Paul O’Brien is a smart guy who knows the shopping comparison space, having worked at one years ago, and now responsible for managing feeds (among other online marketing activites) for HP Home & Office. You should definitely read his Kitchen Sink posts:
-The Kitchen Sink: Part 1 argues that merchants should treat their shopping engine listings like a catalog and include all product listings regardless of ROI
-The Kitchen Sink: Part 2 reinforces Part 1 by discussing a frustrating buying experience on Shopping.com
-The Kitchen Sink: Part 3 talks about improving ROI on the shopping engines
While I appreciate Paul’s arguments for including all product listings on the shopping engines regardless of ROI, it’s not something I recommend to small and medium sized businesses. I’ve just never met an online SME that could justify a marketing channel with a negative ROI.
Shopping comparison engines are a crucial part of the online shopping industry, with 10s of millions of consumers ending up on one or more of the engines each month (the shopping engines are extremely aggressive search marketers). A great reason to get up and running on the engines. Furthermore, Paul references a Yahoo! study which says that “of the total $32.5 billion spent on the Consumer Electronics products tracked in this study, online research influenced 77 percent or $25.1 billion.” Another great reason to get up and running on the engines…if your products can also be found in the local Best Buy.
While Paul’s strategy might make sense to larger businesses with large scale online and offline business operations, I would argue that small and medium sized businesses should actively manage their data feeds and cut listings which aren’t performing. And yes, SingleFeed just implemented functionality that easily enables merchants to send different product sets to different engines.
Tomorrow I’ll talk about some strategies for cutting your feeds…for now, make sure to read through Paul’s posts and make sure to set up a 3rd part tracking system ASAP.
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.
