Merchants who were introduced to online advertising through PPC campaigns, e.g. Google Adwords, often come into the comparison shopping world with the mindset that higher product placements through bidding wars with others is the best way to promote their business and increase their returns.

Unfortunately not only is this the wrong mindset to be in, it can quickly become a costly lesson to many merchants as they try to break out of their old patterns.

Below we will dispell certain myths that many new merchants have when it comes to product bidding on the engines.

Myth 1: Higher bids results in higher placements

The first misconception that many merchants have is that their product rankings on search results are mainly determinant on their bids as is the case with Adwords. However in our experiences bids have less impact in most engines than many merchants are lead to believe, and in general plays a fairly minor part of the CSE’s algorithms when it comes to sorting out the results.

This is not to say that bidding provides zero impact in a product’s placement, as the mechanism does serve a purpose–but our next point explains why it’s not necessarily beneficial to give products higher placements.

Myth 2: Higher placements is beneficial

While on engines such as Google Froogle Shopping Product Search (where traffic is all free) you would want all your products to rank as high as possible for as many different keywords as possible in order to drive the most amount of traffic to your site–on the CSE’s you want to concentrate on getting as much qualified traffic as you can.

For example if you’re listing a polka-dotted denim designer vintage t-shirt from the1950s, someone doing a search for “t-shirt” is unlikely to be in your target niche of audience, so a high placement on that result page would most likely lead to unqualified traffic and simply waste money–leading us point 3:

Myth 3: Higher investments = higher return

The adage of “spending money to make money” is as applicable to comparison shopping as anywhere else, but it’s not necessarily the case when it comes to bidding.

Simply put, higher bids will cost you more money–not only in the obvious sense that a higher bid results in each click being more costly–but it will lead to more unqualified traffic which can add up quickly.

Using bidding to your advantage

How do we use bidding to our merchants advantages then?

Quite simply, we rarely do and leave the bids at their minimum depending on what category and engine we’re listing on.

In those rare cases that we do though, for instance if we feel a merchant is not getting enough traffic on any of their products, we will increase the bid of certain products to $0.01 over the minimum, which accomplishes two things:

• It leapfrogs that particular merchant over others with similar relevancies in their products and thereby gives them more exposure at very little extra cost
• It doesn’t raise their result placement so high that it starts leading to lots of costly, unqualified traffic, which is certainly guaranteed to needlessly waste money.

There you have it then, while bidding can be helpful in certain situations, our experiences show us that generally it’s best to not worry or deal with product bidding at all.

Of course, handing over your comparison shopping management over to us means that you don’t have to ever worry about another product bid again

Now that is a discussion worth pondering over.

Tien

One of the more simple, yet neglected methods of improving a merchant’s ROI is in gaining customer feedback.

Say a potential customer, who we’ll call Red, was looking for a picnic basket to transport food in to deliver to her sick Grandmother.

She hops onto Pricegrabber, enters the term “picnic basket”, and ends up with a list of 10 sites that has the exact brand that she was looking for.

While Red is known to be highly trusting of others, at the same time she is aware that she can read about other customers’ experiences with each of the 10 merchants on Pricegrabber. With each of them having similar landing pages, pricing being similar across the board, and little else to differentiate the merchants from each other–she ends up eliminating the ones with little or no feedback, and purchases a shiny new picnic basket from the merchant with the most positive feedback ratings.

In our experiences, clients who had minimal feedback all saw their sales increase by a considerable amount after the amount of their feedback increased–due mainly to mindful consumers such as Red.

So how does a merchant go about increasing their feedback?

Generally each comparison shopping engine will provide merchants with a code that can be embedded onto their site that will pop up a window at the end of the transaction session where feedback can be given–and some will email a customer and ask for feedback once the order has been received.

For merchants on multiple engines we recommend taking advantage of this feature and embedding the code in cycles of two weeks or so–so as to maintain feedback diversity across the engines.

Alternatively, we at CPC Strategy provide some of our merchants with a rotating banner code, which randomly pops up a window from one of the shopping engines that merchant lists on during the checkout process.

Merchants who use this code have generally noticed greater amounts of feedback posted to their accounts.

This post assumes of course, that by increasing the amount of feedback received that the feedback will be positive overall–as having negative reviews will be much more harmful than having no reviews at all. This is particularly important for merchants who list on Amazon, who can suspend accounts for going other certain positive feedback thresholds.

Of course, we anticipate most merchants reading our blog to have the highest standards of business practices and have few issues with maintaining positive feedback

And with that we’ll see you on the engines with all your great feedback.

-Tien

When speaking with potential clients about the Comparison Shopping Engine industry, the issue of click fraud is often brought up.

After all, when hundreds to thousands of dollars are changing hands on a monthly basis, it is natural for a merchant to expect that most all of that money is spent bringing in non-fraudulent traffic.

In fact, in the PPC industry, e.g. Google Adwords, click fraud is a tremendously serious issue:

The industry-wide average click fraud rate for the entire year went up 15 percent, ending the year with 16.6 percent of all clicks on Web ads being fraudulent. The click fraud rate for search engine ad networks alone, including Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network, grew even more. That was up 47 percent in the fourth quarter, ending the year with a 28.3 percent click fraud rate. According to this data, nearly one out of every three clicks on a Google or Yahoo ad is fraudulent.

However, every coin has two sides, and we wanted to share our perspective on click fraud in relation to CSEs.

Simply put, click fraud is extremely rare on the CSEs.

As a reader of our blog you probably know that our company lives and dies by the numbers–so if any sort of fraudulent activity on our clients’ accounts were to occur we would be able to immediately recognize it.

You can think of it as fraudian slip protection

In the last year, we have not had one encounter that would suggest campaign tampering or fraudulent clicking of ads. Much of the credit goes to the engines who take preventative measures to decrease the risk of click fraud. These measures include::

• Tracking IPs (internet protocols, or “addresses”) for each click and having the ability to run an IP report if they (or you) are suspicious of an unusually high volume of traffic
• Not charging for multiple clicks within a 30 second time period; e.g. if your product is clicked on 20 times in a 30 second time frame you will only be charged for one click
• Issuing refunds in cases where merchants experience an unusual high volume of clicks without any sort of sales increase

The CSEs understand that click fraud is a potential deterrent for otherwise interested merchants, so they actively take preventative measures to make it a non-issue.

Click fraud detection and prevention was actually once a major selling point of ours–however the CSEs have done a such a fine job policing it themselves that we had to cross that off our list.

Which, in the end happened for the best because our list was getting too long

We’ll see you on the engines then, safely clicking away.

-Tien

We shall now conclude our series of posts documenting how to fully optimize those ever so important landing pages.

If you missed the previous posts, be sure to refer back to parts one and two at your convenience.

2. Sell not just your product, but your company

As an online merchant you have to battle to sell and promote your product line; but just as important is the ability to sell your own company as well. A potential customer who is visiting your site for the first time has no idea if you’ve been a reputable business owner for the past 20 years, or if you’re a shoddy reseller that just popped up under a new assumed name.

Credibility is indeed one of the most important aspects of selling online (it is our #2 point on this list after all ), so the more confidence that you can provide a consumer to make him/her feel safe, the better.

Here are a few starting points that we can delve into deeper at a later date:

• Provide an easy method to contact you, preferably by phone; but if you lack the resources, at the very least promote an e-mail address that one can use that provides a quick turn around time
• Include a brief synopsis of your company (perhaps under an “About Us” page), so that a customer can put a “face to the name”. Your site then becomes a story rather than just being another .com
• Post some testimonials or feedback that you’ve received (if you don’t have any, try to get some). See our right hand side for such an example
• Bonus: Get a security certificate to provide that extra layer of confidence to consumers. Companies such as McAfee and thawte provide certificates to qualifying sites that can be posted. Consumers can then shop with little fear that their personal information will be compromised (click on the above links for more information). You can think of it as a restaurant getting a stamp of approval from a health inspector.

4. Provide customers with as much details about your product as possible

While the more savvy of shoppers out there may be able to recognize that Widget Model 311.25cg provides a charge of 1.21 gigawatts and can run purely on refried beans, many of your potential customers probably won’t realize as much.

The more details you can provide then, the more assured that customers will know that they will get exactly what it is they’re looking for, and not pass up on you due to a lack of certainty.

In addition, more details on the page results in more information that a merchant can include in his data feed, and as a result that specific product will show up under more search terms. And in the case of Google Base, this results in more free traffic/exposure.

6. Match the searched product with what is clicked through

This may sound like an obvious one, but there are times when a consumer will search for a product, click through to a merchant’s landing page, only to find a different product featured.

As it turns out what they were actually looking for was an accessory to that product that is featured toward the bottom of the page, requiring them to scroll down to find.

This makes for a relatively bad first impression, and while some consumers may be able to spot what it was they were looking for and end up make the purchase, a majority will have exited as soon as they realize what they see is not what they wanted.

Let’s briefly recap the 7 main points that we’ve gone over in the past week:

1. Page Load Time – longer wait times results in a greater likelihood a consumer will leave your site
2. Sell not just your product, but your company – higher levels of credibility = more trust = greater likelihood of a sale
3. Good Image(s) – an image removes the disconnect between the consumer and product, so make it a good one
4. Provide customers with as much details about your product as possible – more details = more assurance of what one is getting
5. Checkout Simplicity – fewer steps between the initial impression and final checkout makes it less likely that a consumer will click away
6. Match the searched product with what is clicked through - a mismatched link will cause many consumers to immediately find another destination
7. Condense all important details - making all pertinent purchasing information as easy to spot as possible makes it more likely that a purchase will be made

There you have it then; while implementing these 7 steps won’t guarantee an immediate increase in sales, it can greatly enhance the likelihood that a visitor will be well informed of what it is they’re buying and increase their level of trust in you. As a result they will be more likely to make a purchase on that initial visit, and perhaps future visits as well.

We’ve seen too many merchants out there (though seldom one of ours ) underestimate the importance and value of their landing pages, and end up losing out on potential business when a quick fix or two would remedy it.

Don’t let this happen to you then. Stick with the principles above, and you can be sure that your destination pages will be just that–a destination, rather than a point of departure.

Have any tips of your own? Post them in our comments section.

And with that, we’ll see you on the engines.

-Tien

On Wednesday we gave you steps 1 and 3 in creating a kick butt landing page; and today we’re going to provide you with a couple more tips that will help you make that ever so important first impression really count.

Without further adieu then, here are steps 5 and 7:

5. Checkout Simplicity - Imagine entering a grocery store to buy milk, and upon grabbing a gallon or two, you realize that in order to make the purchase you have to crawl through a complex series of mazes back to the checkout counter.

Realistically such a scenario is quite unlikely, but in the online world too many merchants are guilty of putting their virtual customers through similar mazes. Online shopping became popular because it provided people with the ability to make quick, painfree purchases. Therefore, simplicity and ease in the checkout process is an essential quality to ensure the customer’s likelihood of completing the purchase .

Simple checkouts are such a key in the online shopping world in fact that internet retailer leader Amazon tried to patent their “1-Click” purchase system.

And while you don’t necessarily need to have a patent-pending checkout system, it should be immediately clear upon entering your site how one can make a purchase; and from there require as few steps from the initial visit, to the final confirmation page as possible.

7. Condense all important details - The art of selling newspapers has been perfected over the last several turns of the centuries, and one principle that has remained since then is the idea of consolidating the latest, most intriguing headline and image to the center and top half of the page (or the fold) in order to grab the attention of a potential purchaser.

Using this idea then, merchants should supply users with the most pertinent information regarding their product toward the top where a viewers eyes will most likely to be focused. The most important things that a customer will look for initially will be: the product title, its price, an image, and a method to make the purchase.

To illustrate putting these ideas put to good use, below is an example of how one of our merchants, a top 300 internet retailer Stacks and Stacks, has their landing page set up, with the numbers correlating to what’s been discussed so far (click to enlarge):

In essence then, we like to stress the importance of simplicity and user-friendliness when it comes to landing pages. You certainly don’t want to scare off or overwhelm potential buyers with too much, but rather walk the fine line between excess and being informative.

See you on the engines.

-Tien