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Many CSEs have promo messaging fields to use things like FREE SHIPPING or GIFT WITH PURCHASE.  Be sure you are using a compatible promo message for each engine, as not all the messages can be used to every shopping engine.  Be careful when including promotional text in your product titles and descriptions themselves, as this violates the policies of engines like Google and your listings can be flagged for removal.

Updating your shopping engine data feed frequently is important, especially during the holidays.

With increased web traffic and sales, you’re likely to be selling out of products or introducing new items for the holiday season.  You’re also likely to be changing prices and marking products as “on sale” and it’s imperative that you update feeds to the shopping engines so they have accurate information on your products. There’s almost nothing worse than a shopper clicking on a CSE ad (costing you $) to find the product out of stock or at a different (higher price). Many of the shopping engines do factor in the “freshness” of the data feed and take into account how old or stale a feed is and will deem your listings less relevant.

Even if your product information doesn’t change at all, we still suggest regularly updating your feed.  SingleFeed updates merchants feeds daily, and we would say that you should do weekly updates at a minimum.

A lot of merchants fail to use popular keywords in their product titles. This is one of the most common areas we see for merchants to optimize. I wrote a few posts in the past about product title optimizations in the past which I suggest you read.

The classic example is the fictitious website “VacuumUniverse”. They only sell vacuums and vacuum parts and accessories. The product titles they have use a name like “Eureka 1000″ or “Hoover UltraClean” but don’t use the word “vacuum” in them. When they send out their data feed they miss out on traffic for searches which contain “vacuum” or “vacuum cleaner”.

Go into your analytics reports  and get your top 10 keywords. Insert keywords into your products as you see fit.  This doesn’t mean go hog wild and stuff every product with you top keywords.  In the example above, it would make sense to add the word “vacuum” to your titles.

You could also use the product category as a keyword. If you sell blank media like cds and dvds then transform your product title from “TDK X213 50 pack” to “TDK DVD-R Media X123 50 pack”.  If you had used the first version and a shopper searched for “TDK DVD-R” your items wouldn’t show up.

Also try using Google’s new Instant Search and start typing in a keyword and see other popular variations you could use.

Collecting and maintaining user reviews and ratings is an important activity to participate in as a merchant. Let’s face it, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of merchants out there selling the same or similar products as yours. Why should they by from your store (aside from price)? Give them the confidence to buy from your store by collecting post-checkout reviews which are displayed in the search results on the comparison shopping engines.  Google Product Search does not have it’s own survey, but instead collects merchant ratings from a number of other comparison shopping engines, as well as Google Checkout. If you want merchant reviews on Google but aren’t offering Google Checkout as a payment option, you’ll need to institute the survey scripts from the other CSE’s.

Install 1 post-checkout review script:

Some merchants may only be using 1 shopping engine, or  only able to install 1 pop-up script. Install whatever review survey you can.  I recommend the Bizrate/Shopzilla one, as its reviews are collected and used on Google Product Search.

Install multiple post-checkout review scripts: If you have multiple scripts there are a few ways to go about handling the serving of these surveys.

1. Serve all scripts to pop-up (not advised)
2. Rrotate each script to take turns and pop-up (best approach)
3. Serve the script based on the last clicked source and pop-up (most complex approach).

Here’s a SingleFeed Support article about ROI trackers and Survey Tools.

Setting up Tax and Shipping – Looking to improve your conversion rates on the clicks that come from the shopping engines? Chances are you may not have ever setup tax and shipping rules for your comparison engine accounts when you opened them.  For some advanced merchants, you’ll want to control the tax and/or shipping costs in the data feed itself, but for less sophisticated merchants you can setup shipping rules from each CSE account interface in just a few minutes.  It’s important to set these values in your comparison engine accounts like Google Product Search, Nextag, Shopzilla, and Become.com. Each shopping engine should have a section in the account interface to setup or edit these settings.

Shipping Prices

1. Based of Product Price – If you use a simple shipping table with shipping cost based off the price of the product/order, then follow the steps to replicate that shipping table in your shopping engine accounts. It should only take you 2 minutes per shopping engines.
2. Based of Weight and Zip Code – Retailers who rely on carrier (UPS, USPS, FedEx) calculated rates based on weight and destination zip code will use this method. You will need to provide shipping weight in the data feed so the shopping engine can lookup the rates and estimate them for the shopper. This shipping cost is an estimate, it will likely be slightly off from the calculation on your website especially if you have discount UPS rates, or they add something else to their cart to increase the weight of the order.
3. Free or Flat Rate – If you ship all products at a flat rate (or free) then specify the shipping amount.

Note that if you have more than one of these methods offered you may have to provide shipping values in your data feed.

Tax

1. No Sales Tax – In some cases, you may not charge sales tax.
2. By State or Zip – You can specify the tax rates on most CSE’s by State and some offer tax rates by zip code.
3. Tax on Shipping – Some merchants also charge tax on shipping so be sure to set that up if available or applicable.

When thinking about data feed optimization (DFO), the first step we talk about at SingleFeed is proper engine set up and feed delivery.  Did your products actually go live on the shopping engines?

The second step in DFO is the quality of the data feed.  Are you including more than just the basic product attributes?  Are you categorizing all your products properly?  Do your titles and descriptions include proper keyword phrases?  And lots lots lots lots more!

But as we move into the holiday shopping season where clicks and click costs increase, merchants need to give some thought to a third step: Quantitative Data Feed Optimization.  While that sounds fancy, I’m just talking about doing some basic math to make sure you’re not wasting money on the shopping engines.  For example, if you get 400 clicks/month on engine X for product Y and it’s costing you $0.40/click, and you’re not recording any sales through those clicks, then maybe you should suppress that SKU from that shopping engine.  Each merchant will have a different profit margin, but the basic rule applies that if a product is not performing at all on a shopping engine, the maybe you shouldn’t send it to that shopping engine.

Some data feed management companies jump right into this type of quantitative optimization without first concentrating on the quality of the data feed, which means that they are suppressing SKUs unneccesarily and usually cutting your catalog in half.  That’s wrong.  However, if you’ve put in the time and effort to provide the shopping engines with great data, and you’re not seeing the results, don’t be scared to suppress some SKUs.  Some products just won’t work on all the shopping engines.  That’s fine.  It gives you the opportunity save money or shift that ROI negative spend to a better performing product.

The next 10-12 weeks can mean everything to some merchants, as it’s not uncommon for select retailers to earn 60-80% of their annual business from Q4 holiday shopping. What better way to ensure you’re getting the most from your comparison shopping engine feeds than by asking us for feed advice! We’ll be responding to merchant’s questions and providing tips and feed advice for the next few weeks, so send us your questions.  Simply reply with a comment to this post and we’ll respond with another comment or maybe a whole new post if we think the subject is valuable!