Thinking About Shopping Comparison Engines:Part Two

This post comes to you courtesy of Brian Smith. In the first post of this two-part article, Brian talked about concerns merchants may have with shopping comparison sites. In part two Brian discusses how to get started with shopping comparison engines.–Paul

Step 1: Make sure you’re ready to track everything. Yahoo! Store provides basic analytics through the “References”’ link under “Statistics”. You might also consider upgrading to analytics packages like Google Analytics, WebTrends, or Coremetrics.

Step 2: Sign up with the shopping comparison engines. Start with Google Base (it’s free) and then add: Yahoo! Shopping, NexTag, Shopping.com, PriceGrabber, and Shopzilla. There are many other shopping engines, but working with these six will give you a good idea of how the marketing channel performs. Think of this as a test. Spend at least $100/engine in order to collect the data you need to make informed decisions going forward.

Step 3: Set up your data feeds. You can start with an automated data feed submission program, but realize that this feed must be optimized to get great results. To use the Yahoo! Store automated feed, you’ll need to enable the export of the feed. To do this, click the “Search Engines” link under Promote in the Store Manager and click the radio button next to “enable” in the Export Store Content section. When you sign up with the engines, they will ask you if you want them to grab this XML feed. When you sign up for Google Base, the system will instruct you to sign up for their Google Base Store Connector service.

As I explained earlier, though, using these automated solutions is just a first step. You don’t just put up a website and expect Google and Yahoo! to rank you #1 for all of your products. You don’t just put up an ad on Yahoo! Search Marketing or Google Adwords and expect to get all the clicks and all the sales. Working with data feeds is no different. The most basic data feed optimization tip is to include as much data as possible in your data feed. Don’t just submit the minimum basic requirements or else your products won’t be found by shoppers browsing or searching.

Step 4: Analyze your results and refine your data feed. Some products will sell well on the shopping comparison engines. Some won’t. You will want to make sure you’re only listing the products that sell or you’ll rack up click costs producing a terrible return on investment.

Brian Smith
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

Brian Smith runs SingleFeed, a self service data feed management, submission, and optimization system for small and medium sized merchants. He is also an Analyst for the shopping comparison engine industry through his blog, ComparisonEngines.com.

Update: 3/22/07–Internet Retailer posted an interesting story related to this topic about how LampsPlus is setting a minimum ROI threshold below which certain products are not fed to the shopping engines. This really ties into step 4 listed above and may actually be something you want to consider prior to submitting your feed. Read more.

Thinking About Shopping Comparison Engines:Part One

This post comes to you courtesy of Brian Smith. Brian runs SingleFeed, a self- service data feed management, submission, and optimization system for small and medium sized merchants. He is also an analyst for the shopping comparison engine industry through his blog, ComparisonEngines.com. In the first post of this two-part article, Brian will talk about concerns merchants may have with shopping comparison sites. Part two will discuss how to get started with shopping comparison engines. –Paul

There are so many online marketing channels to pay attention to, that it’s extremely difficult to keep up with all the options, let alone effectively launch new campaigns. Whether you’re a small or large retailer, you’re most likely already thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) and have implemented a pay per click (PPC) marketing campaign on Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords. And you’re already overwhelmed. Then you add on email marketing, and an affiliate program, and you think you’re done. Well, don’t forget about the shopping comparison engines!

Shopping comparison engines have been around for years, so I’m sure you’ve heard of Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com (Dealtime, Epinions), Shopzilla (BizRate), NexTag (Calibex), PriceGrabber, and Google Base (Froogle). You might have even tested out this marketing channel in the past. Most likely, you’ve also been a consumer on one of these shopping engines as 1 in 3 Internet users pass through a shopping comparison engine during the peak holiday shopping season.

From a consumer perspective, shopping comparison engines allow shoppers to research products through buying guides and reviews, quickly see which merchants are reputable, and determine a good price for a product. From a merchant perspective, shopping comparison engines can deliver targeted, highly converting traffic as consumers using the engines are figuring out where to buy and how much to pay.

While the shopping comparison engines started out selling electronics, the soft goods categories like apparel, shoes, furniture, and cosmetics are now the fastest growing categories and total sales in these channels now rival sales of electronics. In fact, anything that you can think of is probably being sold on the shopping comparison engines.

Unfortunately, the shopping comparison engines have two strikes against them. First, most retailers think of them as price comparison engines. Second, shopping comparison engines can be more difficult to work with than the PPC engines. I’ll address these two issues and then tell you how to get started on the shopping engines.

Price Comparison Engine or Shopping Comparison Engine?

Many marketers think that if they can’t compete on price, they shouldn’t even try participating in the shopping comparison engine space. While price plays an important part of anyone’s buying decision, there are many other factors – ratings/reviews, promotional messaging, bidding – which influence buying habits on the shopping comparison engines. In other words, it’s very easy for a small business to compete on the shopping engines. I’d even argue that the small guys have an equal chance of attracting attention on the shopping engines because they have the flexibility to manipulate data quickly and easily, while the big guys are doing limited optimization and often relying on their brand.

Also, by participating in the shopping comparison engine ratings/reveiws game, you have an opportunity to build up additional credibility for your site, which is always important for small and medium sized merchants. Once you have generated enough positive reviews on Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, and other shopping engines, you can display their ’seal of approval’ which can increase your store’s conversion rate.

Are Shopping Comparison Engines difficult to work with?

As opposed to PPC engines which might take a couple minutes to set up and a day at the most to get ads live, working with shopping comparison engines is definitely a lot more labor intensive. To get on Yahoo! Shopping, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, NexTag, or Google Base, a merchant must create a data feed. These data feeds contain a list of products and associated attributes like product description, SKU, UPC, category, sale price, shipping weight, brand, etc. There are more than 100 defined product attributes and an unlimited amount of custom attributes. Most shopping engines require 8-10 attributes for each product.

Getting access to all that product information and manipulating it to fit the format of the shopping engines is a tough process. Many ecommerce providers, including Yahoo! Store, provide an automated data feed submission service, porting your product data to the shopping engines, but I recommend manually managing your feed or working with a data feed management company that stresses data feed optimization. While working through the automated data feed solution is a great first step, the data sent to the shopping engines doesn’t always meet the standards of those shopping engines. Or think of it this way, if everyone is doing the basics and you’re optimizing your feed, you’ll be ahead of the pack.

I’m not saying that this will be easy, but the good news is that the work you do to set up your data feed can benefit your company in other areas. For example, I’ve worked with many merchants that had access to Manufacturer Part Numbers (MPNs) and Manufacturer Names, but never included this data in their database/catalog because they saw no reason to put the information on their website. By forcing the merchant to include MPNs in their catalog, the merchant was not only able to send this out to the shopping comparison engines, but also publish this information on their website and therefore rank well for targeted search engine queries that include the MPN or Manufacturer Name. In other words, the information you use in your data feed can also be used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

Furthermore, data feeds with good titles, descriptions, and other attributes like catalog, color, size, age range, etc., are great for generating keyword ideas for PPC bidding (on Google Adwords/Yahoo! Search Marketing/MSN AdCenter). As opposed to just bidding on train set, you can big on [insert color] train set, [insert age range] train set, etc. Viewing an Excel spreadsheet with all the attributes in a structured format can help you come up with hundreds if not thousands of additional keywords/keyword phrases.

Brian Smith
Guest blogger for Yahoo! Small Business

stay tuned for part two: Getting Started with Shopping Comparison Engines

Come Dine at the Search Engine and Marketing Smorgasbord

If you are like me, you may spend a bit too much time trying to keep up with the latest industry news and trends regarding search engines optimization and marketing. It’s certainly fair to say there is an avalanche of information out there with more added each day. As such, when I read about recently released Pipes, a feed aggregator (and manipulator) from Yahoo!, I thought it may be a more efficient way to keep up on the latest articles and research.

What Pipes allows you to do is get a bunch of different data feeds and create a mashup. Now you can get really creative with these such as combining several feeds, finding posts with a high number of views or comments, filter out duplicates, and show only the first 50 posts such as this mashup of digg, del.ico.us, reddit and slashdot. What I wanted to do was bring together some of the top SEO and Marketing blogs and put them all in one place for busy merchants to read. So here is the feed I put together called the Search Engine Smörgåsbord, one part search engine optimization, one part online marketing, spiced liberally with comments, and served fresh.

So what blogs are included? I pulled the top SEO blogs from Search Engine Journal’s top SEO blogs of 2006.*

• SEOmoz
• SERoundtable
• SEOBook
• Stuntdubl
• SEO by the Sea

Then I added top online marketing blogs pulled from Todd And’s Power 150 list. I didn’t pull the exact top five blogs here, but rather five that I felt had a lot of posts which would benefit small business owners/marketers.

• Duct Tape Marketing
• Copyblogger
• PronetAdvertising
• MarketingProfs Daily Fix
• Online Marketing Blog

So if this sounds interesting you can subscribe to the Search Engine Smörgåsbord and read the aggregated posts from the above blogs in your favorite newsreader. Now before you cry out in stunned disbelief and set your fingers flying to post a comment that I left out dozens of notable and worthy blogs in each category realize this—it’s only a starting point. The best part about Pipes is it is collaborative. You can edit my list to remove feeds or add feeds as you see fit. If you do, come back and post the link to your pipe and why you added particular blogs. In short, what dish are you bringing to the Smörgåsbord?

Also, and perhaps quite importantly, I recommend visiting each of the above sites and spending time there to read the archives and full-length articles. The blogs will keep you up on the latest news, but you should really peruse them in their natural environment so to speak to get the full benefit of them.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business

* Astute observers will note Matt’s absence from the list despite his presence in the top 5. This is not to discount Matt’s contribution to understanding search engines (which is massive and highly beneficial). Rather, this is more an acknowledgment that his blog is not specifically about SEO in the way that the others are, and more so that he is like EF Hutton—when he talks, people listen. As such, most of you likely have his blog bookmarked already.

Free Wisdom While Supplies Last

Ever wish you could hang out and have a drink with over 100 top marketing professionals. Imagine the stories, lessons, and other nuggets of wisdom you could pick up and apply to your business. Well I’m not sure what bar you would need to go to or what conference to crash in order to find them, but thankfully you don’t need to go farther than your computer.

Marketing Sherpa, a research firm for professional marketers, has polled their readers and compiled stories, lessons, and insider tips from over 100 marketers. The 60-page report is available to download for free. FREE!!!! Here is a list of the topics covered and the number of entries for each:

• Search marketing (17)
• Email marketing (21)
• Blogs and podcasts (9)
• General marketing and advertising (13)
• Social networking (6)
• Websites (16)
• B to B marketing (14)
• On the job (14)

While some of these tips come from enterprise-level companies, and thus may not always be applicable to smaller businesses, the information should be invaluable for you in terms of thinking about your own marketing efforts. There is a nice blend of both strategy and tactics and all the stories are short and to the point, because no one has less time than small business owners who don’t have the luxury of huge marketing departments or limitless budgets to bring in hired guns.

Marketing Sherpa: Marketing Wisdom for 2007

So download and print this one out, and pull out the tips you think could help drive your business. Sipping on your favorite beer or cocktail while reading is optional.

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business