The Kitchen Sink : Part 3 : Manage YOUR feed

by Paul O'Brien / Tuesday, 03 October 2006 / Published in eCommerce, Search

So here it is, part three of Comparison Shopping optimization… The Kitchen Sink

Last Monday, I started at a high level for which most of you have to do some research about your own store before moving forward; that is, Comparison Shopping is not about direct demand gen, users don’t buy immediately after clicking from CSEs, and you have to consider the brand and awareness benefits of Comparison Shopping.

I followed that Tuesday with the Kitchen Sink scenario; that marketers don’t include products that don’t perform, therefore, they don’t exist to consumers. You have put everything in the feed, including the Kitchen Sink, to get in front of everyone.

So how do you improve your ROI!?!?

As a marketer, Comparison Shopping is an extension of your datafeed; though you may have multiple CSE partners, Comparison Shopping is simply one outlet. Your job is to focus on your feed, NOT Comparison Shopping. As a result, you can optimize your feed and use it for many other things.

How many of you use your feed to generate paid search keywords? Having trouble with that long tail? Can’t come up with 15k terms? Once a month drop your feed in excel, strip out the prices, descriptions, etc. and you are left with product titles, skus, and URL; all you need to drop them into Paid Search.

Have an affiliate program? Many affiliate are able to display your products in a search or catalog format and vendors (Performics, Commission Junction, Linkshare) support distribution of your feed as a channel for Affiliates.

How’s your natural search program? I’d bet, as a store, you’re having mountains of trouble because of your ever changing catalog and dynamic links. I seem to recall that your datafeed is a daily update of your catalog and the links that would do well as a Yahoo SSP (Paid Inclusion) file or restructured to a Google Sitemap.

The list goes on… I can’t give away all the secrets in one post (I won’t have anything else to blog about!). So stay tuned, bookmark, subscribe, or whatever you want to do, I’ll get into more detail later. For now, focus on your feed and think of other uses than Comparison Shopping.

Related Questions

How does IaaS apply to startup development organizations (SDOs) specifically?

Incubators and accelerators have a serious, operationally complex job: give founders access to global mentor networks, connect them to investors, manage deal rooms, deliver curriculum, and track relationships over time. Most do it with a stitched-together combination of video tools, Slack groups, shared Google Drive folders, and spreadsheets of mentor contacts nobody updates. The program director becomes a part-time IT administrator. What an SDO actually needs is civic infrastructure; purpose-built and comprehensive enough to deliver on what it promises founders. Ironically, an incubator's job is to teach founders to stop building things they don't need to build, and then those same incubators do exactly that with their own operations

What's the difference between a startup ecosystem and an entrepreneurship program?

Entrepreneurship programs teach skills. Ecosystems are economic environments where the conditions for high-growth companies to form and scale actually exist. A city can run excellent programs and still have a dead ecosystem; they're not the same thing.

Why do ecosystem builders focus on the wrong things?

Because what's visible is not what's causal. Event attendance, media coverage, and accelerator cohort size are easy to count. What actually drives ecosystems (trust networks, capital recycling, sector-specific talent density) is harder to measure and even harder to claim credit for.

What's the difference between an entrepreneur, a business owner, and a startup founder?

These three categories overlap but are not the same. A business owner runs a company, often for stability and profitability. A startup founder is building for exponential scale and disruption, often with venture capital. An entrepreneur is a personality type characterized by risk tolerance, a drive to improve things, and a compulsion to act, even without permission, resources, or approval. Many business owners are not entrepreneurial. Some of the most entrepreneurial people never start companies. Some startup founders are entrepreneurial; others are simply ambitious employees with equity.

Why do most investors miss the IaaS opportunity?

They're looking at the application layer (the products built on top of infrastructure) rather than the infrastructure itself. Infrastructure companies are often invisible to end users by design, which makes them easy to overlook in consumer-oriented market maps. The companies processing trillions in transactions or verifying millions of identities annually don't show up in App Store rankings or product reviews. Their customers are other companies, not people.