BenWinchell.com

In my last post, we talked about the importance of product level bidding on CSEs that offer it. Today I’d like to look at the shipping cost field that nearly all shopping engines provide. While I typically like to preach about including as much information in your data feed as possible, the shipping cost field can be an exception depending on the shopping engine.

For example, Shopping.com adds the price of shipping from the data feed into the price of the product in their product listings.

Listing in Shopping.com - Price of item w/ Shipping cost ($94.96)

Listing on site - Price of item w/out Shipping cost ($89.97)

Shopping.com’s willingness to show the shipping cost plus the cost of the product in their product search results can have a negative effect on your traffic from the engine. Think about it, if two companies are offering the same product at the same price point but one is showing the shipping cost in addition to the product’s price, which merchant do you think will get the click? I’d put my money on the merchant with the lower price showing.

Try removing the data in the shipping cost field for the Shopping.com feed and see what it does. There may be a positive change in clicks and conversions. Please note that not every shopping comparison engine uses the shipping cost the same way Shopping.com does, so please make sure to know how each engine uses each piece of data.

Shopping comparison engines are often overlooked as a substantial part of an e-commerce site’s marketing mix. These engines don’t typically have the reach or flexibility of search engine CPC advertising, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be effective. One thing many merchants lack is a strong plan of action with regards to their data feeds. Rather than rambling off the same ole’ tips on making sure you include as much data as possible in a data feed, I’d like to instead focus on one field - the product bid.

Not all shopping engines offer product level bidding, but the ones that do offer it give data feed managers an extremely useful tool. Most e-commerce sites will not go through the pain of optimizing their product level bids, so bids will automatically be set to the category minimum. This gives other merchants a great opportunity to dominate the engine listings.

To start, use the analytics tools the engines give merchants to see what products are converting well and have a positive ROI. Generally, increasing the product level bids of the best converting products with a positive ROI is the best place to start. Since most merchants only bid the minimum amount in their product category, increasing the bid by $.01 or $.02 is often enough to get the best converting product listings to the top. Just because a product performs well in one engine, does not mean it will perform well in another engine. Each engine should be optimized separately.

Product level bidding is not just used to better product listing positions. It can also be used to zero out product bids and remove them from the listings. This is extremely helpful for keeping the costs of the engines down. Products that have a negative ROI and don’t convert well are prime candidates for zeroing out.

Shopping engines can be an excellent source of traffic. Tapping into that traffic is as simple as serving the engines a fleshed out data feed, which includes the product bid field.

One of my favorite SEO sites, SEOmoz has a user written article about how to make Joomla more search engine friendly. This is a great read for anyone that is using Joomla and has experienced SEO problems with Joomla.

There are multiple problems with Joomla from a SEO perspective:

1. Dynamic URLs - I’ve run into this problem before at work. The problem with our URLs is you can get to the same page multiple ways and our breadcrumb navigation is essentially in the URL, so many of our pages can have multiple URLs diluting the SE relevance for each page. In Joomla’s case, URLs aren’t keyword rich, and instead are assigned cryptic and random numbers.
2. Headline Tags - Out of the box, Joomla doesn’t allow header tags (<h1>), which are a key component of on page SEO.
3. Meta Data -Again, out of the box Joomla doesn’t allow the customization of the meta data, such as title tags (very important), description, and keywords.

I’m sure there are more, but those are the ones that I have come across in my limited experience with Joomla. It is comforting to see there are solutions for dealing with these issues

Yep! Thats the plan. I’m officially building a site around those lovable cardboard creations. From the looks of it, the market is fairly small and not too competitive. A perfect situation for me to start affiliate marketing. I’m working on setting up the site with Joomla, but it is going a bit slower than I’d like because of my lack of experience with the Joomla source. However, what I have come up with is pretty nice. It is true what they say about Joomla, it is very versatile. My goal is to have the site working by the end of next weekend. Hopefully that won’t be too difficult!

I’ve applied to a few affiliate programs and have been accepted to some already. I have domain name ideas for each niche and am just wondering if my hosting provider will allow multiple domains in the capacity needed. I need to do a bit more research in each of those areas before I make a final decision on what domains to buy and what programs to take part in. I’m also wondering what type of CMS I should use for each page. I’m most familiar with WordPress, but it sounds like the flexibility of Joomla is something worth considering. I’ll probably go with WordPress because of the easy to use SEO plugins it has.

Hopefully, I’ll have a couple more domains bought and at least a shell of a site by the end of the day. I also need to set up the blog for Lisa and me. This will be more about day to day activities and will give us a chance to relay wedding information to our guests. Check it out at http://www.benandlisablog.com. Also, I’ll be working on fleshing out this site. I’ll keep you posted!

I’m out.

Coming from a fairly extensive background of SEO, e-mail marketing, and CSE feed optimization, diving into affiliate marketing seems to be the next step in my personal evolution in the internet marketing space. Of the three internet marketing channels I have experience with, SEO is sure to be most helpful in the affiliate marketing space.

I signed up with Commission Junction today and began browsing potential partners to build an affiliate program around. Nothing has really jumped out at me yet, but with my day to day work in a very seasonal e-commerce niche, I’d like to work on something a little less seasonal. Obviously it has to be something I’m interested in, but I definitely don’t want to jump into an over saturated market - especially since this will be my first site based foray into aff marketing. I’ll work on this a bit tomorrow, hopefully I’ll get a better idea as to what I want to do with some sleep.

I’m outtie 5000

Welcome to my blog. I’ll be using this to post random thoughts, ideas, and so forth about my life and my non-job related ventures into Internet Marketing.