ChannelAdvisor

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 3

Yet more Q&A from our Google Product Search webinar:

Q9) Does it make any difference to send 2 different product feeds for Google Base and another for Froogle? or just one for Google Base?

A9) We're not sending any legacy Froogle feeds any more but I am aware of an instance where Google was still processing and using a legacy Froogle feed as recently as a few months ago. However, keeping those live in addition to a Base feed is superfluous when the feeds contain the same products. If the ID values of the items in the two feeds are the same and are tied to the same account/domain, the feeds are just overwriting each other.

Q10) You mentioned sending a feed every day.  Is that necessary if there is no change to the list of products?

A10) I wouldn't say necessary, but I will still suggest it. The webmaster video we pointed to talked about the importance of freshness so automating a daily process helps ensure you aren't penalized. That being said, I think if you missed a day once in a while the effects would be minimal, probably not even noticeable. But only sending a feed once every three or four weeks is definitely not ideal.

Q11) How can we distinguish (in Google Analytics) between organic results traffic and GPS-originating traffic?

A11) You can add campaign variable tags to the URLs in your feed. Google doesn't allow for redirect tracking in Google base feeds but any and all parameter based tracking functions are allowed. See here for more from Google Analytics.

Q12) Do you know if Bing is on the Google approved list to send along pixels when checking out trough Google Checkout?

A12) Since Google and Microsoft are direct competitors, it did not surprise me that I did not find Bing on the list of approved tracking partners for Google Checkout. Atlas still is, however. I don't recall when Atlas was added to this though I would guess they were present since Google Checkout launched and therefore that they were grandfathered in . It also could be that Bing didn't even try to become part of this list. (Update: Siva Kumar points out that Jellyfish is on the list. I assume that means if you have the old pixel installed it will continue to work. The new pixel documentation contains tracking on the Bing domain, so I would guess for merchants installing the current pixel, Bing will not see Google Checkout orders.  Thanks, Siva!)

Q13) (a) Does having Products duplicated affect results? (b) Does your Ranking, eg Alexa ranking have any affect on the position you appear in Google Shopping?

A13) (a) Duplicated content is generally frowned upon. If multiple domains with the same product content are found by Google to be part of the same company, they will shut all but one of them down. If you submit the same product content multiple times with different ID values, you are really only hurting yourself as you are putting yourself at risk of having your account disabled. In addition, you are potentially spreading your own traffic out across multiple records in the Google database. Since it is very likely there is some sort of popularity aspect to the algorithm, doing this is probably hindering the ability of a single instance of that product to gain traction.
(b) Since Alexa is owned by Amazon, I doubt Google has access to that data. Even if they did, I'm not sure they would use it since they are more likely to trust their own metrics. It was suggested long ago that the page rank of the product URL played a role in the algorithm. I've tried testing this before but haven't found anything conclusive, mainly because most product pages don't have page rank. If the page does have rank, it could play a role but it doesn't seem to be strong and in my opinion, this makes sense. Page rank is typically correlated to authority on a topic and justified based on strength of content, but strong content does not suggest best retail offer. Price and customer service (quantified through merchant ratings) are much more important to most consumers than web site content and therefore should be weighted more heavily.

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 2

More Q&A:

Q5) Google suggests a 30 day expiration period for products. Is there value in optimizing this attribute? for example, does it help to set a 7 day period over a 14 day period?

A5) I haven't ever given this much thought. My first instinct is to maximize the time in case something goes wrong with feed processing on either your side or Google's. That being said, this does seem to tie on some level to their emphasis on data freshness, but it seems unlikely to me that this would be an algorithmic aspect. I see it more as a boolean, either expired or not expired.  Because of that, I don't think I'll be encouraging anyone to test shorter expiration dates as it seems like too much of a risk, but if you are feeling bold, there is always a chance it could pay off to give it a try.

Q6) Google only allows 70 characters in the short description.  Are only 70 characters actually used in the matching algorithm or is it just a display consideration.

A6) I've tested this many times and the data does not appear to be ignored by the algorithm, but it's possible that it could be treated as less important. One way to combat that possibility is to repeat the title at the beginning of the Google description. It's also possible it is already considered on par with the description. However, I see items with more than 70 characters in the title at or near the top of search results pretty often so there doesn't seem to be any harsh punishment in place. 70 is an arbitrary number so there is no reason to think the data less relevant because it sits at the 71st character.

Q7) a) You mentioned that dramatic changes can have a negative effect on your feed. would you say something like adding shipping to your entire file would fall within dramatic? And if so, do you think removing it would be just as dramatic of a change and instead best to just wait it out? b) Does the Amazon Product Ads require UPC code like Amazon Marketplace does?

A7) a) Anything that involves changing all line items in the feed definitely qualifies as dramatic, but for shipping specifically, I would suggest implementing it. This is especially true if you have free shipping on your items because I feel users are likely to use the "free shipping" filter. You could argue that since traffic is free, it makes sense to NOT display all information in order to give the user more incentive to click through, but I think shoppers are likely to gravitate to where shipping rates are easy to find. b) UPC is not required but it definitely helps Amazon in their matching and categorization process. If you have it, I suggest including it. If you don't include it and your product should be associated with a product page but does not get associated with it, you will probably miss out on exposure because that product page will get the majority of the traffic.

Q8) Any idea on how much is Bing's CPA rate?

A8) You set your own rate, but please note that the rate will impact rank on matched pages (via low to high price rank) and could be part of the results algorithm as well, so the more aggressive you are, the more likely you are to be found. We've seen some retailers experience a noticeable increase in sales when they increase the commission rate.

Google Product Search Webinar Follow Up - Part 1

Thanks to all those who joined us on Thursday! We got a lot of questions and though we answered quite a few at the time, there were many more we just couldn't get to. We want to answer them all but also want to make the answers visible to other attendees, so we'll be answering a few at a time via this blog. If you didn't get a chance to ask a question on Thursday or have thought of one since then, feel free to post as a comment or email to csestrategies at channeladvisor dot com.

Notes: You may see only part of your question appear on one of these posts. If some part of your question is very specific to your business, expect an answer via email to that part. If some part was already answered, we likely will not repeat it. Also, if you have an experience that differs from what you read here (which wouldn't surprise us considering the fluidity of the GPS system) please share!

First a few links.
Google Base help form: This will help guide you through some commonly encountered issues with Google Base/Product search.
Google Help Forums: Community driven forums but Google folks do participate.
Google Error form: Use this if you are getting an error and can't get it cleared up through help form or the forums.
Google Webmaster Video on GPS best practices: There are a few valuable nuggets of info in here.
List of Google Rating Sites: The most complete list I've seen and some good conversation about GPS in general, courtesy of SEOmoz. I can't say I agree with everything on this page but since the GPS algorithm is hard to pin down, different omerchants are likely to see different results.

Now on to questions:

Q1) Is GPS scraping the web reviews or in active feed partnerships with the review sites?

A1) I've never asked this directly but I read on the forums once that it is done every so often, i.e., not regularly, suggesting it is a scrape. I would say this is consistent with what we see. Sometimes a merchant's ratings are totally missed even though they are easy to find (via Google of course) and sometimes they lag behind significantly in terms of freshness. I just saw a merchant rating on PriceGrabber from the 18th that is not appearing on the merchant's GPS review page more than a week later.

Q2) I recently saw that the Google tag product_type is now being used in the Google product search as categories  in the filter options. Do you think it is important to map categories to google product_types, rather than use out current categories as custom product_types?

A2) My guess is that most users don’t use the filter options on GPS pages. For one thing, the GPS pages are probably not the main source of traffic for GPS listings. The “one-box” we talked about on Thursday, which appears on regular Google SERPs, likely comprises a much larger percentage of traffic and those pages don’t have such filters. Second, the Google user experience is all about searching, so I think users are more likely to alter their query than they are to look for/use filters. Finally, Google used to place such filters on the top of GPS pages but moved them to the bottom, probably because they were rarely used. That being said, Google definitely wants merchants to use the existing taxonomy. Consistent classification makes data much easier to organize and use. Google hinted a long time ago (before the new taxonomy rolled out) that creating your own product type was not a great idea but I'm not sure if this is still true. Doing so won't cause the item to fail but I would suggest not creating your own values if you can avoid it.

Q3) When Mark and Scot were talking about ways to structure variation relationships I didn’t quite under stand what they meant when talking about separated by comma.  Our data feeds are built and adjusted using excel, but saved as text files (tab delimited).  One of our big sellers is bedding, including sheets, would it make more sense to continue to have each color, each of which has a unique MPN, in a separate line or do something more connected?  And if it would improve our ranking to connect the different colors of each item, what would be the best way to do that? Finally, if the product type doesn’t exist in the GPS taxonomy, does it do any good to make your own?

A3) The reference to the use of a comma as a delimiter was not intended to refer to the delimiter of the entire feed. We just meant that submiting variant options in a comma separate list in an attribute and/or the description was a good idea if you choose to send parent SKUs in the feed. So if you had a sheet set in five sizes, instead of sending five line items, you could send one line item and include in the "size" attribute "king, queen, twin, full" or whatever sizes are actually available. If you did this, you could also include a comma separated list of MPNs in the mpn attribute (though you only want to send one ID value). The potential move from parents to children or vice versa is a significant change and shouldn't be taken lightly. I don't do a ton of shopping for bedding so I'm not sure how the typical bedding shopper searches.  However, when I search on "blue sheet set" in GPS, almost every item in the first ten results also has the size, even though I did not include the size in the query. This makes me think the size is primary for consumers. Try the same with "king sheet set" and see that most top results do not include color. Doing what competitors do isn't always the best answer but I think it's unlikely you'll rank well on queries with the size only if you also include the color in titles. If you have any data that suggests how bedding customers shop, I would consider that in your decision, but based on this quick test, I would say you definitely don't want to send separate colors with comma separated lists of sizes for sheets. With regard to the product_type attribute values, see question 2.

Q4) Strategy 5 talks about expanding into low risk CSE's and specifically talked about Bing.  Given that Bing shopping is buying a product feed from shopping.com (and we send product to shopping.com) I am wondering how helpful this would be? I would love to get some insight into: (a) how the purchased feed results would rank on Bing vs. a feed sent direct to Bing (if the feeds were basically the same) and if they might cancel each other out (duplicate listing are sometimes eliminated or punished in the rankings) And (b) the economics of the CPC shopping.com feed being sent to Bing vs. the CPA direct to Bing model (in your experience which is really more profitable)

A4) Bing is displaying your shopping.com data because the old MSN Shopping platform, which is no longer visible at shopping.msn.com, is still active behind the scenes. That platform has used data from shopping.com and pricegrabber for a long time and it continues to be used for any merchant not sending data directly to MSN/Bing. They aren’t allowing for duplication – Bing listings appear in lieu of anything coming through the old msn shopping platform (which as I said includes shopping.com and pricegrabber). In terms of rank, the answer can vary depending on whether or not there are other merchants selling the exact same item. If so, your listings sent directly to Bing would likely appear higher than your current shopping.com listings because the default sort on product pages on Bing is price low to high, but (here is the important part), the price displayed is NET of the cashback to the consumer. Look at this page and expand the little plus symbol. You’ll see the actual price is higher than what Bing is displaying, meaning the Bing advertiser is getting a boost by participating in the cashback program. In this case, it didn't have an impact on the rank of that item within the page, but if they increased their cashback offering from 8% to 15%, they would rank first.

For items where there is no direct competition on the product and therefore no matched page, I would guess Bing still gives weight to merchants in the cashback program, but the final ranking is likely heavily determined by the user’s query and some sort of popularity (historical traffic/CTR). This probably applies to how the product pages themselves are ranked in search results as well.

With regard to profitability, I would say the majority of the time, a CPA model is preferred. As mentioned in the webinar, it limits risk, but also because of the nature of the Bing model, it gives you a lever for testing the Bing market specifically. What I mean is, you can try increasing your cashback from 7% to 10% on Bing, effectively lowering the price just for Bing users, and seeing if that drives an increase in volume. Even at a lower margin, the higher volume may mean more total profit.

More to come!

CSE Marketing in a Tough Economic Climate

In case you haven't heard, the economy is having a bad hair day. Because of declining consumer spending, all marketing initiatives are being evaluated at many retailers. It's a sad fact, but marketing on comparison shopping engines can be labor intensive and depending on several factors, expensive. There seems to be a trend of online retailers reacting to these conditions by slashing budgets and in some cases, pulling feeds down completely. While decreasing budgets may be necessary, for most retailers, eliminating the program completely is not the best way forward.

Below are thoughts on what retailers should keep in mind when considering the future of their CSE campaigns. Though there may be other issues facing retailers right now, such as challenges surrounding credit, product sourcing, etc., these comments are intended to be independent of such complexities.

• Give credit where credit is due: I sometimes hear merchants say "my CSE program isn't working," when the reality is usually "only part of my CSE program is working." Most retailers currently operating on CSEs have some subset of products that are selling consistently. Our experience is that the many products that repeatedly sell on CSEs are very efficient and usually profitable. Even if the total campaign is not achieving your goal, some products probably are. If a Google AdWords program was operating below goal, I doubt many merchants would completely shut it off. They would lower bids and probably remove certain campaigns, adgroups or keywords that are not performing. CSE is no different in this sense. Recognize successes within the campaign and keep them going. It's an extreme step, but if your business is in crisis mode, removing all products except for this subset of consistent sellers can result in much lower costs while retaining some profitable revenue.
• Rebuild slowly: If you do take this sort of action, you will probably find that the products that are working are a small piece of your overall product set, which makes it likely that the cost incurred by those items is also a very small part of the total cost of the campaign. Recall from past discussions about the long tail of CSE feeds that in most cases, the majority of cost comes from activity on items that drive no revenue. This means your newly slimmed down CSE campaign may be over-efficient. This is what we often see when we take this approach of cutting out the long tail completely because the majority of the risk and uncertainty is removed. If this is the case, it may be best for your business to take that extra efficiency to help offset some other channel, but many retailers will be able to reinvest in CSE. Do this by re-introducing products/categories into your feeds to try to get the maximum revenue while still operating within the construct of their financial model. The best way to do this is to start slowly and watch to see how the reintroduced products/categories perform.
• Focus on your strengths: Regardless of economic conditions, most consumers will continue to shop based on value. Price sensitivity will certainly increase, but issues of quality and trust never completely vanish. Therefore, when choosing products/categories for reintroduction into your feeds, it is best to be realistic about your value proposition and how you measure up to your competition. You wouldn't be in business if you didn't do something right, so focus on including only products or categories where your value is strong.
• Maximize CSE feature use: Having a strong value proposition is key, but it is not beneficial unless it is clearly communicated. Many CSE marketers overlook the basics, such as completing the CSE merchant account interfaces with accurate payment types and customer service info. These elements can impact your rank and conversion rate. In addition, user reviews become even more important as consumers are less convenience-oriented and more value-oriented, so be sure to participate in these programs whenever possible. Display of shipping costs, tax info, promotional messages and coupon details should be maximized as well. Your goal should be to convey your value to the consumer as clearly as possible before any clicks are made. Providing as much information as you can will help protect, if not increase, your conversion rates and ensure your competition isn't winning for the wrong reasons.
• Understand the long term impact of your actions: I can't emphasize this one enough. What you do today on CSEs has a direct impact on your future ability to drive CSE revenue. Many CSEs have some sort of popularity function that is based on historical activity. This means that if you take your products down for a few weeks or months, getting back to where you were is very difficult, as if you were starting over from scratch. In addition, most CSE review programs require recent feedback in order to display those rating on their site. If you already have a positive merchant rating, keeping your campaign live is the only way to protect it. The bottom line is that if you pull your best products down today, you are seriously risking that revenue stream not just for the time those products are down, but for much longer.

If anyone has specific challenges, please share them and I will do my best to help.

Managing the long tail

My team and I deal with inventory sets in the hundreds of thousands.  Such large product catalogs cause logistical pains, but in many cases, the larger issue is getting to profitability when the aggregate cost of that "long tail" of low click, non-revene generating products outweighs the revenue generated by the head of the distribution. Sometimes, this is the case whith feeds that are smaller in size.

Below is an example that shows the order distribution by sku of one of our merchants over a 30 day period. This data is for a single CSE, but the total distribution looks very similar.  The x axis is the number of products in the feed, and the y axis is the number of orders each of those products generated. The most important thing to note here is that though the x axis ends at 4000, the total number of offers is actually around 20,000, which means the long tail goes well off your monitor.

Take a close look at the percentages in each of those areas (click to enlarge).  Over half the cost lives in that long tail of products, the majority of which have incurred just a few clicks.  This means the individual product cost is almost invisible, but in aggregate, this poses a serious threat to profitability.  The gut reaction for many is pretty simple. Chop off the long tail and leave in the feed only the products that have generated revenuve (ROAS will double!).  This is where that middle yellow range comes in to the conversation.  That range represents products that generated exactly one order over this time frame.  If no action is taken, the next 30 day distribution will likely look similar to this, but the products that appear in that middle area will not be the same products next time around. So if you blindly chop off the entire long tail, you're likely cutting off a big portion of your future revenue. You then wind up with a similar distribution that does have a shorter tail, but also a much smaller head.

The ideal solution is to remove only the correct products from that tail.  The question is how do you define correct?

There is no way to get it right every time. As soon as you remove a product, you risk losing revenue that could have come on the next click. But most retailers will find there are products that just aren't worth including. Here are a few ideas on how to identify those. Please note that all of these can be loosened or tightened based on your business's tolerance for risk.

• Reverse-engineer your target conversion rate: Look back at the equation in my last post. Drop in the product cost, the CPC you are paying and your target ROAS, then solve for conversion rate. Divide 1 by the result and you have your click bogey. If the product gets that many clicks and no sales, it is officially in a hole. Unfortunately, the above distribution is the result AFTER applying this rule regularly. It also is only addressing the head of the cost tail, not the really long part of the tail. This approach can help cut an unusually large portion of your cost that comes from a relatively small number of products. You could also occasionally widen the time frame on the data set used in this analysis to catch the second tier of products that are not meeting that target conversion rate, but taking longer to reach the click tolerance level.
• Reverse-engineer a price filter:  Try the same exercise as above but solve for AOV. Use your current conversion rate on the CSE in question. The result is the theoretical inflection point of product level profitability.  Products under that price are less likely to work in the long, assuming they convert at or below the standard rate used in the equation.  If you have a lot of products at a low price point, you may wind up with a much smaller feed, but hopefully a higher ROAS.
• Use data from outside your CSE campaign:  If you have 100,000 products, odds are some subset of those products (possibly larger than you'd care to admit) have never sold on your website.  Well, if that long sought after first sale does come some day, it is as likely to come via a CSE as it is to come from any other marketing initiative.  But if you are fighting this problem, it may not make sense to include that initial marketing cost here. Since CSE CPCs are pretty much flat, advertising these self ascribed long tail products is a risk. These products are probably either incredibly niche, or there is a problem with the offer itself (probably the price).  If they do generate traffic, it will probably only be a few clicks, but that is exactly what we're targeting here.

written by Mark Vandegrift -- markv at channeladvisor

The Importance of Conversion Rate

"How can I improve the return I get from Comparison Shopping Engines?"

This is by far the question I hear most from merchants using CSEs. The answer is pretty simple: Improve your conversion rate. Making that happen, however, isn't quite as easy.

First, let's look at why conversion rate is so critical.

Unless you can drastically increase your average order value or miraculously pay less than the minimum CPC, increasing conversion rate is the only way to impact performance since it is the only remaining piece of the equation. The main reason for this is that CSEs basically charge you the same price for every click. Whether that user searched on your brand or your exact product title, or if that user stumbled across your product through a browse mechanism, the cost to you is the same. Qualified traffic and non-qualified traffic look identical from the merchant's perspective.

So now on to the hard part...how do you increase it? While there is no silver bullet, there are some best practices you can follow to maximize this metric.

• Categorize products appropriately
• Ensure titles and descriptions are accurate
• Populate as many feed fields as possible
• Submit clear and accurate images
• Ensure your action URLs work, take the user to a page where the product in question can be easily located and that the price matches the price on the CSE
• Complete the Merchant Information section in the account login area of all CSEs
• Actively remove products that do not convert
• Unless you have already done so, analyze and improve the landing pages on your site

Reviews/ratings on CSEs can impact conversion as well, but only if those reviews are positive, so be sure to provide great service to keep those ratings high.

Ideally, comparison shopping engines will one day expose some level of information as to how a user found the product listing, suggesting some indication of how likely that user is to purchase after clicking, and charge the merchant appropriately. In the mean time, doing everything possible to maximize your conversion rate without the benefit of that insight is your best bet.

"What if my conversion rate is nowhere close to my goal?"

If you use the equation above and enter in your actual average CPC and order value, plus your ROAS goal, you can solve for your target conversion rate. If your current conversion rate from your CSE initiative is significantly different, you may need to adjust your ROAS goal. You can also work to increase your average order value by removing low priced products from your feed or via promotions such as $10 off orders of $100 or more. However, if your target conversion rate is 2% and you are sitting at 0.5% (difference of 4X), it's unlikely that attempts to quadruple average order value will be successful.

written by Mark Vandegrift -- markv at channeladvisor

Meet the Engines

It's just a day of great news!

I wanted to let you all know about "Meet the Engines," a new webinar series for merchants who want to increase their products' visibility on CSEs and search engines. 

So who's coming?  In each webinar, you'll hear:

• Reps from CSEs and search engines on how to be more successful at getting qualified leads and conversions
• CSE and search engine experts at ChannelAdvisor

Interested? Click here to register for all seven at once.

Here's a general idea of what you get:

• An overview of each engine
• Each engine's selling benefits
• The best ways to get visibility
• Tips and best practices for success
• and the secret sauce...tips and exclusive info from ChannelAdvisor experts

The series covers MSN Search, Google Product Search, TheFind.com, Google Search, Shopping.com, Yahoo! Search and Pricegrabber.com.  It happens once a month, so be sure to mark these dates on your calendar:

• MSN Search – Wednesday, May 30, 2 p.m.       
• Google Product Search – Wednesday, June  27, 2 p.m.       
• TheFind.com – Wednesday, July 11, 2 p.m.       
• Google Search – Wednesday, July 25, 2 p.m.       
• Shopping.com – Tuesday, July 31, 2 p.m.       
• Yahoo! Search – Wednesday, August 15,  2 p.m.
• UPDATED: Jellyfish – Wednesday, August 29,  2 p.m.   
• Pricegrabber.com – Wednesday,  September 5, 2 p.m.

Interested? Don't forget to register.

CSE Strategies at shop.org FirstLook

Wed-Fri I'll be down at shop.org's FirstLook conference with a crew of folks from ChannelAdvisor. 

Thursday at 11:30, I'm hosting a "Ask the Expert" roundtable on "Advanced CSE Strategies".  Here's the blurb:

Forrester reports that Comparison Shopping Engines influence 60% of purchases. Over 35% of the online audience in Q4 of 2006 visited a CSE. This class starts with the basics (top engines, datafeeds, CPC, bidding), and then reveals several advanced strategies that have significantly improved the ROI of CSEs for the web's largest retailers. Think what they can do for you!

I hope you are able to make it and if you're at shop.org stop by our booth (#319) and say hello!