Shopzilla has already gone back to standard rates, so this should be a prime location for pushing budget to. On the other side of the coin, some engines are not rolling back rates until January 15th, so throttles should be available if needed.

End of Holiday CPC Rate Card

• Shopzilla December 25
• Gifts.com December 31
• NexTag December 31
• Shopping.com December 31
• PriceGrabber January 15
• Pronto.com January 15

Nearly all major comparison engines push their merchants to install tracking code. On the engine side, its a valuable resource to know what is happening with traffic. For shopping engines, they work to send high quality traffic that is converting, however they don’t really know what is happening with that referral traffic unless their tracking code is present on the merchant side to show a sale. Seen from the channel perspective, this is an essential ingredient to know what their merchants partners are seeing and how to ensure the traffic service makes sense from a business perspective. This ensures the comparison engine can and does deliver a valuable add financially.

The key is pairing this interest with the more tightly centered interest of the merchant.From the merchant perspective, they are looking for immediate results. From recent experience, then PriceGrabber’s code should be considered.

First, PriceGrabber has managed to greatly extend their reach this year by adding Yahoo Shopping’s network of traffic to their family. While working with other major sites like CNet, PriceGrabber has an impressive network of partners sending traffic. The key is differentiating how this traffic performs. The PriceGrabber code helps report on this network, but then PriceGrabber’s account managers proactively work with the data coming their way. While some companies have greatly scaled back customer service in cost-cutting maneuvers, PriceGrabber has made their staff much more aggressive in 2010, by seeking opportunities and ways to grow client business. By adding the PriceGrabber tracking code, a merchant should expect to see increases in ROI as the data is gathered.

To be fair, there are other important items from other comparison engines. For example, NexTag also does a good job in working with their ROI tracker to improve results, and Shopzilla’s customer survey code can create a huge amount of benefit by aggregating costumer reviews on both the Shopzilla network but also on Google Product Search. However, for this write-up, PriceGrabber’s ROI code deserves a second look if it has not been tried already.

A couple of weeks ago, PriceGrabber announced they will be launching a Deal of Day of the promotion. The idea is not new, which is highlighting one deal per day (similar to Woot.com).

What is unique, is that PriceGrabber is not charging CPC rates, but is only offering this on a CPA or commission basis. The terms are quite good as well. A retailer need only supply an item for less than the normal advertised price. PriceGrabber posts that item prominently on their site for a single day. When someone purchases the item, the processing goes through PriceGrabber’s Storefront system.

The bottom line: Merchant only gets charged 6.75% commission, plus a small transaction fee of less than $2. The product and merchant are prominently highlighted which also aids in branding. No insertion or set up fees, just tell PriceGrabber what day you want and what product you are advertising.

For those planning on Q4, you’re a little late. Pretty much all of October, November, and December are already taken. However, if you have a seasonal peak outside of those months, this is a great opportunity to highlight products.

Analyzing demographics should be thought of in a similar way. There are many different ways you can slice up an audience depending on how detailed you are trying to be and what you are cooking. Typically, marketers are looking for basic information like gender, age, education, income status, and household population (have any kids?). This type of recognition of an audience lets a merchant or marketing professional know what marketplace to use. Comparison engines are the same, except I haven’t seen much information out there, about who goes where.

Male vs. Female Demographic

Besides being sharply divided about presidential candidates, male and female shoppers also shop differently. Companies are taking notice and some are actively responding.

SHOP.COM is an interesting case study here. SHOP.COM primarily reached a female audience, and after studies showed over 70% of shoppers were women, SHOP.COM began to adjust their strategy to suit their audience. Looking to sell some dresses or make up? Perhaps SHOP.COM is the place for you because they are building around female shoppers.

Become also sees a majority of female shoppers, but perhaps not as strongly as SHOP. Other comparison engines like Pronto see a pretty even split, with an audience that is 49% male and 51% female.

Looking for a male demographic? I would be willing to bet CNet sees a primarily male audience, and based on design, I would guess PriceGrabber sees the same (but don’t quote me on that).

Reaching Out to a Minority Audience

Speaking of PriceGrabber, if you are looking for a minority or Hispanic based audience, then PriceGrabber’s PrecioMania.com site may be a good fit. Increasingly companies are reaching out to minorities because, well, there are more minorities now than before. The wonderful thing about the American audience is, they keep changing.

Many of the comparison engines reach out in their own way to different groups, so it’s safe to say that using most large 1st generation comparison engines probably touches on this audience as well.

Gay Comparison Shopping Engine?

Now here is a demographic that is tough to pin down, and quite honestly, I have never seen this in a comparison engine’s media guide. However, I noticed something interesting with a client a few days ago.

One particular item was selling very well at one channel. So much so, that it was beating many other top performing products. I asked my client why this one item, a sailor hat, was selling so well. The client explained its an odd story, but after a few months of selling this item, they realized in working with costumers that this item was primarily purchased by a gay audience.

So where was the sailor hat selling like hotcakes? – NexTag

So, does one product give a case for rock solid proof of a particular demographic? No, but it is worth noticing. As a wise man once told me, think like your costumer and try to understand who they are. Who would buy this item? And for marketers more importantly, where would they go to buy it?

Here is a quick checklist of things I would suggest doing for each of the below comparison shopping engines.

Amazon : Watch your feedback. The feedback rating of the seller is factored into relevancy and exposure for the merchant. This can even push a merchant out of the buy box. A good rule of thumb is to keep feedback above 90% or risk loosing business.

Google : This is a good tip for Google, but also for all other engines as well. Be sure to fill out all payment and delivery information as part of the company policies. Many engines sort and rank based on these items so ensure all shipping information is filled out, any international shipping options are filled out, and any payment information is properly filled out. Also, think about getting Google Checkout if possible.

MSN Live : When uploading a file, also check back for the FTP status and upload status. Live is still in Beta and Microsoft seems to have this as a lower priority. I’ve noticed many times if using an automated upload, things can periodically go wrong and it’s easy to have a feed not processing if you are not checking regularly.

MSN Shopping : Look for additional ad banners and demographic targeting. The nice thing about MSN Shopping is that as part of the MSN network, they have many opportunities to drive traffic from a specific placement in MSN Shopping, all the way to an integrated advertisement on MSN.com.

PriceGrabber : Think about adding featured products which stand out on category pages. If not check out the ROI tracking post from a few days ago: Using the ROI Tracker on PriceGrabber

Pronto : Try to encourage feedback from costumers. Pronto has a cool feedback system where users are encouraged to leave feedback on items, sellers, and manufacturers to create an enhanced 2.0 experience. To leave feedback, just sign up for a Pronto account, click on items and leave the feedback. Having customers do this can help the visibility of a merchant’s popular products here.

Smarter : Check the categorization of items. Over the course of many product feeds, sometimes an item can be placed in another category than what was intended based on the engine’s attempts to properly place products. Check back through the account user inteface (UI) and make sure all products are residing the proper categories every few weeks.

Shopping.com : Check out the recent post on title set up, best advice I can offer: Read the Directions: Optmizing on Shopping.com

Shopzilla – Bizrate : When sending bidding in the product feed, the bids which show in Shopzilla’s UI is not what is necessarily being fed in the product data feed. Make sure to not go back and forth between making bidding adjustments between the UI and the feed, stick to one system and ride with it. Lastly, do this realizing that the UI will be a quick update which can be easily seen, and the product feed update will need to be tracked on the merchant’s or service provider’s side.

Yahoo Shopping : If you are a merchant who regularly changes images, keep in mind Yahoo Shopping will never refresh an image file automatically. If you change your picture, change the image name so Yahoo can process the new request. Otherwise, if you do update the image and keep the same image file name, then you will need to call Yahoo directly and ask for a complete refresh on all images. The support is courteous and friendly, and can get this done within 24 hours.

Another note to all these and engines not mentioned would be a standard rule to set engines to auto replenishment. Many times I have seen a merchant’s feed go down because they ran out of funds. Email alerts can be set up if you have a tight budget, but keep in mind these automated alerts are just as likely to be overlooked as to go directly to your Spam folder. If at all possible, set the feed to auto replenishment so your feed is not down for days until the account is refunded.

I am writing about PriceGrabber because installing their code offers more benefit than just visibility into clicks and sales. Using this tracking code, PriceGrabber’s account managers can gain additional visibility through their internal systems to help optimize traffic coming to the merchant.

One additional benefit is being able to manage affiliate site traffic going to the merchant. As has been pointed before in previous postings and comments, comparison shopping engines use their own affiliate networks to pull in traffic to their merchants. PriceGrabber reaches out to a wide audience, including an international segment through sites like PrecioMania.com. Increasingly I am becoming an evangelist for reaching to an international audience. In working with on client recently, one of PriceGrabber’s account managers was able to determine while a lot of traffic was coming through the international arm of the PriceGrabber, the results were not in line with expectations. The account manager was able to redistribute traffic through their network to cut out poor performing traffic sources.

This additional layer of tuning to cater to online demographics relative to the merchant is just one great benefit to installing PriceGrabber’s code. I encourage each merchant out there to carefully consider implementing third party code on their site, but this is one case where I encourage it as the cost to benefit ratio clearly supports addition of this tool.

Recently I have been playing with Compete.com, which allows pretty accurate traffic measurements of sites to be taken from their systems. Playing around, I came across some interesting numbers to think about.

First, let’s take a look the power of pulling traffic in tandem. Shopping.com is one of the big sites online, as well is Shopzilla. One thing to remember is, when advertising through Shopzilla, a merchant is automatically placed on Bizrate as well. This is a powerful tandem, as Bizrate serves a large audience as well. Looking at the 2 sites here next to competitor Shopping.com, it is easy to see how signing up with Bizrate-Shopzilla, can actually provide a much greater reach than Shopping alone.

Now of course, this not exactly the Holy Grail, as this says nothing about conversion percentages or actual ad revenue. PriceGrabber for instance has a reputation for efficiency in the industry, especially with consumer electronics. This graph, will not tell us anything about that.

However, this information can help answer some questions. For instance, if a merchant is looking to pull in a large number of sales quickly, but is not concerned primarily with efficiency, then what engines to use? Now we can start gathering some good information. Let’s take one of these engines, Bizrate, and compare against a couple of up-and-coming engines, Pronto and Become.

Now there is more of a pronounced difference. It is impossible to say which may be a better over all investment, but it is useful in terms of where the numbers will skew. If a merchant is looking to move product, or looking for greater efficiency, this information may help determine the best strategy in moving forward. In fact, this same merchant may be best served by different engines at different times of the year.

Anyone looking to unload any 2007 inventory after the holidays?

In looking for items to report on, often subjects come in a bunch. Such was the case when I noticed a shopping comparison engine emerge dedicated to green aka environmentally friendly business.

The original inspiration came from Evo.com, a new green only shopping comparison engine. Evo comes packed with 20K products from a selection of over 400 different companies aimed at the environmentally conscious consumer.

The beauty is that a niche like this is possible, where 20 years ago a Green Peace advocate was considered border line communist. The other nice thing is that Evo is not alone. Here is a quick list of green oriented shopping comparison  destinations:

 Evo.com

PriceGrabber – ShopGreen 

HGTV Marketplace – Green Section