Though paid search platforms have nixed the auction-style system, bid for position is still alive and kicking in many comparison shopping engines (CSEs). But there’s smart ways and not-so-smart ways to bid. Higher position does not mean higher ROI, and this has to be carefully monitored.

Andrew Davis and his team from CPC Strategy recently put out the Merchant Comparison Shopping Handbook, an ebook that references a couple Get Elastic articles (this one and this one). It contains this tip which Andrew has graciously allowed me to share with Get Elastic readers.

If we feel a merchant is not getting enough traffic on the CSEs, we’ll increase the bids of certain products or categories to $0.01 over the minimum, which accomplishes two things:

• It leapfrogs that particular merchant over merchants with similar products and thereby gives more exposure at very little extra cost.
• It doesn’t raise their result placement so high that it starts leading to lots of unqualified traffic.

You can also increase bids on products or categories that perform extremely well by $0.05 to $0.10 to drive more traffic and potential sales to those items, but watch these bids closely to make sure you don’t damage your ROI.

As we move closer to the holiday season, remember that competitive behavior may change in shopping engines (bid prices will likely go up). Also, consider that shopper behavior may also change (more clicks, more “window shopping” to get gift ideas). Make sure you carefully manage your bids daily, and don’t be afraid to stop bidding on keywords and products that are sucking money.

For more tips on managing your bids and campaigns in comparison shopping engines, you can download Merchant Comparison Shopping Handbook for free, and check out last year’s post Optimizing Your Comparison Shopping Engine Marketing for the Holidays.

Preparation

• Start your holiday shopping engine activities NOW if you haven’t already. Things ramp up very quickly, and if you are not ahead of the curve, you are already behind it. Make sure that come mid-November, the only thing you are working on is bidding and promotions.

• Know your budgets for the entire holiday season. Make sure that you are working with realistic numbers, and they are sufficient for the whole season — which includes post-holiday gift shoppers looking to take advantage of big sales. With the recent economic difficulties, plan for more customers to adopt this strategy this year to save money. Set aside some budget to capture these post-holiday deal hunters.

• Know your goals and targets for the holiday season. Make sure that you know what performance is expected and approved by upper management so there are no surprises. Have these goals broken down monthly, weekly, daily if possible, and ensure you can track current performance in a target-to-date fashion. (1 day into the week you fell short of your daily goal by 10%, your goals for the rest of the week adjust to accommodate that shortfall)

• Understand holiday bid pricing and management strategies. Comparison shopping engines typically inflate bid prices for the holidays, especially for certain categories. Make sure you factor this into your bid strategy, and revisit your bids on all engines to make sure you are where you need to be. Pre-emptively determine the ballpark your bids should increase to (or decrease, depending on category) and have the changes prepared. But consider that many merchants will not make any adjustments and will end up at the category minimums throughout the holiday season. Be ready to do some analysis to find the optimal bid after the rate hike, and keep a close eye on it. Be ready to turn bids down when your season has ended.

• Know what search keywords drive the sales of your top products. Put processes in place to monitor their position among each engine. This will help you track how your bids are affecting the ranks/results, and open up some opportunities for improvement.

• Check all your engines’ interface for error or warning messages. Reach out to your account managers to determine best ways to fix any issues you may find.

Data Basics

• Error check your datafeeds. Make sure all the data being sent out is accurate, and being fully accepted by the engines without error. Actually look at the individual data fields on products across multiple categories to make sure they are populating the correct fields. Look these products up live on the engines to make sure they look correct.

• Watch your stock. Verify that the products you are sending to the engines are only in-stock products. It’s critical to avoid the poor customer experience and added cost of clicking through to out-of-stock products. For particularly high-velocity products, the threshold may need to be set higher than just “1 in stock”.

• Perform quality assurance on tracking urls. Look at your product urls to ensure that all necessary tracking tags are included, as well as any tracking tags or pixels you have integrated in your checkout path.

• Ensure that all your products are categorized correctly. Don’t just look at uncategorized products, but look at how your current categories are set up. See if there are any better ways to map them.

• Watch your filters. Check any product-data or product-performance based filters that you may have in place, restricting products from being sent in the feeds. Verify that these still make sense given the season, the increased minimum bids and the increased ROAS.

Promotions

• Organize your promotional schedule. And know your calendar through the end of the year. Work ahead of time to prepare promotional copy and product/category lists so that you can set up promotions quickly and not have to worry about it later.

• Encourage promotions that push “one stop shopping.” Tighter wallets this year mean consumers are going to be looking for deals in their gift buying even more, and bundling promotions are very powerful.

• Repeat shipping promotions. If it makes sense for your business to run shipping promotions, make sure run them at least a few times throughout the season. Not everyone buys their presents on the same weekend.

• Know all your shipping cutoff dates. Be prepared to lower bids or pull products off immediately when those cutoffs have been met.

• Don’t forget your product pages. Work with your website teams to make sure promotions and other pertinent holiday information is available on your product pages. This is often overlooked since they are not traditional landing pages, but they are for you.

• Don’t forget value propositions. Make sure you are adding your holiday promotions and value propositions to your feeds whenever you can. Use the promotional text fields, but don’t discount other places to message such as the description. Don’t forget to message those bundling promotions as well!

• Don’t forget gift cards. A number of shopping engines now accept Gift Cards as products. Make sure you are sending these and that they are listed on CSEs like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Become.com, and NexTag.

Analysis & Optimization

• Know your top products/categories. Use that list to guide your data optimization and add keywords to the feeds that support them. Use website analytics to find which keywords drive clicks and conversions for your top products.

• Perform margin analysis. Know what products you cannot afford to send through each channel, and suppress those from the feed (or 0 bid them on engines that support that).

• Remove poor performers. Look for products that have had little to no conversions, but a large number of clicks/spend. Check the categorization of the products, landing page, price competitiveness. Determine if there is anything you can do to make adjustments, and if not – bid down sharply or cut these dead weight products.

Thanks again to Rick for sharing these tips. If you’re interested in learning more about shopping engine strategies, check out the Mercent blog.

Preparation

• Start your holiday shopping engine activities NOW if you haven’t already. Things ramp up very quickly, and if you are not ahead of the curve, you are already behind it. Make sure that come mid-November, the only thing you are working on is bidding and promotions.

• Know your budgets for the entire holiday season. Make sure that you are working with realistic numbers, and they are sufficient for the whole season — which includes post-holiday gift shoppers looking to take advantage of big sales. With the recent economic difficulties, plan for more customers to adopt this strategy this year to save money. Set aside some budget to capture these post-holiday deal hunters.

• Know your goals and targets for the holiday season. Make sure that you know what performance is expected and approved by upper management so there are no surprises. Have these goals broken down monthly, weekly, daily if possible, and ensure you can track current performance in a target-to-date fashion. (1 day into the week you fell short of your daily goal by 10%, your goals for the rest of the week adjust to accommodate that shortfall)

• Understand holiday bid pricing and management strategies. Comparison shopping engines typically inflate bid prices for the holidays, especially for certain categories. Make sure you factor this into your bid strategy, and revisit your bids on all engines to make sure you are where you need to be. Pre-emptively determine the ballpark your bids should increase to (or decrease, depending on category) and have the changes prepared. But consider that many merchants will not make any adjustments and will end up at the category minimums throughout the holiday season. Be ready to do some analysis to find the optimal bid after the rate hike, and keep a close eye on it. Be ready to turn bids down when your season has ended.

• Know what search keywords drive the sales of your top products. Put processes in place to monitor their position among each engine. This will help you track how your bids are affecting the ranks/results, and open up some opportunities for improvement.

• Check all your engines’ interface for error or warning messages. Reach out to your account managers to determine best ways to fix any issues you may find.

Data Basics

• Error check your datafeeds. Make sure all the data being sent out is accurate, and being fully accepted by the engines without error. Actually look at the individual data fields on products across multiple categories to make sure they are populating the correct fields. Look these products up live on the engines to make sure they look correct.

• Watch your stock. Verify that the products you are sending to the engines are only in-stock products. It’s critical to avoid the poor customer experience and added cost of clicking through to out-of-stock products. For particularly high-velocity products, the threshold may need to be set higher than just “1 in stock”.

• Perform quality assurance on tracking urls. Look at your product urls to ensure that all necessary tracking tags are included, as well as any tracking tags or pixels you have integrated in your checkout path.

• Ensure that all your products are categorized correctly. Don’t just look at uncategorized products, but look at how your current categories are set up. See if there are any better ways to map them.

• Watch your filters. Check any product-data or product-performance based filters that you may have in place, restricting products from being sent in the feeds. Verify that these still make sense given the season, the increased minimum bids and the increased ROAS.

Promotions

• Organize your promotional schedule. And know your calendar through the end of the year. Work ahead of time to prepare promotional copy and product/category lists so that you can set up promotions quickly and not have to worry about it later.

• Encourage promotions that push “one stop shopping.” Tighter wallets this year mean consumers are going to be looking for deals in their gift buying even more, and bundling promotions are very powerful.

• Repeat shipping promotions. If it makes sense for your business to run shipping promotions, make sure run them at least a few times throughout the season. Not everyone buys their presents on the same weekend.

• Know all your shipping cutoff dates. Be prepared to lower bids or pull products off immediately when those cutoffs have been met.

• Don’t forget your product pages. Work with your website teams to make sure promotions and other pertinent holiday information is available on your product pages. This is often overlooked since they are not traditional landing pages, but they are for you.

• Don’t forget value propositions. Make sure you are adding your holiday promotions and value propositions to your feeds whenever you can. Use the promotional text fields, but don’t discount other places to message such as the description. Don’t forget to message those bundling promotions as well!

• Don’t forget gift cards. A number of shopping engines now accept Gift Cards as products. Make sure you are sending these and that they are listed on CSEs like Shopping.com, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber, Become.com, and NexTag.

Analysis & Optimization

• Know your top products/categories. Use that list to guide your data optimization and add keywords to the feeds that support them. Use website analytics to find which keywords drive clicks and conversions for your top products.

• Perform margin analysis. Know what products you cannot afford to send through each channel, and suppress those from the feed (or 0 bid them on engines that support that).

• Remove poor performers. Look for products that have had little to no conversions, but a large number of clicks/spend. Check the categorization of the products, landing page, price competitiveness. Determine if there is anything you can do to make adjustments, and if not – bid down sharply or cut these dead weight products.

Thanks again to Mercent for sharing these tips. If you’re interested in learning more about shopping engine strategies, check out the Mercent blog.

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The problem is perception. Consumers may be less likely to use comparison engines if they feel that they are somehow being manipulated. Since people want to feel in control and that they have made the best decision – they want to believe they are choosing from all the information available. But the consumers in the study don’t fully understand comparison shopping, nor do they realize that so much of their buying behavior is influenced by paid advertising already.

For example, when we go to the grocery store, we encounter paid advertising placement. Eye-level items pay a premium for their prime shelf real estate as do impulse-buy checkout display items. Television ads cost far more during the day than in the wee hours of the night, and during popular shows on the top networks.

The User IS In Control

Comparison shopping engines enable sorting of results – low to high and high to low, and sometimes even more options for sorting / refining of results. If there are ones that don’t, they seriously need to reexamine their site usability. If the convenience and utility of comparison engines cannot compete with the consumer’s annoyance with feeling somehow manipulated, over-marketed to or in some way not having control over their purchase decision, the industry needs to work on making consumers aware of their ability to use the decision-making tools available to them.

In terms of reinforcing awareness, individual shopping engines need to make it very easy to find price or seller rating sorting functionality. Nextag is an example. There is a table of default seller listings when you navigate to a product. You can in fact sort by price or seller rating if you wish by clicking the underlined text links, but most users don’t intuitively know this unless they’re really ninja with Excel spreadsheets or otherwise understand how it’s supposed to work.

Default listings

After price sort

For this reason I believe conventional drop-down menus (like the following Bizrate screenshot) are more user-friendly.

It’s Not The End!

So if you’re using comparison engines as an additional sales channel, don’t be scared of this survey. Unless, of course, shopping engines are your only Internet marketing strategy. Consumers wary of comparison engines will likely turn back to traditional engines like Google and Yahoo, so search engine optimization remains highly important, as is using a search engine friendly ecommerce software. Other strategies to promote include affiliate programs, deals and coupon engines and social shopping sites, mobile phone shopping engines like Slifter and innovative and fun web shopping sites.

Is comparison shopping in danger of losing consumer trust? I doubt it. Comparison shopping is just too useful to go away. Add to the traditional shopping portals the hip-and-cool Like.com, Etsy and Shopwiki that have the intelligence to match keywords to colors, and even celebrity styles to products. (After all, there’s more to the purchase discovery process than comparing price and seller rating.) The user experience is only going to get better and better.

Additional resources:

Not all comparison engines work on pure CPC model. Ecommerce Optimization has compiled a fabulous and thorough list of comparison engines and makes note of which operate on which model.

Now imagine you could whip out your cellphone, perform a quick search and tap into a database of over 85 million products from 30,000 retail stores tagged by zipcode. Entering a keyword, UPC code, product name or model number would deliver a list of stores by distance from where you are right now (in the McDonald’s drive thru lineup) along with prices. And you can view product images, descriptions and even pay for the product while your apple pie is being boxed. Then your cellphone gives you GPS enabled directions (unlike the sometimes unreliable MapQuest) to pick up your order.

Sound like the distant future? It’s already here. GPShopper has made it happen and introduced a new advertising channel for offline retailers (or etailers with physical stores), with top etailers like BestBuy, Toys R Us and Staples already on board.

The product is called Slifter (I can’t get over that it sounds a bit like social network for shoplifters) and it’s available to cellular customers with GPS enabled phones and mobile web plans in the US for $1.99 per month (Sprint network) plus applicable web-surfing charges.

(Screenshots from the Flash Demo)

If you are an etailer with a physical location or multiple locations, Slifter is a great opportunity. GPShopper provides detailed analytics for you to track product views, which products shoppers save to their shopping list or text message to friends, and even which store locations they prefer. The program uses a pay-per-click model, where you pay when a searcher clicks on your offer in search results (so they have compared your price and proximity pre-click). There are also opportunities for banner advertising and SMS messages for broadcast your deals.

Although Slifter’s user base is small at the moment, the concept makes a lot of sense. More people have access to a cellphone at any given time than a computer. And despite the popularity of online shopping, people still do like to shop locally or do not have time to wait for a product to ship. The ability to pay for goods with a cellphone is another convenience we can expect to gain acceptance. (Slifter’s payment processing uses PayPal Mobile Checkout).

You can access Slifter for free via SMS (text “SLIFTER” to 75438), wireless web, or java application download on almost any mobile carrier/device combination. You can also try Slifter online but as far as I could tell playing with it, results only pointed you to comparison engines like Shop.com anyway, or Overstock.com which would be found in any given comparison engine. (I could have really missed the mark with my test searches for “Barbie car” in zipcode 90210 — hey I’m Canadian, that’s the only zipcode I know!) Nevertheless, the search functionality is clunky and awkward and you might as well go directly to a regular search engine or comparison engine. Otherwise, I wish I could try it with my Canadian cellphone. Have you used Slifter or are advertising with this channel? If so, drop a comment!

Ever since Froogle got the boot from the Google homepage, there has been a need for exposure for the service. As Google Checkout picks up steam, the natural place to promote merchants offering Checkout is Product Search. This may be the way Google is trying to get more traffic through to the price comparison engine.

The Google Checkout stamp is everywhere in Product Search now. See below:

You can see the universal filter by Checkout merchants (Marissa Meyer stated it was a feature demanded by Checkout users), the Google Checkout badge on product listings, and of course on the cash cow – AdWords listings. (*Hat Tip to Linda Bustos for finding this)

So, does anyone else think the merchants offering Google Checkout get a huge advantage? Is this good for consumers? Is it good for merchants (regardless if they offer Checkout, PayPal, or neither)? Or, is the tactic slightly… “Microsoft’ish”?

There is definitely a lot of potential in the online comparison shopping sphere in Canada, but there are some Canadian comparison shopping engines!

With the exception of Shoptoit.ca, the Canadian shopping comparison engines play it safe, sticking with low-risk computer, electronic and DVD items. For this mini-review, I decided to search for “Canon Powershot” and compare the number of products delivered by each engine, and what user features were available to help compare products and identify Canadian etailers, as well as any potential usability issues.

Unlike its dot-com cousin, PriceGrabber.ca lists only the following categories: Computers Electronics Cameras Software Video Games A search for “Canon Powershot” produced 27 results, with prices to compare between up to 4 different online retailers. To narrow my search, I could sort by popularity, rating or price or drill down more with additional filters a-la-Amazon: And then view a detailed side-by-side comparison. Unfortunately, PriceGrabber.ca is lean on user reviews compared to its US version. It would be easy enough to integrate the US reviews to the Canadian site. There are products where at the category level, PriceGrabber indicates there are reviews, like desktops, but when you view the comparison matrix, it shows no reviews, so just make sure you check for reviews at the category level if they are important to you. Merchants can find more information about listing with PriceGrabber.ca here.

PriceCanada and RedFlagDeals are sister sites, PriceCanada being more akin to traditional comparison shopping than online deals. PriceCanada has the following categories: Computers Electronics DVDs My Powershot search delivered an impressive 86 results, but battery cases were displayed at the top, so I had to narrow my search via a dropdown menu. I could only select by megapixel number, so I chose 5. Alternatively I could have sorted the 86 results by price. You can also filter results by manufacturer, category or megapixel, select results per page to 10, 20, 50, 75 and 100. PriceCanada’s Advanced Search, though easy to overlook, feature is very useful as you can enter a parametric price search and exclude irrelevant keywords: Other helpful features include Retailer Ratings (unfortunately there are no ratings, but it’s a great list of Canadian etailers), Price Drops (lovely!) and Buyer’s Guides. Merchant information is found here.

Shoptoit ventures beyond electronics and computers and offers a variety of products. It’s got Web 2.0 design, wishlists, every possible category…I am in love with this shopping engine.My Canon Powershot search returned 203 results, and it was really easy to narrow it down to 64 “digital camera” results through a very clear and visible text link. Then I could sort by relevance, number of stores (up to 8 stores), A-Z or Z-A and price highest to lowest or lowest to highest. By far Shoptoit.ca has the most usable comparison tool I have ever come across. When you check off products to compare, a little “clipboard” appears, which you can edit as you go along before you navigate away from the product page, and as you scroll down the page, it follows along with you. There’s no limit to how many products you can compare at one time but results can get covered over by advertising if you choose more than 8 products. Suggest a store or find out more about opening a merchant account.

Like the name implies, RedFlagDeals is coupons for Canadians, offering the following categories: Apparel Automotive Entertainment Fitness & Beauty Food & Drink Home & Garden Small Business Travel You can browse or search by keyword, and even vote on deals. A keyword search for “Canon Powershot” delivered a sweet deal — $100 refurbished Canon PowerShot A410 3.2MP digital camera from BestBuy. And the bottom of the left hand panel shows a handy list of Canadian free shipping offers: If you know of a deal that they haven’t listed, RedFlagDeals invites you to send it in, but finding the Contact link takes a bit of digging, it’s unconventionally placed in a left hand column. The comparison shopping section is only for Electronics, Computer and DVD.

Shopbot‘s got tech, computers and electronics to compare. First I went to the keyword box for “Canon Powershot” and got a long list of results, but Shopbot doesn’t tell you how many like the other engines do. And all the individual prices and shops were listed, so some identical products are listed over and over again.I found the number of results overwhelming so I decided to sort by price: lowest to highest (remember to click “Apply Filter” or nothing happens). What I got was a list of accessories which only go so far down the page and then stop. Hey, what happened to the actual cameras? There was no option at the top or bottom of results to see a next page or anything. So then I tried parametric price search and entered what I think’s a reasonable range — $100-$400. Again, depending on whether you sort low to high or high to low price, you’ll get different results. And it’s hard to trust that you’re seeing all the available products, because the search engine will show you a fixed number of results only. OK, on to browse. I was able to find a digital cameras category, then narrow by brand to Canon. I found the absence of photographs disappointing, and the appearance of Adsense a bit deceiving (formatted a bit too much like the rest of the site). I’m not too savvy about model numbers, so a big list is overwhelming. Plus, you get a mix of accessories and actual digital cameras. Even just a snippet of a product description would greatly help usability. And it never hurts to list your store. You can get more information at shopbot.au@gmail.com

Although Shoptoit was my favourite (note the Canadian spelling) comparison engine, I did like RedFlagDeals’ search for deals by keyword. So I’m going to make good use of both. What I would like to see is more Canadian etailers getting involved in comparison shopping, and more Canadian shoppers becoming active users of these sites. There’s a lot of room to grow in all areas of Canadain search marketing, and I hope that this time next year I’ll have more of these sites to review.