LoveYourFeed.com

If you’re a Shopping.com merchant, you may have noticed an email in your inbox this last week entitled “The Product Condition Field”. Shopping.com has supported this field for a long time, but they are starting to make it a required field. There are three values you may use: New, Used, or Refurbished. All pretty self-explanatory stuff. If you use SingleFeed to submit your products to Shopping.com, don’t worry – no change is required on your part. We already require this field within our own format. So we’ve been sending this data to Shopping.com ever since you signed up with us! If you’re not a SingleFeed merchant, you’ll want to jump on changing your feed to comply with these new requirements in order to keep your listings published. 

Online retailer Ingram’s Water and Air was able to increase overall site traffic by 20% using SingleFeed’s shopping engine optimization services: 

“After only a few months, Ingram’s realized a 20% increase in monthly visitors, resulting in $39,000 in incremental monthly revenue. On Google Product Search, now one of their most productive channels, Ingram’s benefited from a ranking increase on many of their top keywords and numerous products were appearing in the coveted Google OneBox.”

You can read the full PDF case study here. 

When managing a shopping engine campaign, it’s critically important to monitor performance and make necessary adjustments to improve your bottom line. Since your ads at a shopping engine are product based, you need product level reporting in order to determine what actions to take (like increasing a bid, removing a product, or modifying the ad). There’s a lot of tracking tools out there, but a lot of them (including Google Analytics) aren’t powerful enough to drill down into a per product, per channel (i.e. per shopping engine) basis. As you look for a tracking solution to help you best manage your shopping engine campaign, make sure that you have this level of detail. If you’re already using SingleFeed as your data feed management provider, you probably already know that we have a few types of reporting solutions that can provide you with this level of detail!

With regards to tracking tools, we’re frequently asked, ”The shopping engines all offer their own tracking solution. Should I use theirs, yours, or just stick with my current tracking tool?” This is a great question. Our general philosophy is that you should definitely have more than one tracking solution available to you. No tool is going to be 100% accurate all the time, so it’s nice to have a second and sometimes third perspective. A lot of merchants who currently use Google Analytics will also utilize our tracking tool and maybe a couple ROI trackers from the shopping engines. Which brings me to my next point.

We’ve found a couple shopping engine analytic tools that not only provide you with relevant product level data, but also come souped up with technology to actually IMPROVE your performance on their shopping engine network:

– Shopping.com has a powerful feature built into their tracking tool called “Value Based Pricing”. What this means is that they monitor your products performance across their network of shopping sites. As they cull your click and conversion data, they will actually reduce your bid (in some cases to below their minimum) on poor performing products and/or network sites. You can read more about it in their recent merchant newsletter.

– NexTag also offers a powerful ROI tracking tool, dubbed the “ROI Optimizer”. Using historic click and conversion data across all merchants within your category, they factor your products performance into their search algorithm, potentially downranking poor performing products and upranking better performing ones. The theory is that they are providing the user (shopper) a better experience by serving them the most relevant (i.e. most frequently purchased) products.

Feel free to explore these options as you look to optimize your shopping engine campaign. And please post any questions or comments!