Comparison Shopping Engines Management
Comparison shopping engines (CSEs) are a crucial part of an online retail strategy. If you're not in NexTag®, Shopzilla, Shopping.com® and other CSEs, you're missing out on exposure and revenue. CSEs are capable of putting thousands of products in front of customers at the critical point when they are comparing prices, features and brands to help make a purchase decision.
Beyond the standard ability to create and submit a feed of an ecommerce site's inventory to comparison shopping engines, we also effectively fine-tune these shopping engine campaigns to maximize both revenue and return on a daily basis. Using a direct data feed that you provide, our proprietary tools can manage an entire online catalog of products with tens of thousands of records and provide frequent dynamically generated pricing, stock availability and selection changes.
Automated and Manual Approach to Shopping Engine Management
We believe a combination of automated and manual approaches delivers the best results. Inceptor search marketing's best-in-class proprietary technology helps our feed specialists proactively monitor and consistently improve ROI and conversion rates for our retail clients.
- The rigorous rules-based logic developed by our team's feed specialists enables our tool to deliver consistent, efficient results through iterative analysis of statistically significant changes in account performance.
- Our tool measures and optimizes performance at the SKU, category and shopping engine levels.
- We optimize for each comparison shopping engine individually based on the reported conversion results and the unique strengths of each engine.
- Rules developed specifically for each client's goals and inventory help our tool to determine the optimal list of products to submit to each CSE. Any products that are removed from the submission file during optimization are tested again periodically to account for other factors, such as product seasonality.
- The categorization logic we develop specifically for each client's catalog ensures products fit into the correct categories for each shopping engine taxonomy. Our ongoing recategorizing efforts help increase traffic from browsing.
- Our feed specialists pay careful attention to your product-specific marketing plans. For example, we highlight your special offers by adding promotional text to your CSE program and then removing the text when the campaign expires.
Synergy between CSE, PPC and SEO
CSE performance data provides insights of immeasurable value for keeping your PPC and SEO programs fresh. To give you a competitive advantage, our feed programmers share your CSE performance data with our PPC and SEO teams. These daily feeds can help identify:
- Early signs of sales trends, which indicate products about to take off
- Lists of new products, which allows for prompt inclusion in PPC programs
- Products now on sale, which allows for potential promotional PPC ads
- Out-of-stock items, which ensures PPC campaigns do not continue to generate traffic and costs for products after they have sold out
- Profitable revenue generators, which identify and highlight promising areas for SEO and PPC keyword expansion
- Additional testing opportunities, at lower CPCs, for keywords/keyphrases, messaging and conversion funnels
Proven Results from Comparison Shopping Engine Programs
We have relationships with the major shopping and price comparison engines, including:
- Amazon Product Ads
- Become.com
- Bing Shopping
- Google Product Search1
- NexTag
- PriceGrabber
- Pronto
- Shopping.com
- Shopzilla
- TheFind,
any many others2.
We understand the sweet spots for each engine. Here are some examples of the results we delivered on major shopping engines for several Inceptor etail clients.3
- Religious Products on Smarter.com
- 195% ROI and 190% Conversion Rate growth
- Sports and apparel on Become.com
- 188% ROI and 186% Conversion Rate growth
- Healthy Home Products on Shopzilla
- Grew 157% in ROI and 178% in Conversion Rate
- Skates and Snowboards on PriceGrabber
- Conversion rate increased 280% over 4 months and ROI increased 300%
- Wedding Supplies on NexTag
- 204% ROI growth and 163% Conversion Rate growth
Ready to talk to our experts? Just give us a call or drop us an email!
1 Google is a trademark of Google Inc. and is registered in the U.S. and other countries.
2 Names of CSEs may change at any time and without notice.
3 Inceptor internal data, January - April 2010
800.307.6709
Case Studies
What Our Clients Say...
“I would definitely select Inceptor again, and in fact, I have. We’ve signed four contracts with them at this point. I can tell other business owners that you’ll do better with SuperMedia and Inceptor, and that they really have your best interests at heart”
Continue reading
Fred Hosley, Web Manager for Kaz USA
“The best thing about working with the Inceptor team is their ability to adapt to changing market conditions.”
Larry Davis, VP of Marketing for Ross-Simons
“They have made the organic online marketing channel a low-cost acquisition channel for us. We have been able to turn it around (from before) and drive costs down. It is of high importance for us to have them onboard.”
Sr. eCommerce Strategy Manager, Fortune 500 Financial Services Company
“I would never recommend them to another company like mine. I want to maintain the competitive advantage I get from working with them!”
Inceptor eCommerce Client – Home Furnishings
“Inceptor brings to the table a broader view of the marketplace. Working with a vendor that can bring us larger marketing trends is very useful to us because we are very myopic. Their role is very important. They do the actual bidding and management of our campaign, plus they serve a technical and advisory role to our business.”
eCommerce Client – Sporting Goods and Apparel
“We’ve been working with Inceptor for about 18 months. Inceptor built our accounts from scratch, and manages our Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, and Comparison Shopping Engine feeds. We selected them because they seemed to be knowledgeable, honorable, personable, and intelligent. All of these assumptions have turned out to be correct.”
Continue reading
Fred Hosley, Web Manager for Kaz USA
“Our SEO account person is very quick to respond, well-versed in search engines, and sets expectations very well, which is what I need. They are not promising the world and then not delivering. That is what makes this a good relationship.”
Sr. eCommerce Strategy Manager, Fortune 500 Financial Services Company
“From my experience working with Inceptor, they are looking for ways to improve our PPC account and bring best practices. They are always looking after our business goals on a day in and day out basis.”
Inceptor Client – B2B Services
“We have been able to identify pockets of underdeveloped search terms to minimize our cost per click. Our team is not afraid to push back and share new ideas. It’s a pleasure working with Inceptor.”
Larry Davis, VP of Marketing for Ross-Simons
“I think the main thing they have really helped us is to keep our marketing dollars in front of us. Pay per click is very expensive. The cost of marketing was difficult to determine what makes money and what doesn’t. They have helped us to be more effective in spending our marketing dollars.”
Inceptor eCommerce Client – Healthy Home Products
CSE Blog Entries
Introducing Inceptor’s New “Google Shopping Defined” eBook!
Check out our brand spanking new ebook on Google Shopping (PLAs) and the new changes being rolled out by Google. …read more
Google Shopping Search Results No Longer Free
Major changes are coming to Google right in the middle of Q4 that will have a major impact on what was formerly Froogle and more recently known as Google Product Search. The new program, Google Shopping will incorporate elements of the existing Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs).read more