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Next Tuesday SingleFeed is running a Webinar on Shopping Engine Success. Register now. We’ll cover 5 straightforward tactics to improve your results on the shopping engines. Whether you’re listing on Google Merchant Center, Shopzilla, or NexTag, this Webinar will give you the tools you need to succeed.

Join us next Tuesday for Top 5 Tactics for Shopping Engine Success

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.

So there are just 30 days until Black Friday, and a few more than that until Cyber Monday. You’ve hopefully got all your ducks in a row for holiday promotions, shipping, and are prepared for the increased traffic and sales. You have Google AdWords campaigns primed and ready to go, and you’re probably encouraging your affiliate partners with commission incentives. It’s the calm before the storm, the troops (you and your ecommerce team) have dug in to the trenches and are ready for the wave of shoppers, warehouse shipments, and customer support inquiries. Have you checked your shopping engine data feeds? What are you doing to optimize your products on the shopping engines like Google Product Search, Nextag, Yahoo Shopping or Pricegrabber? What about ensuring your shopping engine accounts themselves are ready for the holidays? Here are some tips for your Holiday Comparison Shopping Engine Campaigns. You can also review Ben’s post from last holiday season.

Check your feed for:

• Accurate prices – Double check the price for your products in the feed and on your website. During the holidays we recommend daily uploads of your feeds to ensure accurate
• Working URLs – We recommend taking a few minutes to spot check product urls in your feeds on a regular basis. This will prevent you from submitting broken feeds which could be very costly.
• Stock status – Uploading your feed daily ensures you’re posting the correct stock status and/or quantities to the shopping engines. You wouldn’t want to keep paying for clicks on an engine when the product isn’t in stock and the order cannot be fulfilled.
• Spelling/grammatical errors – No one ever wants to see typos and misspellings in your product data, and why submit poor data to the engines (especially paid engines).
• Google Base Expiration Date – If you don’t update your feed regularly (which you should) then when was the last time you submitted to Google Product Search? Check your expiration dates on your product listings, it would be bad if your items expired because their 30 days was up.

Check your shopping engine account for:

• Sufficient funding – CPC based shopping engines should have sufficient funds so that your account doesn’t run out and your listings go offline during peak holiday shopping. We suggest using the auto replenish feature which is available in most shopping engine account centers.
• Store information – the shopping engines allow for you to post your store’s support phone/email, return policies, payment methods and more. Be sure this information is up to date.
• Tax and Shipping – We’ve posted on this before and encourage you to update (or plan to) your shipping rates as needed.
• Promotional Messaging – There may be special programs or messages you can display with your listings like “Free Shipping”, displaying a logo, or phone number.
• Poor performing products – Products that don’t convert well on your site or other marketing channels need to watched carefully so that you’re not wasting money. Remove them from your feed and investigate after the holidays.

If  any of this sounds overwhelming, or you still have questions, consider the help of SingleFeed to submit, manage and optimize your listings not only for the holiday season but year round. Many merchant’s are benefiting from our product categorization, correct wizard, optimization and regular submission. Ask us how we can help.