “product targeting” technology, meaning that once you have submitted your product data feeds Google accesses that data and matches search queries to the most relevant products. Which products are shown in the PLA is Google’s decision and ranked on CPC and other factors familiar to search auctions like quality score and click-through rate. Google pulls the image URL from your feed in order to display a product image along with the product title and any optional promotional text that you enter.

Feeds

A product data feed is a list of individual products that includes product details such as name, price, product page URL, product image URL, description, category and more. PLA success starts with product data feeds that are accurate, comprehensive and delivered frequently. Take a look at the quality of your data; are all relevant fields present, is it accurate and up-to-date? By optimising your content you will ensure that the data available to Google contains all the relevant information for a Product Listing Ad.

Targets

Targets, or product groupings, identify which products from data feeds will trigger Product Listing Ads for related searches. Target fields allow you to group products together based on characteristics such as “sale.” This grouping action enables you to control bids across multiple products based on set qualifications, (e.g. all products characterised as “sale” should receive a bid of 75 pence). Since bids are controlled based on these targets, be sure to have a reliable bidding strategy in place.

Promotions

Promotions refer to the optional ad copy, such as “free delivery,” that can be attached to Product Listing Ads. While PLAs already offer more product information than regular text-based ads, adding this additional text can help differentiate your ads from competitive offerings. It is crucial to strategically create targets since promotional text is attached to all products within a target.

Reporting

Visibility into PLA performance is essential for retailers to obtain a return on their investment. By reviewing your campaign performance you should go back to your feeds and make necessary adjustments to further optimise their data for better visibility within Google Shopping.

We’ll be updating this blog with helpful advice and strategies as this transition takes place, or if you’d like to learn more about Google Shopping you can download our Top 12 Tips to Google Shopping Success tip sheet.

Analysis of Google's acquisition of Channel Intelligence

2013-02-07T08:29:35-08:00

Yesterday (February 6, 2013), Google announced that they are acquiring Channel Intelligence (CI). In this post, we'll share some thoughts on 'why?', what we are hearing from retailers and what we think this means for Google long-term. Disclaimer: we historically have periodically competed with CI in the comparison shopping management space.

E-commerce is forecasted to be a $1T industry by 2017 and Google has publicly said that 40% of their revenue is in the retail/e-commerce vertical, so the stakes here are very high. Before we dive into what's behind this acquisition, it's important to look back at Google's historical efforts in e-commerce.

A brief history of Google's e-commerce efforts

Here are the headlines from the last ten years of Google's efforts in the e-commerce space:

December 2002 - Google introduces Froogle (consumer facing front-end) and Google Base (back-end)
June 2006 - Google announces Google Checkout
April 2007 - Froogle is rebranded as Google Product Search (GPS for short) and the Google Base nomenclature is dropped.
2007-2012 - Google improved GPS with international rollouts, local features, Google Checkout integration, item pages, parent/child, attributes, images, product reviews, etc.
November 2009 - Google introduces Product Listing Ads - a program that charges a CPC on top of GPS. This program did not receive much traffic/query exposure.
May 2012 - Google announces the end of the free GPS in the US and merges in the PLA program renaming the combination as Google Shopping (GS).
July 2012 - After lackluster adoption, Google renames Google Checkout to be part of the mobile-facing effort, Google Wallet
October 2012 - Google moves 100% of queries away from GPS to GS in US.
February 2012 - Google moves from GPS to GS in UK, DE, AU and 7 other regions.

The other bit of background we need to cover to understand what's driving this acquisition is the history of friction between Google and Amazon.

Google / Amazon friction

Industry lore suggests that 10+ yrs ago when Google first started their project to scan books, Amazon's Jeff Bezos realized the two firms were on a collision course. Since then there have been a number of friction points. This smoke became a fire in the last year as the mainstream press caught on, ignited by a spark from Forrester. Here are some highlights:

July 2012 - Forrester releases study showing that 30% of consumers start their product searches at Amazon vs. 15% at Google - only 2yrs earlier, the trend was reversed.
September 2012 - The NY Times publishes an article that proclaims: "Google Struggles to Unseat Amazon as the Web's Most Popular Mall."
November 2012 - Amazon withdraws all products from Google Shopping, but does stay in the Adwords program. Shortly after, eBay follows suit, significantly hobbling Google Shopping's breadth of product selection.

December 2012 - Google acquires Bufferbox, a Canadian startup that offers an Amazon Locker type service

December 2012 - Amazon is widely known to be entering the advertising business that Google largely dominates today.

Why CI? (follow the data... and the revenue/ad spend)

Within the context of Google's mixed efforts in e-commerce and their increasing friction with Amazon, Channel Intelligence offers Google one strategic thing that it desperately needs to even hold its ground against Amazon: transactional data.

Amazon sees every transaction in its ecosystem. Google sees no transaction data, just clicks unless Google Analytics is installed and even then, the data isn't tied to specific products (complete closed loop that Amazon has).
Amazon has built a very deep and wide catalog of the entire World's product catalog. Google has scattered high-level data and lacks a robust product catalog.
Google would like to know exactly what is happening (costs, conversions, etc..) at competing comparison shopping engines (shopping.com, shopzilla, pricegrabber, Nextag, etc.)
Without visibility into the full transaction loop at a sku-level (e.g. what products are selling and what price), Google is partially blind to the value they are providing and maybe leaving click revenue on the table.

Acquiring CI gives Google access to pieces of this data for those customers currently using CI.

An interesting side note: eBay (with its marketplace and PayPal businesses) is the only other company that comes close to the level of transactional data that Amazon sees.

In addition to access to closed loop transaction data, Google's goal is to increase ad spend. If you know that someone is paying $.50/click (CPC) and it is converting at 4% for an ASP of $100, you can easily calculate that there is a lot of room to grow in the CPC and move the cost up based on that knowledge. With the lack of Amazon and eBay who are top adwords advertisers, not only is selection challenged, but it has a less robust competitive market than the similar adwords 'auction'.

In conclusion, CI gives Google transactional data that has numerous uses, the top use being increasing ad spend. Google has made a ton of revenue (our conservative estimate at the time of the announcement was $130m in the US alone) by turning a free program into a paid program and this acquisition will enable them to have access to transactional data that will keep the ad spend dollars flowing.

Retailer reaction

Historically, many retailers (especially larger top 200 retailers) have been reluctant to share their transactional data with their e-commerce channel partners. As Google folds in the CI business, it will be interesting to see if retailers are ok with Google having significant, deep new insights into the performance of their products at a detailed SKU-level and non-google channel performance details. Ironically, transactional data protection and control is the number one reason that retailers don't sell on Amazon.

I don't see retailers pulling the plug on Google Shopping, but we do recommend that retailers go into this with their eyes wide open and ask questions such as:

Will Google use CI transactional data to source new sellers? "Wow, ProductX is really selling, let's go recruit 3 more retailers that carry ProductX..."
Will Google build a product catalog that other retailers can utilize using your data?
What will Google do with your sales data from other comparison shopping engines? You could picture someone saying: "I see you are spending $X/month over there, how can we move that to Google Shopping?"
Will Google have access to your cost or margin data?
Will Google use your performance data to increase prices and click costs?
Will Google continue to support non-Google sites that CI currently supports, like Amazon Product Ads, Nextag, Shopping.com (owned by eBay), PriceGrabber, etc.? Or will Google's focus and efforts be biased towards Google owned-and-operated properties?
CI's tag solution allows the company to see all of a retailers traffic and conversions - seo, sem, direct, email, etc. Will retailers be ok with this going forward?

Search Engine Land's Greg Sterling has an interesting take on Google's interest of supporting non-Google engines: "CI works with other product distribution channels and shopping engines. That’s probably unlikely to continue over the long term." A view we share, so most likely the concern over what Google does with sales data from other channels will be moot.

Longer-term Google speculation - building a marketplace?

The increasing speculation from Wall St. and other areas is that to really compete with Amazon, Google will need to build a marketplace, especially as mobile adoption continues to skyrocket. We have been suggesting for quite a while that Google has many of the pieces it would need to build a marketplace:

Consumers/Traffic
Retailer relationships/advertisers
A checkout system (Google Wallet)
A monetization mechanism (PPC)
Trust/safety program (Google Trusted Stores - launched last year, minimal retailer adoption over data-sharing concerns)

All that Google lacks to make this a reality is a product catalog, and a strategy to differentiate from eBay and Amazon. It's possible that long-term CI could help Google with the catalog missing puzzle piece.

Interestingly, Wall St. is starting to feel that Google needs to go down the marketplace path as shown in the following exchange from the Google Q4 earnings call:

Ben Schachter - Macquarie: ... Google Shopping, the PLAs and the interface changes, I think significantly improve the user experience, but the consumer still needs to leave the site to transact. Do you anticipate a mechanism whereas users can actually transact on Google Shopping without having to leave? You know, as you said sort of no extra work needed? Thanks.

Larry Page - Chief Executive Officer, Director: Google Shopping, I guess you are asking about Product Listing Ads I think that we are also in the early stages of that. We just rolled out Google Shopping. We’ve seen tremendous uptake from merchants and from users and I expect that quality of the site, the ease of buying things will improve over time and I am really excited about that. I am not going to comment on details about that, but we’re always focused on making our user experience better.

That's definitely not a yes, but it's also not a 'no', but only time will tell if Google feels enough pressure from marketplaces like Amazon and eBay that it feels it needs to dip its toes in the marketplace waters to improve the consumer experience to the levels delivered by eBay and Amazon.

Stay tuned and we'd love to hear your thoughts in comments.

Scot Wingo, CEO of ChannelAdvisor, wrote this blog post. eBay is an investor in ChannelAdvisor.

A Holiday Gift from The Feed Doctor

2012-12-19T07:38:21-08:00

The other day someone asked me for help writing a rule. She had text with “accented” characters, and wanted to replace them with the non-accented version. For example, she wanted to change the word “Résumé” to “Resume.”

But it was even worse than that. Her text was actually “html encoded.” This is a way of converting “special characters” so that web browsers render them properly. For example, the ampersand is a special character, so it might look like & in an html file. In her case, instead of “Résumé” she actually had “Résumeé”

It turns out I couldn’t think of a good solution, and I hate it when that happens. So I sat down and wrote two new functions: HTMLDECODE and TRANSLIT.

First, HTMLDECODE will convert the encoded special characters into their true form; e.g., it converts “Résumeé” into “Résumé.” Next, TRANSLIT (which is short for “transliterate”) converts the “accented” characters to non-accented ones; so it would convert “Résumé” to “Resume.”

Now, I could have made a single function that does both, but just in case you want one and not the other, I made them distinct. You can of course combine them, like this:

TRANSLIT(HTMLDECODE(“Résumé”)

These functions will be available with our January software update. Enjoy!

Blogpost by Anthony Alford, The Feed Doctor @thefeeddoctor

Looking for more information on Comparison Shopping?

Comparison Shopping Misconceptions: Don't Let These Missteps Trip Up Your Strategy

This white paper covers common comparison shopping misconceptions to make sure you're not making mistakes with your CSE strategy.

The secret to reviewing your Google Shopping queries

2012-12-12T12:05:05-08:00

As the holiday season picks up, you've no doubt seen an increase in traffic on your Product Listing Ad campaigns and might be looking to optimize your spend through the program. Many traditional methods of optimization no longer apply due to the lack of keywords. However, with a few caveats, you can still review the queries triggering your ads and make changes to your negative keyword lists to manage the matches. If you're looking for the queries in the usual place, under your keywords tab, you won't find them. This seems to be an area of confusion, with even major search marketing blogs reporting that it's not possible. The savvy marketers at ChannelAdvisor know that you can indeed find these queries by navigating to the dimensions tab of your AdWords account and selecting search terms under the "view" menu drop down!

Download the Top 12 Tips for Google Shopping Success tip sheet for more information and to make the most of your Product Listing Ads.

Blog post by Jackie Jenkins, Paid Search Product Manager

Quick Tips Before you Finalize your E-Commerce Budget

2012-12-11T05:47:44-08:00

A look at online holiday success to help guide your budget

It’s that time of year that every finance geek loves and the rest of us loathe: budget time! As you’re wrapping up your final budget plans for the year, check out where ChannelAdvisor customers found success during some of the busiest shopping days of the year to help guide your financial plans.

1. Keep Google Shopping Top of Mind

Google Shopping has thrown a lot of retailers for a loop this holiday season; however, our retailers experienced a strong showing on Cyber Monday with Comparison Shopping same-store sales trending at 20% year-over-year growth.

Evidence of Google Shopping’s success is also supported by the Paid Search SSS numbers, which were essentially flat for the Cyber Five. We’ve attributed this to the broad coverage and high placement and click-through rate of Google Shopping.

Use this handy calculation to estimate your costs:

Traffic: Clicks x Average Cost Per Click

GMV: GMV/ROAS

For further tips download our Top 12 Tips for Google Shopping Success one pager.

2. Amazon isn’t just the biggest river in the world...

Amazon continues to be a behemoth, growing at 2X the rate of overall-commerce (according to comScore predictions that e-commerce will grow at 17% this holiday). This year Amazon came in at 37.7% SSS growth for the Cyber Five, and 42.4% for Cyber Monday.

We conducted a spot check of top-selling items in most categories throughout the Cyber Five (using www.nowinstock.net) and found that Amazon was out of stock for many, thus suggesting an increase in third-party sales as backfill for an out-of-stock Amazon.

Make sure that you have budget next year to ensure your products are found by Amazon shoppers--download this tip document that outlines how to sell more on Amazon.

3. Make Mobile a Priority

According to data aggregated from a group of ChannelAdvisor customers, mobile accounted for 30.7% of Cyber Five sales! A dramatic nearly 80% jump over last year’s 17.2%. Tablets exactly doubled from a 7.2% share to 14.4% and smartphone share grew from 10% to 16.3%.

We found the highest percentage of consumers shopping via mobile devices on Thanksgiving Day, slowly declining over the course of the weekend as more brick-and-mortar shops opened their doors.

As you are plotting ways to earn your share of this mobile traffic, check out our Retailer's Guide to Mobile for some quick tips of the trade.

4. Don’t Count Out eBay

We’ve documented many aspects of eBay’s turnaround on our eBay Strategies blog, most recently The New eBay: Serendipity+faster transactions=win for sellers. It seems, however, that eBay has lived into its claims, at least from a Cyber Five (the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday) perspective. Coming in at an impressive 38.3% year-over-year same-store sales (SSS) growth for the total Cyber Five, eBay experienced 5X growth on Cyber Monday over last year.

If you aren’t selling on eBay, or if you are and want a refresher, check out our Unlocking the Power of eBay eBook, debunking all the common misconceptions about selling on eBay.

While there is rarely enough budget to do everything you want to do, invest in these four areas and you’ll start 2013 on the right foot and be well prepared for Cyber Five 2013.

Highlights from Google Shopping Webinar

2012-11-30T01:20:44-08:00

Last week we held a Google Shopping webinar to help retailers get their heads around the upcoming changes to Google Product Search. In case you couldn’t make the session, we’ve compiled the essential tips and key dates:

On November 15^th, Google made the announcement that they are extending the rollout of Google Shopping across Europe. The transition of Google Product Search to a paid model was transitioned initially in the US in May. This transition ended last month and now the same program will be implemented in the UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, Australia, Japan, Italy, Spain, Brazil and the Netherlands.

PLAs are at the core of Google Shopping, so a key lesson from the webinar was to make you as familiar with their function as soon as possible. A Product Listing Ad (PLA) is a unique ad format that allows you to include specific product information like an image, title, price, and your store or business name. Product Listing Ads appear in their own box on search results pages, separate from standard text ads. Google anticipate that PLAs will allow merchants to have more control and predictability over their advertising campaigns, will have better opportunities to differentiate themselves, and that the traffic driven through will be more qualified.

Essential Timelines

15^th November: Google announcement was made. Google will begin experimenting with the single unit format for products on Google.co.uk and will also begin testing commercial offers on Shopping property.

13^th February: Launch of Google Shopping with commercial offers promoted, however free offers will still be included. Retailers should expect a drop in free traffic to product landing pages and a corresponding increase in paid traffic.

End of June: By the end of June, all campaigns will be transitioned to a fully paid experience on Google Shopping.

Lessons Learned From The US:

A benefit of the US transitioning earlier in the year is that we can learn from their experience and identify the essential tips to begin following. Here are the 4 top lessons learned from that region:

Lesson 1:

Begin testing Product Listing Ads straight away, opting in all or part of your feeds with at least the minimum bid. This will allow you to learn and refine how PLAs work from the beginning and give you a competitive edge to late-adopters. If you are already using PLAs, you can take it a step further by focusing on optimising your feeds.

Google will soon announce an incentive for early adopters to reward those prepared for the transition. Details of this will be released by Google in December.

Lesson 2:

Make Google Shopping an important part of your 2013 marketing plans and budget. Estimate your costs by measuring your traffic and GMV. Use the equations below to calculate these core facts and try to add them to your plans for next year.

Traffic: Clicked x Average Cost Per Click
GMV: GMV/ROAS

Lesson 3: Data, Data, Data!

With Google Shopping, data is more important than ever before. Optimise your content and work toward making it a better quality. This will allow a better user experience and drive more qualified clicks to your website.

Lesson 4: Develop a Target Strategy

Product Targets are central to Google Shopping. Targets, or product groupings, identify which products from data feeds will trigger Product Listing Ads for related searches. Target fields allow retailers to group products together based on characteristics such as brand. Grouping products by target enables retailers to control bids across multiple products based on these qualifications, (e.g., all products characterised as brand should receive a bid of 75 pence). Think about how you measure your business, specifically around your product catalogue; should your target be based on brand, product type, margin or price? Identify a strategy that works for you and build your strategy around this.

If you want to learn more about Google Shopping you can download our Google Shopping bundle: