Product level bidding will help set you apart from the competition.
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.