News & Press

There are now a lot of shopping search engines about, are they really worth the effort.  The pain of adding a shopping search engine is stumping up the deposit, building a product feed and mapping your categories to their products.  If you use software like Magento it is likely that some of the feed scripts have been done for you but still there is a lot of effort to get it right.  Then there is the problem of every shopping search engine wanting you to put their tracking code on your order thank you page, when you already have a thousand and one things on there.

But

If you have reached a point of saturation with PPC and you have a lot of products then it is probably worth your while in getting onto shopping search.  It is especially important if you sell branded items that are recognisable that people will be searching for.  If you only sell you own brand then it is going to be more difficult.

I would start with the common ones such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com as the setup is relatively painless.  But make sure you do track to conversion.

We started off tracking just the referrer of the traffic to the sale, so we could see when shoppzilla was giving us sales but nothing more.  We could not see which products were getting the most hits and if there were products that were eating the budget and not converting.  We now track the shopping search engine and the product being clicked through to so we have more visibility.  Admittably I have not done anything with this information yet but at least I can see at a glance which products are selling.  If ROI does not look good on a certain shopping search site then I could limit the product feed to only a popular product category or brand.

Be vary of how you read your stats.  With most ecommerce purchases made on the person’s second visit albeit on the same day, most sales will not get counted against the shopping search engine.  What I mean is, people will come to the site via a shopping search engine, look at your products and then go and view the competition – then they might google your brand name and come back to the site and buy.  This sale would then get attributed to the ‘brand name’ search term in your stats.

To solve this you really need to be adding something to the cookie of a person stating what the referrer of the first visit was.  This can then be added to the person’s order details as a hidden field.  If you have this information can can periodically export out the order detail against email address and orginal referrer and calcuation your life time customer value according to referrer.  This is great as it shows you how much a lead is worth from each campaign source.

Well thats it for my ranting for this week.  It is the weekend already here in Auckland, whilst my UK team are just getting up and facing the sloth of emails I sent to them today. I have my parents coming to stay for 4 months (eek) so I better go and buy a spare bed for them!

Have a good weekend.

Mark