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- Gentlemen, Start your Engines – Shopping engines, that is
Gentlemen, Start your Engines – Shopping engines, that is
- By Rob Aronson
- Published 10/30/2007
- Search Engine Marketing
Rob Aronson
Rob is the founder of Avenue A| Razorfish’s search engine optimization department.
He serves as the senior search engine optimization expert for the agency, and oversees the agency’s feed management offering. In addition he sets the strategic vision for all organic search technology product development initiatives for Avenue A| Razorfish.
Rob has over 7 years of experience in planning, executing, and tracking search engine marketing campaigns for clients across a wide range of industries. He dedicates his time to researching the rapidly changing search industry so that the team can anticipate, and respond accordingly to, changes in the search engine marketing landscape. Rob conducts frequent training on best practices in search engine optimization, working with our clients’ in-house optimization, marketing, web services and IT teams.
With the shopping season race about to start most online retailers have maxed out their paid search campaigns, unleashed the SEO folks, increased their ad media buys and are still looking for incremental volume that will help move the needle. They need to look no further than the shopping engines.
Fueled by a spate of acquisitions, shopping engines have come into their own. The three largest players in the shopping and product comparison space were acquired: eBay acquired Shopping.com, Scripps purchased Shopzilla, and Experian acquired PriceGrabber. The combination of new marketing dollars, added distribution partnerships and Yahoo! and Google expanding their own shopping offerings has resulted in the shopping engines increasing their reach by over 66% in the last several years. Two driving forces behind this growth are vertical creep, vertical listings that appear at the top of organic search engine results and below top sponsored listings, and the shopping engines employing aggressive SEO and SEM efforts. It is not uncommon to have more than half of the 20 total listings on the first page of the search results (includes paid listings, organic listings, and shopping listings) lead a user back to a shopping engine. It is therefore not surprising that a recent study from Hitwise revealed that 10% or more of all traffic on the major search engines is sent to a shopping property.
Unlike traditional search engines, the shopping engines don’t employ spiders to index content; instead they rely primarily on advertisers to push content to them via an XML feed. Fill in as much data as possible in the feed: Searchers on shopping engines often search for items with attributes in the query, such as particular sizes, by price, color, etc. The more information you provide in your feed the more likely your listing will appear against these searches. Since these searches are extremely targeted, the conversion rate for these terms tends to be high.
Once a user selects a product they often will sort thro
ugh the list by price. If possible consider using bulk price or rebate pricing so that your listing will appear higher up.
Opt in to participate in user satisfaction surveys: Merchants have the option of enabling customers from the shopping site to complete a survey rating their experience shopping on the merchant’s site. Merchant ratings/reviews play a significant role in determining where a site will appear on many of the shopping engines. If your site has a high enough rating, it will be considered a trusted store and marked as such next to your listing.
Consider using logos: Many of the engines allow advertisers to include a logo with their listing. This will often lead to a significant increase in click-thru rate as it helps your listing stand out on the page. It should be noted, however, that there is a significant increase in the cost when using a logo, which can sometimes make this ROI-prohibitive.
Map your products to the appropriate engine categories: The shopping engines have their own category taxonomy that typically differs by quite a bit from that of the advertiser. In order to ensure that your categories are properly placed into the right shopping engine you will want to make sure that, in the feed, you are assigning your products to the appropriate category according to the shopping engine. Since every shopping engine uses different categories, this can be a time consuming process.
Take advantage of the shopping engines that offer the ability to bid on a per product basis, (Nextag, Shopping.com and Shopzilla). Currently most engines only allow bidding on a per category basis. It has been my experience that most merchants are not taking advantage of this and therefore there is a real opportunity to bid up your most profitable products.
“Let the Race Begin”! Happy Shopping.
Fueled by a spate of acquisitions, shopping engines have come into their own. The three largest players in the shopping and product comparison space were acquired: eBay acquired Shopping.com, Scripps purchased Shopzilla, and Experian acquired PriceGrabber. The combination of new marketing dollars, added distribution partnerships and Yahoo! and Google expanding their own shopping offerings has resulted in the shopping engines increasing their reach by over 66% in the last several years. Two driving forces behind this growth are vertical creep, vertical listings that appear at the top of organic search engine results and below top sponsored listings, and the shopping engines employing aggressive SEO and SEM efforts. It is not uncommon to have more than half of the 20 total listings on the first page of the search results (includes paid listings, organic listings, and shopping listings) lead a user back to a shopping engine. It is therefore not surprising that a recent study from Hitwise revealed that 10% or more of all traffic on the major search engines is sent to a shopping property.
Tips and Tricks to Maximize Return
There are several things that can be done to improve your ROI in the shopping engines:Unlike traditional search engines, the shopping engines don’t employ spiders to index content; instead they rely primarily on advertisers to push content to them via an XML feed. Fill in as much data as possible in the feed: Searchers on shopping engines often search for items with attributes in the query, such as particular sizes, by price, color, etc. The more information you provide in your feed the more likely your listing will appear against these searches. Since these searches are extremely targeted, the conversion rate for these terms tends to be high.
Once a user selects a product they often will sort thro
Opt in to participate in user satisfaction surveys: Merchants have the option of enabling customers from the shopping site to complete a survey rating their experience shopping on the merchant’s site. Merchant ratings/reviews play a significant role in determining where a site will appear on many of the shopping engines. If your site has a high enough rating, it will be considered a trusted store and marked as such next to your listing.
Consider using logos: Many of the engines allow advertisers to include a logo with their listing. This will often lead to a significant increase in click-thru rate as it helps your listing stand out on the page. It should be noted, however, that there is a significant increase in the cost when using a logo, which can sometimes make this ROI-prohibitive.
Map your products to the appropriate engine categories: The shopping engines have their own category taxonomy that typically differs by quite a bit from that of the advertiser. In order to ensure that your categories are properly placed into the right shopping engine you will want to make sure that, in the feed, you are assigning your products to the appropriate category according to the shopping engine. Since every shopping engine uses different categories, this can be a time consuming process.
Take advantage of the shopping engines that offer the ability to bid on a per product basis, (Nextag, Shopping.com and Shopzilla). Currently most engines only allow bidding on a per category basis. It has been my experience that most merchants are not taking advantage of this and therefore there is a real opportunity to bid up your most profitable products.
Caution Flag
One of the major challenges in working with the shopping engines is the lack of a uniform format for their feeds. Currently each of the engines requires different information in unique formats. This, in combination with the difficulty in managing frequent inventory changes, is why most large retailers outsource their feed management to a third party that has the technology to seamlessly manage the building and optimizing of the feeds for the different engines.“Let the Race Begin”! Happy Shopping.
