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.
