5 Holiday Readiness Tips for CSE Marketing

The holiday shopping season is well recognized as the peak revenue-generating period for the retail industry. However, this year the sudden economic downturn has generated additional pressure on retail marketers to drive sales. For smart online retailers the current economic situation presents an opportunity as consumers look to the Internet for convenience and cost-savings to fulfill their holiday shopping needs. Our Performance Marketing team has assembled a number of holiday readiness tips and best practices for this holiday season, which they plan on using to help online retailers efficiently, generate sales that you can use to best position your company for the challenging shopping season ahead. Download the entire 2008 Holiday Best Practices & Tips for Comparison Shopping Marketing Guide for additional strategies on tactical preparation for the coming months.

Here are our top 5 tips from the Holiday Best Practices Guide to prepare for a successful holiday season:

1. Bid Audit & Strategy
   Start by reviewing all of your bids on all engines to ensure your bid-levels have been adjusted as necessary on those channels that have already increased their bids for the holidays. To note, Shopping.com has reduced the minimum bid on many of its categories during this holiday season. If a shopping engine hasn’t yet implemented a bid change, be proactive in determining a ballpark range to which your bids should be increased (or decreased, depending on the category). Have those bids organized and ready to implement quickly once the engines raise their bid levels.  Prior to implementing your bids, perform a quick analysis to see if your conversion rate on key products and categories have increased enough to help offset the higher bid amount. Also, consider setting yourself a calendar reminder to turn your bids back down once you can no longer ship for the holiday season so that you don’t get hit with unnecessary costs post-season.
   
2. Review Your Product Filters
   It is wise to take a moment to review your product filters. Verify that you are only sending products to the channels that you have in stock. Few things are more disheartening to a holiday shopper than getting all the way to the point of purchase, and then discovering that the product is out-of-stock. For your high velocity products, you should consider raising your inventory threshold above “1 in stock” (or your own unique minimum inventory threshold) to account for additional holiday velocity. If you have any filters set up to remove products from your feeds based on explicit product data or performance criteria, evaluate those filters to make sure they still make sense given the season, increased bid costs, and increased conversion rates.
   
3. Revisit Category Mappings
   Test a good sample size of your products to ensure they are categorized correctly on each shopping engine. In addition to checking your own uncategorized products, look at how your current categories are set up and see if there are better ways to map them to the categories unique to each shopping engine.  This will help boost your relevancy and ensure your products appear for related searches.
   
4. Check for Feed Errors
   Ensure that the data you’re sending to each channel is accurate and fully accepted by each comparison-shopping engine without error.  Look at the individual data fields on a sampling of products across multiple categories to make sure they are populating the correct data.  Follow up by looking up these same products live on the shopping engines and verifying that they are appearing correctly.
   
5. Optimize Your Top Performers
   Use your top performing products and categories as your guide to data optimization. Use your website analytics to know what keywords drive conversion of your top performers and apply SEO best practices to optimize on those keywords. Make sure you have those keywords added to all the feeds that support them and your product ads include those keywords. Include holiday promotional language in your CSE feeds wherever you can. Work closely with your web team to ensure these promotions and other pertinent holiday information is available on your own product pages as well.  Retailers often overlook this because product pages aren’t traditional landing pages – but they are landing pages for your CSE customers.

Maintaining and optimizing your comparison-shopping engine campaigns can be a labor and time-intensive endeavor, but ultimately the retailers who win on CSEs are those that are able to efficiently promote the right products in the right places with the right merchandising copy and promotional offers.  Download the entire “Mercent 2008 Holiday Best Practices & Tips for Comparison Shopping Marketing” guide to learn more on how your company can harness this opportunity.

Check out the post by Linda Bustos "Holiday Marketing Tips for Comparison Shopping Engines" on the Get Elastic blog for a great summary of our Holiday Best Practices Guide.

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