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The Top Ten Comparison Shopping Engines Compared – Q4 2009
Welcome to the Q4 edition of our quarterly comparison shopping engines. With the shopping season increasing sales across the board it was a busy quarter for all merchants on all the engines.
For the previous studies and a more in-depth look at our methodology, take a look at our Q1 rankings.
Again, this study compares the major comparison shopping engines and see how they rank based on the following criteria:
• overall traffic driven
• average amount of revenue generated
• COS (Cost of Sale) % or return on spend
• average CPC rates
• responsiveness rate among the engines
• quality of merchant tools
In this edition, the ranked as follows:
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Below we’ll quickly sum up the graphs–for more details you can view our previous rankings for a deeper explanation of each category.
For the first few categories, the results are based on an index of 100, with the rest expressed as a percentage of the leader.
Traffic (average clicks per month)
Revenue (average per month)
COS %
Average CPC
Responsiveness Rating (ranking from 1-10, 1 being best)
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Merchant Tools (ranking from 1-10, 1 being best)
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Conclusion
In the end we ranked each shopping engine from each of our metrics from 1-10 and assigning a point value for each category (higher being better).
We doubled the COS % value making that out of a possible 20 points, and weighted traffic + revenue as 1.5 each for a maximum of 15, summed it up, and got the following:
| Engine | Traffic | Revenue | Cos % | Avg. CPC |
Responsive- ness |
Merchant Tools | Total |
| Google Base | 9 | 15 | 20 | 10 | 1 | 10 | 65 |
| Shopzilla | 15 | 13.5 | 12 | 3 | 7 | 9 | 59.5 |
| Nextag | 13.5 | 12 | 10 | 1 | 8 | 7 | 51.5 |
| Pricegrabber | 12 | 10.5 | 8 | 4 | 9 | 8 | 51.5 |
| Shopping | 10.5 | 9 | 16 | 7 | 3 | 5 | 50.5 |
| Cashback | 6 | 7.5 | 18 | 9 | 4 | 2 | 46.5 |
| Become | 7.5 | 6 | 4 | 8 | 10 | 6 | 41.5 |
| Smarter |
1.5 | 4.5 | 14 | 6 | 6 | 3 | 35 |
| Yahoo | 4.5 | 1.5 | 2 | 5 | 5 | 4 | 22 |
| Pronto | 3 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 17 |
Again Google Base is atop our list, with the Shopzilla in 2nd, and Nextag/Pricegrabber in 3rd place.
With Yahoo Shopping partnering with Pricegrabber it’ll be interesting to see how this affects Pricegrabber’s traffic amount as well as its conversion rates.
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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. 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.
