Comparison Engine Dominos: New Rate Cards

Sometimes changes in an industry seem to be followed immediately by a cascade of other changes, as a domino effect takes hold. I don’t want to say that such a change could happen for rate cards in such a tight knit industry such as comparison engines. I don’t have a spy located in various board rooms for example, but it is interesting that there have been a flurry of rate card changes in the last week by 5 of the major shopping engines. So, without going deeply into the ripples of cause and effect, I’ll go through each change in the order they were announced.

Shopping.com

Shopping continues to be the most innovative in billing, by supporting a value based rate card which fluctuates on the measured value of the traffic source that Shopping is using to drive traffic to the merchant site. The formula is defined by Shopping as the following:

 [Rate Card CPC]    x   [Publisher Quality Score]    =    [Billed CPC]

This formula paired with changing rate card CPCs by category and price level, gives Shopping a continuously variable CPC rate which is both innovative and difficult to pin down sometimes. The rate changes went into effect on May 16th, so it’s already out in the wild. The full rates can be seen at: Shopping Rate Card

Shopzilla

Shopzilla aka Bizrate, was the next domino to fall, announcing rate card changes effective June 1. Shopzilla has been good enough to provide a break down of current and effective CPC rates in June. As with many of the rate card changes on the engines, there is a mix of higher and lower CPC rates being put into place. You can find the complete review here: Shopzilla Rate Card Effective June 1

NexTag

Now the ball really gets rolling. A few days later this month, NexTag announced their rate card changes for June 1. NexTag’s changes are pretty heavy toward increases, but there are some decreases as well. Included in this change is the creation of many new categories, so merchants should be aware of the updates since this likely means a change to the product feed to include the new mappings. The NexTag taxonomy can be found here: NexTag Categories. In the update, NexTag did not including a rate card link, so merchants who are looking for new rates should check in their NexTag administrative tools.

Amazon Product Ads

Amazon followed up a few days later by announcing their rate card changes. The rate card changes have been nicely summed up by Amazon in their announcement. There are 36 categories effected, with 117 other categories left untouched. Of the 36 categories, 32 categories are seeing increases and 4 categories seeing decreases. As with NexTag, the CPC rates are located in the merchant’s admin panel, so there is no public link to provide. Amazon is also consistent on the date for the changes, which is June 1.

Become

Only a day behind Amazon, Become announced their rate card changes only a few days ago. There is no summary, so merchants should review to see what categories have been changed and how this effects overall expenses. The good news is that Become is giving more time than the others, making the changes effective June 15. The rates can be found here: Become Rate Card

Overall, any merchant who has tight controls on ROI, should keep June 1 circled on the calendar. More than likely, things will fluctuate on that day and adjustments may need to be made later on the month once the changes have a chance to yield a new pattern. Fortunately, there is no rate change on Google Product Search.

June 1st, 2011