LoveYourFeed.com

A few posts back we recommended that if you are advertising your products on NexTag and Shopping.com, you ought to consider installing their respective ROI Trackers. These ROI trackers in particular not only give you another vantage in which to view and analyze your campaign performance, but more importantly, they can boost performance, getting you a higher return for your advertising dollar.

Add Become.com’s newly improved ROI tracker to our recommended list. We recently found that they have made significant improvements to their ROI tracker. Once installed, it will track your products’ conversion rates and use that information to provide a ranking boost to products that are performing well and downrank poor-performing ones. This should improve your conversion rate and ROI! Thanks Become.com!

SingleFeed currently offers an all-in-one shopping engine tracking solution, allowing you to see real-time click and conversion data across all shopping engines in one handy online interface. Even if you have our tracker installed, we still recommend that you install these ROI-improving trackers from NexTag, Shopping.com, and now Become.com.

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!

Before you try to refine your data feed, you first need to do the following:
-Set up a log analyzer program with conversion tracking
-Append shopping engine specific tracking URLS to the end of your product links (do not submit the same exact link to multiple engines)
At the very least, with this data in hand, you can track conversion per engine and sales/revenue per engine and hook this information up with cost data provided by the shopping engines to figure out simple things like engine-wide cost per acquisition (CPA) and ROI. From there, you can completely turn off an engine if it’s not a profitable marketing channel. Alternatively, if you’re doing great on all the shopping engines, you can increase all categories/keywords bids.

While completely acceptable, the problem with this strategy is that it looks at each engine as a basket of products when there are most likely some products which are hurting your overall ROI and other products which are helping your overall ROI.

In other words, a smarter (but more time consuming) strategy would be to figure out profitablity by product listing/SKU. If you want to succeed on the shopping engines, you must do this. If you are thinking ‘but Yahoo! Product Submit, Shopping.com, and others don’t provide this data,’ you’re right. Here’s a simple workaround: take SKU based reporting information from Shopzilla, NexTag, and Become, and generalize the profitability findings across the other shopping engines. Truthfully, I hate this strategy because traffic from Shopping.com is different than traffic from PriceGrabber is different than traffic from Smarter.com, but it’s the best way to handle the situation for most small and medium sized retailers. At the same time, everyone should be demanding (send an email a day) SKU level reporting from the engines which don’t offer it.
As for which products to cut and which to keep, I’d start by grouping your SKUs into three groups:

-Red: Products that get lots of clicks but no sales OR sales at a very negative ROI
-Green: Products that get clicks and sales at a positive ROI
-Yellow: Everything else

Before doing the obvious – cutting the ‘Red’ products from all paid shopping engines – make sure to check the categorization for your products. I’ve seen handbags, sweaters, and camcorders show up in the iPod category with proper, non-iPod pictures, but still get a ton of irrelevant clicks. While it’s a long shot that is the fix for your ‘Red’ products, it’s worth at least a quick check on the outliers. Ok, now cut your ‘Red’ products.

Now, as opposed to cutting the ‘Yellow’ products, take the time to look at the feed attributes – product name, product description, category, etc – and optimize the listing. Maybe your title is misleading. Maybe your description is pathetic. Maybe your image is so small that you’re getting curiosity clicks. Maybe you didn’t include shipping cost information. Maybe you didn’t include tax information. In other words, spend time optimizing your feed. These are the types of activities that you do with your PPC campaigns, why not dedicate the same effort to the shopping engines.

After cutting the ‘Reds’ and optimizing the ‘Yellows’, resubmit your feed to the shopping engines. Repeat this process once per week.

Disclaimer: All optimization strategies are suggestions and do not guarantee success. These are data feed optimization tactics I have used or others have suggested which I think everyone should at least think about, if not test. Use at your own risk. Or don’t use, just keep coming back.

Related Posts (which got me in trouble with some shopping engines)
-A Case For Product Level Bidding (June 5, 2006)
-Guest Commentary – JP Werlin on Product Level Bidding (June 6, 2005)