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“Bing Cashback” is the New “Live Cashback”
Microsoft has just officially launched its new search engine, Bing, which some facetiously say stands for either “But It’s Not Google” or, as a reciprocal acronym, “Bing, It’s Not Google”.
Whatever it may or may not be shorthand for, Microsoft has officially thrown on its gloves and challenging Google at what it does best, search.
Whether or not users will begin to adapt to the new engine is something that only time will tell, so for now we’re going to focus on the shopping experience it provides to users.
First things first, directly on the Bing homepage is a link for Shopping, which didn’t exist before when it was called Live (and currently exists on Google).
Clicking on the tab takes a user, appropriately enough, to the Bing Shopping page, where as we’ve discussed previously, highlights Cashback toward the top.
But now by virtue of the shopping page receiving exposure via the home page should certainly increase the amount of users who actually enter the shopping page and use it as a platform the way they’re using Google Product Search.
We’ve certainly noticed a steady increase in our merchants revenue via the Cashback platform as of late–though it’s hard to tell if it’s directly because of this change.
As with before as well, a search that Microsoft recognizes as a popular product search will be highlighted with popular brands, and price ranges that a user can click through (similar to Google’s “one box” feature):
We will continue to monitor if user adoption of Cashback continues to increase as users begin to adopt Bing either plain curiosity, or because their shopping section is now directly on the home page–or simply by the natural increase of online retail in general.
We here at CPC Strategy though certainly approve of any methods that make the online shopping experience that much easier.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Google Base Terms of Service Updated
Google Base has updated their terms of service, and any merchant listed on there (and there’s no reason one shouldn’t be) will have 30 days to log into their account and accept the new terms or risk having their products being removed.
The process is as simple as logging into the Google Base dashboard, which will take you to the new terms, and checking off that you indeed accept them.
This is generally not an issue for anyone doing manual uploads via Google’s site, since Google requires feeds to be updated every 30 days before they’re taken down–but for merchants who automatically upload their products via FTP or another method, it could potentially be an issue to be aware of.
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CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google Base/Shopping Tags:
Popular Tech Categories in au.Shopping.com Get a Slash in Price
After releasing a new tiered price structure just a few weeks ago, their down-under counterparts au.Shopping.com have announced a major slash in certain tech categories: Digital Cameras, Flat Panel TVs, and Mobile Phones. Each click costs a mere $0.25 AU now, resulting in saves of up to 58% from previous rates.
The format of their e-mail certainly shows this is not something they want merchants to ignore either:
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Shopping.com, bidding Tags:
Pricegrabber Deal of the Day Charts Price History
For the past month or so, Pricegrabber’s Deal of the Day page has included a chart that shows both the average price history and lowest price of that particular product, giving users a good indication of what sort of deal they’re getting on the deal:
For those who aren’t familiar–Pricegrabber’s deal of the day is similar to Woot’s One Day, One Deal experience, in which a new product is released every day at 12pm PT from a specific merchant which is generally at a much lower price than one can find anywhere else on the internet.
Thanks to Twitter user @juney for bringing this to our attention, and don’t forget to follow us on Twitter as well.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Pricegrabber Tags:
Google Product Search now lists Adwords, Allows Barcode Scanning
For astute, regular users of Google Product Search, one may have noticed that Adwords have begun to be displayed along the free product listings:
In theory, adwords listings within Google Product Search results should help improve conversion rates since the traffic should be much more qualified. Generally users will receive such results within normal Google search results or hidden away as advertisements on other sites–by being displayed alongside actual products that people are searching for, a consumer is automatically seeing something that is relevant to them.
For more information on how to get this done, be sure to check out Google’s help document”.
Source: Search Engine Roundtable.
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Google has also released a special feature for their own “Google phone”. Users of Android handsets now have the ability to scan barcodes which directs them to a Product Search results page, allowing them to compare the in-store price with that of various vendors online.
This would be a great way for a consumer to go into a store, check out the product in the flesh, and decide whether he can save by buying online–or if it’s worth the premium to purchase it right away.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Google Base/Shopping Tags:
Shopzilla Adds New Columns to Data Feeds
Joining the fray of shopping engines that have tweaked themselves this year, Shopzilla has announced a few changes that merchants can make to their data feeds in an effort to increase conversion rates.
The first modification that a merchant can make involves including an “original price” column and a “current price” for their products so that their product listing ends up looking like this:
Other engines, such as Become already have a similar feature (on another note you can save big on certain baby items at the sites listed below):
Another notable feature is the availability of promotional texts that a merchant can use alongside their listings–other sites allow merchants to type in a customized text such as “Free Shipping” or “20% off Orders of $100″–Shopzilla is now allowing merchants to enter a specific promotional code to display messages such as “Authorized Dealer”, “Guaranteed Next Day Delivery”, among others.
All in all, more information listed on a search results page is always good, as a merchant always wants a consumer to have as much information as possible before clicking over for fear that that click would go wasted.
It’s certainly a step in the right direction for any engine to allow their merchants to add columns to their data feeds which in turn get passed onto the consumers.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Shopzilla Tags:
Shoptoit.ca Doing Their Part in Click-Fraud Transparency
We’ve discussed aplenty on click fraud being blown out of proportion as it relates to comparison shopping. However a Canadian based shopping engine, Shoptoit.ca is taking a strong stance to eliminate these fears completely.
When a merchant logs into their Shoptoit account and looks through their click reports, Shoptoit makes it completely transparent where the clicks are coming from via the consumer’s IP address.
The screenshot below illustrates how Shoptoit breaks down the source of traffic and whether or not a click is charged for:
The second column above lists the IP address in which the click came from, and in the parenthesis is how many times that IP address clicked through to the particular merchant’s site. A merchant can then see in columns 4 and 5 that only the initial click was charged for, while subsequent clicks were not.
So whether a user clicked through to the merchant’s site three times or a hundred, the merchant will end up paying the same amount.
Other engines implement a similar system in which a high multitude of clicks from one specific source are not charged for–though few make this as clear cut as Shoptoit does.
We applaud their efforts at calming merchants’ fears on the engine, and encourage other engines to try the same–as paranoia can often trump reasoning most days of the week 
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Shoptoit.ca Tags:
New Tiered Pricing Structure at Shopping.com
Not long after announcing that they would lower CPC rates by as much as 57% for certain categories, Shopping.com has again announced a new pricing structure that should help a good number of merchants lower their costs and increase their return on investment (ROI).
The issue with the current flat CPC rate system that most shopping engines use is that a merchant selling an electronic device that costs say, $5 is paying the same per-click as someone in the same category selling a device for $500.
In order to get the same return on their comparison shopping investment, the former merchant would have to convert at a rate of 100x greater than the merchant selling the $500 product–which is quite unreasonable to expect. As a result there is little incentive to list for any products below a certain price point, even though those may convert at a relatively high rate.
With their new structure however, lower ticket items will have lower CPC rates, while higher priced items will see an increase in CPC rates. The graph below provided by Shopping.com illustrates the effect this will have:
Their main goal is to minimize the discrimination of pricing of items, and attempt to balance out the COS (cost of sale) % among all products offered by a merchant.
For merchants offering a majority of or only high ticket items, they may see an increase in their spend off the bat, but overall the proportions shouldn’t be too drastic since the items they sell are priced so high to begin with.
The new rate card is available on complete here.
CPC Strategy was founded by former employees of the comparison shopping engines and understands first hand what it takes to manage a successful comparison shopping campaign. You can check out our webpage at www.cpcstrategy.com. Don’t hesitate to Contact us to find out how we can make the shopping engines work for you.
Categories: Shopping.com, bidding Tags:
