SES San Jose is in full swing and one of the sessions covered Shopping Search Tactics. Brian Smith, from ComparisonEngines included a list of 10 don’ts when advertising on shopping engines.
- Not tracking properly. Track and test and track and test.
- Not reading the specs, assuming they are correct. Put time into it.
- Assuming your data feed is up and running. Go and check. Be careful about this.
- Not including unique IDs (MPN, UPC, ISBN). You might not show up on a skewed list of products.
- Bidding (like you do in PPC campaigns) - be careful. Sometimes you are bidding on a product or category, it’s not keyword bidding. We see people throw tons of money away.
- Going ga-ga over ad-ons - little things like logos can really increase your costs - it’s an easy sell for the shopping engines so be cognizant. Rather than spending the extra 10 cents on a logo, spend 10 cents to increase your bid to get better placement.
- Don’t assume that submitting all products to all engines will work. Think before you send out the feed. If you make $1 on product and that’s what the bid cost is - it doesn’t make sense. And all engines have different types of traffic so pay attention.
- Categorization: You must categorize on shopping engines. Some do, some don’t. If they don’t require it, you should do it anyway because otherwise you might end up in the miscellaneous section. And a lot of times the uncategorized products will end up at the bottom of search results.
- Engine level quantitative data feed optimization (DFO) - see what engines are and are not working. And if it’s not working, why? Look at the data you are submitting.
- The biggest mistake we see is the “submit and forget” mentality. Think about actively improving your results.
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