I think you've probably seen those banner ads soliciting 'mystery shoppers.' They're the hip young people who canvas the offline retail world and gather competitive intelligence and even internal G2 on the retailer's unsuspecting store employees, right? Hmmmm. In the online world there are few mysteries. Product offers, price, merchant ratings and availability are out there for all to see. Yet, many merchants spend little time gathering competitive and offer intelligence on those they are competing with online... and even less time taking action to counter the competitive threat. This post is the fifth in our series of nine on CSE Marketing Best Practices and we'll touch on the role of competitive intelligence in smart comparison shopping engine marketing.
Monitor the Money SKUs
I guess it's pointing out the obvious that merchants should focus most of their time monitoring those SKUs that matter... the X% of products that drive 80% plus of your online revenue. Those are the SKUs your competitors are watching also. Typically the less branded a merchant is [and the more direct marketing focused a merchant is] the more time that they spend in the trenches watching their competitive presence online. By collecting and acting on good CSE intelligence smaller and in some cases 'more energetic' online direct marketers can often out-flank well branded merchants in this regard.
Keyword Studies - Not just for SEM anymore
Comparison shopping sites such as Shopzilla and Shopping.com are as much search engines as Google or Yahoo. It's just that they are specialized shopping search engines. Successful paid search marketing on Google and Yahoo have long depended on understanding an ad's position on SERPs (Search Results Pages) for given search terms [keywords or phrases]. Comparison Shopping Engine cost per click marketing is really no different. For each of the 'Money SKUs' that we referred to above a short list of keywords or search phrases should be identified. These search terms will naturally be the ones that convert the best in an SEO and / or SEM context.
Each of the search terms / phrases should be regularly plugged into the search box on the most important shopping portals. From the CSE search results pages the marketer will want to answer the following questions:
- Are my products present? If so, at what position... on what page?
- Are my products present on the default sort of the SERPs? Sort by relevance? Sort by Price?
- How have the position of my product listings changed over time?
- Can I correlate the results of my CSEO work and CPC bidding to a change in product listing position?
- Who is winning the 'smart buy', the channel's editorial product pick?
- Who is owning the sponsored listing or preferred listing postions?
- How can I adjust my offer (shipping, price, promotions) to be more competitive?
- How should I adjust my CPC bidding to test the ROI on a higher position for these ads?
Where's My Offer?
Savvy marketers should not only monitor the SERPs of the search terms of their 'Money SKUs' but they should monitor the attachment of those SKUs to the CSE shopping sites. The easiest way to do this is to search on the actual product title (as a search phrase) in each of the CSE search engines. Assuming the product is in the search engine, it should also be categorized correctly and the key offer content should be current. If it's not, fix it and republish a feed to the shopping channel and make sure that the CSE is aware of any major issues.
Jellyfish Have No Scales
With more than just a few fish in the 'Sea-SE' world (ah, remember Jellyfish and PriceFish.com?), can you really hope to monitor what's going on with every Money SKU on every site? Not likely. The real challenge of CSE marketing is that it's tough to keep on top of competitive and offer intelligence on your Money SKUs on even just the big fish channels. It's a matter of scale. It's a matter of resources. Here is where a team like Mercent Performance and a platform like Mercent Retail allow you to put scales on Jellyfish (and every other CSE channel) and make sure that your offers are present, well positioned and competitive.
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