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Smarter.com Announces Rate Changes
In a somewhat surprising move, Smarter.com just announced that they’ll be making rate changes, a lot of them drastic, across the board on their shopping engine.
Beginning March 1st, you will see both increases and decreases in your Smarter.com CPC minimum bids. This adjustment will allow us to remain competitive in the upstream marketplace and continue to acquire high quality traffic on behalf of our merchants. Simply put, we are bringing our rates in line with other comparison engines.
The full rate card can be downloaded here, but to quickly sum it up all of the major categories are seeing rate increases, some by as much as 3 times what it is now.
Below is a chart illustrating the changes and the number of subcategories that it affects:
At first glance it appears that most categories are seeing a rate drop, but the 1212 categories that saw a drop are all in the media section (books, movies, magazines, and music).
Below we examine the changes in the main channels:
One of the biggest advantages that Smarter had as a shopping engine was that they generally had one of the lower CPC rates across their categories, which made them profitable for merchants even if their traffic didn’t convert as well as other engines.
By pushing themselves closer to the top tier engines in terms of CPC rates, their traffic is going to have to convert considerably higher in order to keep the same profitability that merchants are used to now.
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: Smarter.com Tags:
Smarter Introduces Featured Merchant Program
With Q4 shopping either right around the corner, or having already launched in full force depending on how you ask, now is just as important a time to take advantage of all the shopping engines have to offer right now.
Smarter.com is introducing a featured merchant program then, which at an additional rate of $0.20/click features:
- Premium placement on product page – a sure fire way to stand out amongst your competitors!
- Smarter.com Featured Merchant Logo
- Merchant Logo listed alongside all of your listings – excellent branding opportunity!
- Highlighted on category and search result landing page
- with the ability to opt-in at the account and category level
In essence then, merchants who participate in the program will be more prominently listed in search results, making consumers more likely to click through.
Normally for the larger engines inflating one’s traffic isn’t always the best idea since the costs will iust increase significantly, but as a smaller engine getting more traffic is generally a greater challenge.
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: Smarter.com Tags:
Listing Promotional Messages on the CSEs
One of the unique aspects of CSE management is figuring out how all the shopping engines’ unique features differentiate themselves from each other.
While columns such as product URLs, product names, descriptions, etc. are generally universal among them all, there are many discrepancies among them that a merchant should know about in order to maximize their listings on the engines.
Below we provide details on practices that will help best promote your products specifically for each engine:
Listing Nextag Sales Price:
- Include MSRP or regular price in feed
Nextag Free Shipping:
- If everything has free shipping, select “Always Free for All Items” in the “Manage Shipping Rules” section
- Otherwise include shipping costs in feed
Nextag Promotional Message:
- For a single message, bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” under “Manage Bids by Category”, then click “Set Marketing Message” and choose from the available templates
- To select different marketing messages by product, include a “Marketing Message” column in the feed and be sure to bid at least $0.05 on the “Message” for all products under “Manage Bids by Category”
Listing Free Shipping:
- Set column “Shipping Rate” to 0 in feed
Shopping.com Promotional Message:
- Include message in “Stock Description” column in feed.
- Free
- 100 character limit
Shopzilla Free Shipping:
- If shipping is free for all products, select “Free shipping for all products” under shipping information.
- If not, set rules through feed, column: “Shipping Cost”
Shopzilla Sales Price:
- Include “Original Price” & “Sale Price” columns in feed
- Be sure to select Contact Us in your Shopzilla login and notify your account manager that you’re adding a column; your listings will temporarily come down while they re-process your feed.
Shopzilla Coupon:
- Go to “Manage Listings”
- “Special Offers”
- Select from the available options
PriceGrabber Free Shipping:
- Set it under the column “shipping costs” within the feed
- In the login under “Your Account” it can be modified in “Shipping and Tax Info” (not available for all accounts)
PriceGrabber Coupon:
- All the info can be included in the feed using their coupon spec sheet.
Google Products Search Tax and Shipping:
-Add a column called “tax” in the format–Country:State:Percent: y/n shipping
So for example if a merchant is based in the United States, California, charges 8% tax, and offers free shipping, that column would read– US:CA:8:y
More info can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=160162
Become Promotional Message:
- Include desired text in feed
- Bid on desired categories in “Bids” tab
Become Sales Price:
- Include the following columns: “MSRP” and “Price”
Smarter Promotional Message:
- Have the two columns: “Regular Price” and “Sale Price”
- Go to “Extras” tab
- Select “Submit Coupons” and fill in appropriate fields
Yahoo Shopping Sales Price:
- Have the two columns: “price” and “sale-price”
Yahoo Shopping Free Shipping:
- Fill in the appropriate SKU with “0” in the column “shipping-price”
Pronto Sales Price:
- Include the columns: “Retail Price” and “Price”
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: Become, CSE Management, Google, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Pronto, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, Uncategorized, Yahoo Shopping Tags:
Sample Data Feeds and Feed Specifications for Comparison Shopping Engines
Below you’ll find both sample data feeds and links to data feed specifications for the major shopping engines (As of 10/3/2009). It’s highly recommended that you read over the latest specification at the engine resource site before deploying the feeds for your campaigns.
-Nii
Google Base/Google Product Search
- Sample Data Feed for Google Base/Google Product Search
- Google Base/Google Product Search Data Feed Specifications Page
Shopzilla
- Sample Data Feed for Shopzilla
- Shopzilla Data feed Specifications Page
Pricegrabber
- Sample Data Feed for Pricegrabber
- Pricegrabber Data feed Specifications Page
Nextag
- Sample Data Feed for Nextag
- Nextag Data feed Specifications Page
Shopping.com
- Sample Data File for Shopping.com – Varies By Category, see Specification Page
- Shopping.com Data Feed Specifications Page
Bing Cashback
- Sample Data Feed for Bing Cashback
- Bing Cashback Data Feed Spcifications Page
Yahoo Shopping
- Sample Data Feed for Yahoo Shopping
- Yahoo Shopping Data Feed Specification Page (Must be a Yahoo Shopping Merchant to View)
Become
- Sample Data Feed for Become.com
- Become Data feed Specifications Page
Smarter.com
- Sample Data Feed for Smarter
- Smarter Data feed Specifications Page
Pronto
- Sample Data Feed for Pronto
- Pronto Data Feed Specifications Page
Amazon Product Ads
- Sample Data Feed for Amazon Product Ads
- Amazon Product Ads Data Feed Specifications Page (Need to have an Amazon Product Ads account to View)
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: Amazon, Become, Bing, CSE Management, Cashback, Google Base/Shopping, Nextag, Pricegrabber, Pronto, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, Smarter.com, Yahoo Shopping, bidding Tags: Feed Specifications
Comparison Shopping Overhauls for ‘09
While a good majority of Americans resolute to lose some extra weight during the new year, a couple of shopping engines have recently been packing on a little some extra.
A few months ago Shopping.com began allowing merchants to submit new header columns into their feeds, which we thought was a great way to allow customers to narrow down what they’re looking for–and it appears they’re beginning to take advantage of this feature.
Currently the feature appears to only be available for shoe shoppers, as users browsing for shoes can now sort through popular brands by size as well as color. This is similar to Like.com’s interface except Like uses a proprietary system that uses image recognition for sorting, whereas Shopping.com relies on the attributes that merchants send them.
This is a great addition for both consumers as it provides a better overall shopping experience in looking for exactly what they want, as well as for merchants to be more specific about their offerings.
Also revamping their look is Smarter.com. They have a much sleeker design with bigger fonts and a neat widget on their front page that rotates images of some of their more popular items around.
They also appear to be further jumping on the social media wagon by promoting their blog on their front page, which doesn’t only discuss the retail industry, but operates more like a magazine column–which provides plenty of incentive for users to want to come back to their site.
Imagine that, operating a blog to promote your business, what else will they think of 
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, Smarter.com Tags:
