Supplying product data feeds to Shopping Comparison Engines (CSEs) can help retail clients to grow revenue with excellent ROI However, CSEs require a tremendous amount of management in order to be successful; the feeds must be customized to each engine, and must be frequently updated to reflect inventory changes. Most businesses do not have the technical resources or the time to devote to optimizing their product data feeds. Inceptor has seven years of experience and proprietary tools that enable us to efficiently and effectively manage CSE accounts.
Situation
A national specialty retailer came to us in mid-2008 for help with their search engine marketing program. They were looking for help in expanding revenue without sacrificing efficiency. Their very mature PPC program had reached a level where continued expansion was decreasing its ROI. Rather than remain focused solely on PPC, we recommended launching a CSE program. The client had previously tried Shopping Comparison Engines with in-house resources. The campaigns were paused due to poor performance: click traffic that drove few orders.
Challenges
The company has thousands of product variables to manage, including sizes, colors and other options. Inventory, pricing, and bids needed to be changed often, but the large data set made manual updates time-consuming and difficult to perform. The client needed a more efficient way to manage their product data feeds.
Solution
The Inceptor team built a highly customized CSE program that updates product information daily. We tailored the feed to each shopping engine to exploit differences in each engine’s use of metadata and search results display formats. We also helped the client set up internal systems to aggregate inventory changes, allowing us to incorporate them automatically. We managed the client’s huge and varied inventory with our proprietary monitoring and performance analysis technology. Our tools automatically set bids based on ROI goals, and identify inefficient categories or products, allowing us to manage and optimize feeds down to the SKU level. Our optimization experts quickly identify high- and low-performing categories and SKUs, and can adjust the feeds, metadata, and other factors to maximize results.
Results
During the first six months, the new CSE program drove significant revenue at an ROI comparable to the PPC program. Thus, we were able to deliver increased revenue from a program that the client had previously found to be unprofitable.
