One of our clients recently reported a very poor conversion rate. As opposed to having issues with one or two channels, which is actually common depending on the merchant’s type of product and target demographic, the poor ROI was seen across all of the shopping engines. This typically indicates a universal feed problem or site-related issue on the merchant’s end. We began investigating by spot checking many of the client’s product links. The first thing we noticed was that each product page was taking, on average, ~5 seconds to load. This caught our attention.

In our experience in the comparison shopping space, and the e-commerce space in general, landing page load times can easily impact your marketing campaign’s performance. The average online shopper today has no patience. They want their order delivered yesterday. Even a several second load time delay on your site can prompt them to hit the back button, increasing your site’s bounce rate. What’s worse: if that visitor was coming in via a comparison shopping engine, you got charged for the click the moment they left the CSE even though they never even landed completely on your site. It doesn’t take a savvy marketer to know that’s not good for business.

This certainly isn’t a new hypothesis or a groundbreaking industry discovery. Yet, at the same time, I don’t believe that load time issues have been thoroughly tested. We don’t even know for sure if this is causing the poor performance for our client. Regardless, it is an important factor for all merchants using the comparison shopping engines to consider. While this isn’t exactly a DFO (data feed optimization) tip… we’ll file it under miscellaneous CSE tips.

Check out Bryan Eisenberg’s post “Time is Money”

Does anyone use promotional messages in their feed? What are they for? Where are they displayed? Do all the shopping engines support the same ones? Will they increase my conversions? Yes, no, maybe so? That’s what this post is meant to explore: this oft forgotten field.

A promotional message (or marketing message, as Nextag calls it) can be associated with individual products and, in theory, allows the merchant to differentiate their product listing and compete on something other than just brand, price, etc… For example, you might want to say “buy one get one free” or “free gift card with every purchase” or “15% off all electronics!” or “free shipping”… Whatever the message, the shopping engines that support this field display it somewhere alongside your product listings, typically only on a product (or “compare prices”) page.

Can you find the promotional messages below?

Some engines (Pricegrabber, Nextag, Yahoo! Shopping & Shopping.com) let you enter any message you want within certain character limits. I think this makes the most sense. Other engines (Smarter & Shopzilla) limit you to a pick-list of predetermined messages. I understand that they are trying to create uniformity, but I don’t like this limited implementation as much. Some engines (TheFind & Pronto) don’t support promotional messages at all. Become.com has a field in their feed for promotional messages but doesn’t display them on their site. For Google Base, you can enter it as a custom attribute. Dealing with the different requirements for each engine can be a pain for merchants and so that’s one of the issues we try to help with over at SingleFeed.

Most of the engines offer this differentiator for free, with the exception of Nextag, which tacks on 5 cents to your CPC for the applicable products.

No one really talks about this field and it doesn’t appear that many merchants are even taking advantage of it. I’ve noticed that the adoption rate varies by both product category and shopping engine. A greater percentage of electronics retailers seem to use this field and particularly on Shopping.com. Not only have I noticed more adoption in tech goods than other categories, but a lot of the same retailers are using this field across all the engines… The likes of Beach Camera, Abt Electronics, & TigerDirect almost always seem to be using a promotional message. Is there something they know that everyone else doesn’t? Is it simply that more differentiation is needed in a fiercely competitive, low margin category like consumer electronics? I’d be interested to hear some feedback from merchants out there who have experimented with this field and what they’ve found. Does it increase your click-thrus? Does it increase your conversions? Is it a complete waste of time?

[edit/addition: Pricegrabber does not accept promotional messages in the feed. Contact your account rep and they can manually activate it for you].