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.