Using the ROI Tracker on PriceGrabber

Many of the comparison shopping engines have ROI trackers that can be inserted and used to track results. For merchants who do not have either a great analytics package, or perhaps not the fortitude to drill down through many different layers, installing the CSE’s ROI tracking code can be a great window into what is performing and what is tanking.

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.

February 22nd, 2008