Web Ad’Vise-"Advertising on Comparison Shopping" for Dummies

Tips to control costs on the Comparison Shopping sites

noreply@blogger.com (Shyam Sundar.P) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:59:00 +0000

Get the most out of the free channels

Try and use the free price comparison channels like Google base and TheFind.com to their fullest potential.

Uses two/three Tier-2 channels to balance your cost.

List your products on a few tier-2 channels like Pronto, SortPrice, Become, Smarter etc.

Monitor costs regularly

Monitor your cost on each channel regularly and try to raise your bids accordingly

Do not list all the products on all the channels. Need to have strategy

Listing all the products across all the Price comparison engines is a killer. Each channel has a different set of competitors and different combination of products to compete. So carefully analyze the channels and list your products in a competitive manner.

Biding strategy in relation to your Competitors and their strategies

Many sellers on these Comparison channels don’t even using bidding as an option. Bidding is a very productive option if used with a proper game plan. Identify all those products that you have a competitive edge and which you think will convert better if we could increase the visibility. We can just slowly bid them higher. Most of the channels these days allow product level bidding..

Know your competitors

Always understand your Competitor at the channel level and have a channel specific listing and bidding strategy depending on your competitors on that channel

Product level strategy

We almost talked about this across this posting. But to summarize always identify the list of products that convert better or on which you have a competitive edge for you and give them the visibility by raising the bids so they can rank higher.

Always try to look at the broader picture (over all clicks across the channels)

To prune out the non converting products we should always look at the over all data( we should look at the performance of that product across all the channels) that is when you can identify the most cost drainers quickly and prune them out or get back to the drawing board to see what is wrong with that product and why its not converting

Listing strategies for better results on the Comparison Shopping sites

noreply@blogger.com (Shyam Sundar.P) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:46:00 +0000

Keyword rich title and description
We should use the maximum Character limitation provided by the Comparison-shopping channel to give as much information as we can. Make sure to blend in the keywords for which you want your products to show up.
Remember.
The entire Title and Description is searchable on most of the Comparison channels

Optimize your listing
Use the options given by the channel to differentiate your product listing from the rest of products by adding things that will attract the attention of the buyer.

Submit feeds regularly. Twice a week is the best thing to do.
Most of us typically send the feeds one in a fortnight or whenever there are major changes to the feed. But most of Comparison-shopping sites, these days give a better ranking to the feeds that are submitted frequently. So it is very important that we send an updated feed to all the channels atleast twice a week.

Uploading the feed every day has doubled the orders that I got from Google base

Provide as much information as you can
Build your feed with the maximum information you can give the Channel, the more the information and the more the attributes you submit, your products are that much more searchable.

Submit channel specific feed
Though there are a lot Comparison-shopping channels that accept other channels feed. If you have the time and patience, its always advisable to build a channel specific feed as per the instruction of that specific channel and upload it. The feed indexing bots on the channel do a better job when the feed is built as per their site specifications.

Don’t quote your price way too low even though you are able to source the product at a very low cost.
Though we all know that these channels are price sensitive we should avoid listing our products at a very low price then the second lowest competitor.

Typically if there are 10 people selling the same product and most of them are pricing the product around $10 do not ever make a mistake of pricing the same product at $5 or so though you might have struck a deal and procured it at that low cost from the vendor.
This for sure will kill the confidence of the buyer and for sure cause some suspicion on the quality of the product and the authenticity of the price

Understanding a typical buyer on Comparison Shopping site

noreply@blogger.com (Shyam Sundar.P) — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:32:00 +0000

These are the basic qualities of a typical shopper on the comparison shopping site

Price Sensitive

The average customer on the Comparison Shopping site is a price sensitive customer; typically looking for the best price he can get the product for

Ratings are a confidence booster

Once the product is finalized, one would obviously look for the Store ratings to see if the product he is buying will be delivered as promised.

Store ratings are as important as the Price. So always “Under promise and over deliver”

They are out there to compare the price

Most of the times, we notice they often come to a Comparison Shopping site to have an understanding of the product and know the approximate price of the product, which they want to buy. So appearing very high on the listings also will not help much as we end up taking a lot of clicks from people who just want to compare the costs and go and buy it offline.

Ships faster

After the price and store ratings, the “shipping lead time” makes a lot of difference. So whoever promises to ship the product faster gets the sale.

“Price attracts the potential customer to your listing and good ratings and faster shipping coverts them in to a buyer”

Amazon and Ebay

noreply@blogger.com (Shyam Sundar.P) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 07:01:00 +0000

Apart from Comparison-shopping engines the other most popular option to advertise the products is on market places like eBay and Amazon. These are the two most famous channels for advertising and gaining visibility to your products. eBay and Amazon are among the top ten most traffic generating sites in united states by this it is clear as to how important these channels are as a source of advertising.

How are they different from Comparison shopping engines?

On comparison-shopping engines one clicks and lands on your website. So the transaction takes place on your website but on eBay/ Amazon the transition happens on eBay/amazon
Comparison-shopping engines charge per click (CPC) where as Market places charge per transaction.
On comparison-shopping engines, a small and smart adcopies is all that matters to attract the buyer to your site but on Market place we need to list all the information.( shipping policy , return policy, payment options etc.)
On eBay/Amazon the buyer never lands on our site. The entire process happens on their site.

Advantage of listing on eBay/Amazon.

Most popular and highest traffic generating sites so very good visibility for your products.
They only charge per conversion so our cost of advertising will be less when compared to comparison-shopping engines.

Disadvantages of listing on ebay/Amazon.

As the transaction happens on their channels the entire information needs to be transferred on to eBay/Amazon.
Highly sensitive to customer feedback. So one needs to be on their toes to make sure that things are going smooth on eBay/Amazon.
Setting up the account and getting started on Amazon/eBay is little tedious than setting up an account on comparison-shopping engines.

Having said all these one cannot afford to not list on eBay and Amazon. The is where the world goes for shopping online. So in the next few post I will clear document launching and building these channels to perfection.

Top 12 Comparison Shopping Engines that matter

noreply@blogger.com (Shyam Sundar.P) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:13:00 +0000

Now that we have launched Google Base, its time to short-list few other comparison search engines. There are 20 odd Price comparison search engine but we shall start with the top 12 that really matter as of today.

I have ranked them as per the Alexa traffic rank.

Shopping.com
NexTag
PriceGrabber
Shopzilla
Pronto
Smarter.com
Become
PriceRunner
TheFind

Aol Shopping
Yahoo Shopping
Msn Shopping

The set-2 has high Alexa traffic ranks but those ranks come from their Parent sites. Alexa rank for Yahoo Shopping is 1 but that rank comes from its parent site Yahoo.com. So going by these ranks will be miss-leading more so when we really care about just Comparison search.

Now that we have the list of all the comparison search engines that matter the most. We shall take one channel after the other and learn how to setup the account, build the feed and optimize the account for better ROI.

Launching Google Base

noreply@blogger.com (Shyam Sundar.P) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:08:00 +0000

The best way to get started in Comparison shopping is to start of with Google base, as its free and generates decent amount of traffic and its built and operates on the same rules like any other comparison shopping engine. The feeds uploaded on Googlebase will show up on Google search and Google product search formerly known as Froogle apart from Googlebase.

To get started on Google base you need a Google login. Then we need to decide if we need a multiple client account or a normal account. A multi client account helps you to handle multiple data feeds from the same account but with a multiple client account the reporting is bad we don’t even get the basic reporting that we usually get with the basic account.

Today we shall talk about setting up the basic account. So now that the account is set we need to build and upload feed. This can be done in multiple ways however the most common being, sending a .txt or .csv file or sending an .xml file are using the API to built tools to automatically deliver feed.

Today we shall talk about uploading feed using the very simple and basic excel file.

Now that we have decide excel is the file that we are going to use. We need to select the kind of products or categories that we are going to advertise on Google base. This is the feed specification file that will help in deciding the kind of attributes you are going to use in the feed file.

Chose the kind of products you are planning to list on Google base and then pull out the maxim no. of attributes that describe your products apart from the usual once. And Googlebase also gives you an option of adding custom attributes. The more the attributes the more searchable your products are. Once your excel file is ready with the header (all the attributes you have chosen fill the respective columns with your product details. And save the file in a .txt format. With a name let me call it the Googlebase feed file name.

We need to setup the Google base account with the basic information like the website url, communication email, payment method accepted and the time zone and stuff. So once the account is all set and the feed file is ready we need to upload the feed.

Feed can be uploaded through the interface if the feed file is less than 20mb else we need to FTP the feed using a ftp client. the FTP information can be had from the interface where there is an option to upload the feed. And before upload the feed we need to register the feed file name on the Googlebase interface with the same name with which we have saved our Google base feed file.

Once the upload is done do not for get to upload the feed at regular intervals the feed expires every 31 days. So make sure to upload the feed atleast once in a month.

Now that the account is set, feed is built and uploaded its time for us to track the results. We can track the basic data on the interface but its always good to start using the free analytics tool from Google, Google analytics. Sure will give you all the details on setting up the Google analytics account in the coming posts.