Retail Performance Marketing - The Mercent Blog

"Maximize Your 2011 Retail Sales on Google" Free Webinar Now Available On-Demand

In case you missed our joint Webinar with Retail Online Integration (ROI) and Google, the complete session with slides and audio is now hosted online and available free on-demand.

No one knows more about Google retail advertising programs than Mercent (other than Google... maybe).

Here's the summary of the presentation:

Featuring: Eric Best, Chief Executive Officer, Mercent and Frank Kochenash, VP of Client Services, Mercent
Introduction by: Kristine Szarkowitz, Director of Marketing & Communications, Mercent
Duration: One hour
Cost: Free to attend/register!

Savvy retailers understand in order to win in eCommerce a highly proactive and informed strategy is a must! Google is taking the eCommerce landscape by storm as one of the fastest growing online shopping channels available to today. Too few retailers however, have the necessary insight and knowledge leverage everything Google has to offer.

In the first of its 2011 Mercent Retail™ Webinar Series, Mercent will deliver a high-value, informative session to demystify Google’s top retail programs and divulge ‘must know’ expert insight on how retailers can leverage Google’s programs to maximize their 2011 retail sales through the channel. This is an ideal program if you want to learn more about:

• Google Product Search (GPS)
• Google Adwords paid search 
• Google Product Listing Ads (PLA)
• Google Product Extensions to AdWords (PE)
• Google Affiliate Network (GAN)

RSVP (Registration) is required to attend this free webinar.

Evolution of the Data Feed Format: New Shopping.com Data Feed Specs

The foundation for a shopping comparison engine is product data. Anyone involved in the industry can explain how many dilemmas emerge when listing products derived from different sellers. Serving up relevant products is one challenge. Matching like products to each other comes next, and of course putting this together in an engaging and consumer friendly format is par for the course. Usually channels attempt to simplify the product feed to allow products to be easily digested and displayed by the engine’s infrastructure. However, recently there has been movement to a more detailed data feed format first pioneered by Amazon, and then later brought to comparison engines by GoogleBase’s innovative design. The latest company to courageously put forward a complex and intricate catalog feed format is Shopping.com.

Overview of the New File Format

Shopping is releasing the new data feed format so that it can be adopted by merchants by June 1st. The typical format options are all present such as SKU, Brand, UPC, Product Name, etc. These are all part of the 'Classification Attributes' group as detailed in the product feed specification. The feed can be delivered in the usual ways and in the usual formats, such as .CSV, .TXT, and .XML.

Product Attributes

What really makes this new e-commerce feed format stand out, is a section of the shopping feed specifications that Shopping refers to as 'Product Attributes’. Since this feed format is not in production yet, it’s only possible to speculate on how all these facets will come together. However, here are the highlights, and they are intriguing:

Product Bullet Points 1-5: This looks like it will operate in a similar method to Amazon's feature list, which gives an itemized, heads-up display to the consumer of short points about the product. This type of format should help in allowing consumers to easily browse through products for additional details, without having to read the entire description.

Product Type, Sub-type, Style, Gender, Department, Age Range, Material, Format, ...etc: And, it keeps going! There are numerous attributes, too many to mention here. All of these attributes are aimed at helping place products into subgroups existing below the category level taxonomy. These subgroups will appear as options in a navigational bar on the site, and allow for further drill down into relevant product assortments.

Color: It's still early to spell out exactly how this will operate, but on many items and searches, there should be a color search option. Shopping will display colors available based on items within the result range. Indications are that Shopping will match more granular color choices to more basic options (such as matching ‘maroon’ to the color red). Like.com has implemented a similar color attribute.

Custom Attributes 1-100: Yes, up to 100 separate product attributes. This is where things get really interesting, and kudos to Shopping for opening up this much ability for merchants. Each field name is to be assigned by the merchant and then populated with matching values. Only Google has opened up this much customization ability until now, by allowing merchants to choose what information is best suited for the consumer. As with some other components, there are many possibilities with this tool, so it’s hard to give advice or know with certainty the exact affect these variables will have.

New Possibilities

Ultimately this new catalog feed format will open up new opportunities on Shopping.com. To accommodate this feed format and the data points it offers, Shopping will be progressively updating their site. To get an idea on how this will play out, visit the Shoe category on Shopping.com: http://www.shopping.com/xDN-shoes. Ideally, this will give merchants a whole new range of options to better match their products to what consumers are searching for. This will allow for more detailed searches and results, which are needed when having an inventory of millions of items.

On the merchant side, this will also open up the door to more creative data construction, without the limits of only a few basic data points. With new possibilities, does come increased risk as well. If these data points are not completely filled out, then a merchant’s products could disappear as consumers click into progressively more detailed product groups. With proper product feed integration, this can be overcome. For example, in Mercent Retail, these additional data points could be populated via content rules to ensure a robust product feed even if the product data is not initially available. Overall, with proper testing and feed management, merchants will have the entire summer to get ready for Q4 2009.

Tagged: Data Feed Product Attributes, CSE Trends, Channel Marketing Management

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.

CSEO Best Practice: Optimizing Your Product Titles

A properly formatted Product Title should be considered the cornerstone in your comparison shopping engine optimization (CSEO) efforts. To achieve optimal relevancy on most shopping engines, you may need to revise the Title in your feed from its original appearance on your site. On the other hand, Google prefers that the Title in your feed reflects the one found on your product's landing page. A bit of art and science is needed when crafting a Product Title because the balance of form and function changes from one engine to the next.

In general, the Title you craft should be clear, descriptive and accurate. A good Title should start with Brand, followed by a descriptive phrase or adjective about the product, and end with the product type (noun). Great information to include in your Title is gender, size, color and other descriptive attributes. You should avoid unnecessary use of punctuation, capitalization and symbols as way to make your products stand out. Crafting a Title that misrepresents your product is a sure fire way to lose the trust of those you are trying to sell to. No one likes being tricked.

The Title is a major factor in how your products match to search queries and is used by most engines to tie your products to additional sub categories. Your Title should not focus on clever marketing terms or fluff text but rather relevant product information a user may search for (such as brand, gender, model number, etc.). Keep in mind that you will not be able to craft a perfect Product Title that catches every nuance of every related search and categorization opportunity. For example, "Fender American Deluxe Stratocaster Electric Guitar (Black Maple)" is relevant for the person searching for "Fender Deluxe Stratocaster ", but not as much if they are searching for "Montego Black Fender Strat". Remember, if you can’t fit it all in the Title you can use the product description to include additional descriptive information.

Be aware of the total allowed character limit each Shopping Engine has for Product Titles and take advantage of it to ensure you have the most optimal Title in play. Do not exceed the allowed limit for a Title or it will be truncated. A truncated Title is an easy way to lose credibility because a potential customer may view this as a mistake and look somewhere else to purchase even if you offer the best price.

Here’s a quick reference to how many characters are allowed in the Product Title by Shopping Engine:

Engine	Field Length
Become	80 Max Characters
Google Product Search	80 Max Characters
Microsoft cashback	255 Max Characters
MSN Shopping	50 Max Characters
NexTag	80 Max Characters
PriceGrabber	255 Max Characters
Pronto	255 Max Characters
Shopping.com	100 Max Characters
Shopzilla	100 Max Characters
Smarter.com	No Limit, Truncate 70 characters in Search Results
Yahoo! Shopping	No Limit, Truncate 45 characters in Search Results

In general, the preferred Product Title structure is:

Brand >> Model >> Descriptive Copy >> Product Type

Even though this structure will work for most products, consider each product type has a unique list of attributes that could be used to make the Title more relevant.

Here are a few examples of different Product Title structures:

Product Type	Title Format	Example Title
Clothing	Brand  >> Style / Color / Material >> Gender >> Clothing Type	Eddie Bauer Blue XL Tall Long Sleeve Men's Straight-Collar Oxford Shirt
Electronics	Brand >> Model Number >> Style / Color >> Product Type	Apple iPOD Touch (MA627LL / A) Black 16GB Wi-Fi Digital Video / MP3 Player
Furniture	Brand >> Series >> Style / Color / Material >> Furniture Type	South Shore Lexington Collection Dark Mocha Queen Size Platform Bed
Movie	Title >> Year >> Author / Artist / Director >> Format Type	Swingers (2002 Miramax Collector's Series) ~ Jon Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and Ron Livingston (DVD)
Musical Instrument	Brand >> Style / Color / Material >> Series >> Instrument Type	Fender American Deluxe (HSS) Black Stratocater Electric Guitar
Wine	Winery >> Year >> Region >> Wine Type	Etude 2006 Carneros Estate Grown Pinot Noir Wine

Helpful hints for Product Titles:

• Use standard spelling and grammar.
• Use common terms. (Use “sofa” not “davenport”)
• Do not include HTML or control characters.
• Don't use ALL CAPS and unnecessary punctuation. (!, ?, etc)
• Don’t use promotional text (Clearance, On Sale! & Free Shipping).
• Avoid using specific price, availability & time information.

There is no “one size fits all” formula to crafting a Product Title. The information above summarizes general best practices that will help you get 80% - 90% of the way there. Careful consideration needs to be given to the type of products you have, the channels you’re advertising on and how your target audience searches for these items. You can never go wrong with testing ideas on a subset of products, measuring the results and testing again. Of course, using tools like Hitwise, WordTracker and Google Insights for keyword research can go a long way for things like “shoe” vs. ‘footwear” or “drum set” vs. “drum kit” and so on.

GPS - Google Product Surge

Recently there has been a strong rise in the effectiveness of Google Product Search (GPS) as a source of traffic and sales.

Unfortunately, I can't post a nifty graph from a reliable third party source like Compete.com here, because the Google Product Search listings are an extension from the Google.com domain. So, any traffic evaluation will reflect Google.com as a whole and not just the GPS component.

My information is based on client data, where sales have been rising steadily since 2007. This is partly to do with data optimizations made within Mercent, but it also shows that recent changes by Google have been very helpful.

Putting the Shopping Back Into Google

One change has been adding the 'Shopping' link back onto the Google home page on the upper left hand navigation. This quickly allows shoppers to route to the Google Product Listings and began a browse session.

A second route also is now provided when a search matching GPS listings is made. The first natural listing result is a quick summary of a few products, as shown below:

This brings quick attention to the GPS listings and helps route qualified traffic through the site. Not having a main domain, a la 'Froogle', may hurt a little bit but the surge in new shoppers has certainly brought Google back on track to becoming a top ranked CSE. Additionally, in combination with Google checkout, this surge may well eventually challenge Amazon, as many have predicted.

Taking Advantage of The Traffic

To harness the increased traffic, several steps can be taken to increase effectiveness. As a small disclaimer, Google does not release specific information on their algorithms, but the basics still apply just as with other comparison shopping engines.

1. Descriptive Product Title: Make sure to include a detailed synopsis of the product being sold. So if you are selling a widget, make it an "Acme Aluminum Plus Size Widget". Don't go overboard with a exceedingly long title, but make it quick, readable, and hopefully stocked with a few well chosen keywords. Which brings us to point #2...

2. Use Relevant Keywords: Don't worry about trying to repeat the same word over and over, just once in the title and a couple of times in the description will probably do. Also, use keywords which are relevant and make sense. Don't use a heavily trafficked keyword if it doesn't really apply to the product. Lastly, be careful on spelling. Some engines correct for hyphens or plural/singular nouns. However, Google does not, so do your research.

3. Description: This will also contribute to content, so make sure the description is well built. I would suggest adding the most important script at the beginning of the description (the rest will be truncated and hidden from view)

4. Reviews, reviews, reviews: Work on getting product/merchant reviews in place. This appears to aid in ranking and also lets consumers know you can be trusted. Google does not have their own survey code yet, but you can use survey code from other engines which will then be crawled and placed into Google's results. For more information on Google ratings, see another Mercent Post Here.

5. Categorization: Always make sure to categorize items properly. This is not quite as crucial as some engines which automatically divert to a set category based on search terms, but none the less is good advice.

So now that Google is paying attention again to Google Product Search, and so are consumers, there is only one question left. Are you?

Live at Internet Retailer 2008

If you are in Chicago this week at the Internet Retailer Conference, then make sure to come by the Mercent Booth #437.  We will have a full team there whether you want to talk about the industry, trends, or just how big this conference is getting.

SEO and SEM Marketing Using Comparison Shopping Engines and Marketplaces

In talking about the effectiveness and benefits of using comparison shopping engines and marketplaces like Amazon, there is one aspect that often is overlooked. Discussion is usually centered on the ability to give consumers choice and visibility into products. This is true from a costumer’s point of view, but there is another big plus I think goes overlooked, and that is getting the costumer through the door in the first place.

As the prime decision maker or business owner, it’s vital to get people into the store before they buy, and a website is no different. Many tactics are available including search engine marketing (SEM) and laborious search engine optimization (SEO) work. The extraordinary thing about comparison shopping engines and marketplaces is in many ways, they do this work for the merchant. These channels spend a large amount of time drawing in traffic similar to site owners and getting those consumers the choices and information they are looking for. One interesting off-shoot of this competitive niche is just how well comparison shopping engines and marketplaces have gotten at their own SEO and SEM work.

To illustrate, I took a quick survey using heavily trafficked searches that most merchants would kill for (well, hopefully not literally). I then ran a quick search on Google, and scanned the promised land for any SEO and SEM guru, the coveted ‘Page 1’ Google results. Most businesses would need to invest a large amount of time and money to be ranked in these spots. The beauty here, is that these spots have been filled out nicely by the comparison shopping engines and marketplaces.

To test how effective these channels are, I performed a test by making searches on Google. This is not quite scientific because paid results will vary by search, natural results will vary by day, and I have purposely omitted sites which offer an advertising solution, but a slightly different model than the focus of this article (eBay, Overstock).

Below are the results of high traffic product related keywords searches on Google in both organic and paid placements:

Keyword Search	SEO on Page 1	Channels Present	SEM on Page 1	Channels Present
baby stroller	1	Amazon	1	Bizrate
digital camera	1	Cnet	3	Amazon, Bizrate, PriceGrabber
olympus digital camera	2	Amazon, Bizrate	1	Bizrate
ipod	2	Amazon, Cnet	1	Amazon
laptop	2	Cnet, Yahoo	1	NexTag
office chair	0	None	0	None
wii	1	CNet	1	MSN Shopping
psp	1	CNet	1	Amazon
lcd tv	0	None	4	Amazon, NexTag, PriceGrabber, PriceScan
iphone	1	CNet	2	Amazon, ComparisonSearches
ink cartridge	1	Bizrate	0	None
sony plasma	1	Amazon	2	Amazon, NexTag
7 jeans	2	Bizrate, Yahoo	0	None
hollister clothing	2	Bizrate, Shopping	1	Become
xbox	1	Amazon	1	Amazon
hd dvd	0	None	2	Amazon, SHOP.COM
gold necklace	4	Amazon (2), Bizrate, Yahoo	0	None
fleece jacket	2	Amazon, Yahoo	0	None
ray ban sunglasses	2	Amazon, Shopping	0	None
boots	2	PriceGrabber, Yahoo	2	Amazon, Bizrate
Total Hits	28		23
Average Per Page	1.4		1.15

The interesting thing in looking over the results, is the relative stability in the findings. With the exceptions of 'gold necklace' and 'lcd tv', the searches are fairly consistent in terms of coverage. You can expect to find about 3 results on the page, evenly divided between paid and natural listings.

The additional benefit to a merchant, besides not having to compete for these listings on their own, is the relative optimization work done by the channels. For example, if a paid listing is pulling in a lot of non-converting traffic, the engine will turn off the listing. This sort of trickle down optimization, works to the benefit of the merchant by making sure the right traffic is being pulled in initially, before a consumer even clicks on an item resulting in an expenditure.

CSE Best Practices: Go Long or you may come up short

By Glen Hamilton

Classic marketing (actually advertising) has been about ad ‘reach, frequency and targeting’ since the serpent beguiled Eve (and Adam). Getting your message out to all the right people on earth frequently enough to have an impact is the name of the game. Online retail comparison shopping engine (“CSE”) marketing blends all the classic advertising elements together. It’s about great market reach, ad frequency and consumer targeting… with targeting both in terms of demographics (who am I?) and psychographics (what’s my purchase intent?).

So, in this last in a series of nine blog posts on CSE Best Practices I’ll focus on one element of CSE marketing which is what I’ll call ‘extended reach.’

Extended Reach as CSE Best Practice

The concept of the ‘Long Tail’ in online marketing whipped onto the scene in 2004 when Chris Anderson from Wired magazine coined the term (and sadly it has already become a bit of a cliché). From a retailer’s perspective the long tail of online comparison shopping advertising has two cords: more SKUs and more shopping channels (A bigger product catalog distributed to more shopping destinations).

A CSE best practice is to publish more product ads to more channels (the long tail) where you are maximizing the ROI on your CPC and CPA ad dollars on every one. Clearly this is difficult to do manually and this fact leads retail marketers to overly suppress underperforming product ads and neglect highly targeted and lower cost 2nd and 3rd tier shopping channels.

Mercent Retail is a platform to syndicate large assortments of product ads anywhere to anyone. What’s even more important is that Mercent Retail has the algorithms and analytics to let you do so while maximizing the ROI on each product ad. No longer will you have to cut short the number of channels you manage just because of the lack of an efficient means to manage them. Mercent Retail allows merchants to efficiently publish all their product ads to more channels than ever before.

SKU Suppression is for Cavemen

A couple Mercent competitors in the CSE management space talk a lot about ‘SKU suppression.’ SKU suppression is where unprofitable product (“SKU”) based ads are cut out of the catalog assortment published to a given shopping channel because either their ROI is negative or they are not saleable (i.e. ‘out-of-stock’). SKU suppression in and of itself is a blunt instrument that reduces the cord of the long tail of the merchant’s published product ads over time. Part of an enhanced reach strategy is to flag underperforming ads for viable products (i.e. products in-stock and available for sale) and then have an efficient way to CPC bid and CSEO optimize (edit, test and optimize the ad content for targeted keywords) those ads. In the worse case, if all optimization fails, product ads can be excluded from an assortment. Yet, even if a product ad has been excluded you need not consider that exclusion permanent and you’ll need a way to consider including them again if the offer has changed materially.

The ditch on the other side of ‘SKU suppression’ is poor analytics. The worse thing a marketer can do is to exclude a product ad from a channel assortment for the wrong reason or because of bad analytics. This topic deserves its’ own series of blog posts… but a key point is that conversion analytics should be based on first-party cookies or persistent server-side session tracking methods. Conversion analytics should be able to understand the full value of all the products the ad sold and the revenue, margin and inventory turnover contribution of each product sold. These points just scratch the surface, but SKU suppression without detailed, accurate, relevant and near-real time sales and ad spend analytics may be worse than doing nothing.

Lengthen the tail and wag the dog

Question: What good is a great ROI on your online shopping channel marketing if you don’t have a lot of sales? You want to go to market… and be everywhere all at once and have everything well merchandised and each click incrementally profitable. An effective tailing strategy with more channels and more product ads (don’t forget all your size, color, material and make/model product variations) will add a huge amount to your reach and sales online. In this case the tail can wag the dog and help you keep your online sales and customer acquisition curves convex.

CSE Best Practices: Map Well, Map Strong

By Glen Hamilton

Products presented in ecommerce catalogs are logically grouped together for convenient browsing. These product groups are commonly called product categories. The set of product categories for a given electronic catalog is called the taxonomy of the catalog. The process of assigning products to categories is known as category mapping.

When data from a merchant's ecommerce catalog is published to a comparison shopping engine ("CSE") the CSE will then need to map the merchant's products to the taxonomy of the comparison shopping site. Most first-tier shopping sites (such as Shopping.com, NexTag, Shopzilla and Pricegrabber.com) require (or highly recommend) that the merchant map their products to the taxonomy of the CSE. Obviously this can be a challenge for the retailer.

This post, the eighth in our series of nine CSE 'best practices,' will talk about CSE category mapping and ways to make the process efficient and the outcome optimal.

Map Categories not Products

When creating a data feed for a CSE shopping site the merchant will want to associate each of their ecommerce product categories to a product category on the CSE site. Many merchant categories may be assigned to same CSE category though generally it's not the other way around. By mapping categories (instead of mapping individual products) a great deal of efficiency is gained... as all the products assigned to a given merchant category will be automatically mapped to the related CSE category.

A good category mapping tool set, such as the one provided with Mercent Retail, will make creating and maintaining this category-to-category association a snap for even the largest catalogs. That being said, it's important to take some time to map your categories thoughtfully. Remember, category mapping is all about merchandising. Making sure your products are categorized correctly on the comparison shopping channels will increase your clicks and increase your conversion rate.

Map the SKUs that matter... individually

For those products that really drive the majority of your business it's wise to review the shopping channel category mapping for those products on a SKU-by-SKU basis (or UPC-by-UPC basis). If sales results are not what is expected on a given CSE channel then work with your account manager at the shopping site to find out which categories give the most traffic and sales per product listing... and which categories are the highest performing for your given set of UPC codes or manufacturer part numbers.

Be wary of 'unified' category mapping solutions

Some data feed marketing solution providers approach category mapping by associating each merchant's product categories ( and/or products) to their unique category structure and then using their category structure to map to each CSE taxonomy. This is not optimal. It's like making a photocopy of a photocopy... you lose clarity in the reproduction. It's an unnecessary layer of abstraction that mostly benefits the vendor not the merchant, CSE or consumer.

The merchant's unique ecommerce categories (and all sub-categories) should have their own voice and find their right place on each shopping portal. Attempting to unify all merchants to a single vendor taxonomy forces all merchants using these vendors to have the same CSE facing categories which makes the ability to differentiate your category mapping (and product content related to categories) virtually impossible.

Be wary of 'black box' category mapping solutions

Beyond the pit falls mentioned above of using a unified vendor taxonomy, some data feed marketing vendors will further complicate this approach by relying heavily on software to associate a given product to their taxonomy. This automated mapping process generally focuses on string comparisons of key fields and uses relevance-based product matching on part number and product content data elements.

This type of solution doesn't provide the merchant with control of the process, transparency into the results or the ability to easily test among various category mapping alternatives. It's a 'black box' that may provide value... but it also may wind up making really poor merchandising decisions on key merchant categories, on high value products, on the most important comparison shopping engines.

CSE Best Practices: Brand it!

By Glen Hamilton

Question: What do shopping comparison sites and online marketplaces have to do with retail branding?

I'm interested in your answers based on your experience. As for me, this post (the seventh in our series of CSE Best Practices) will deal with this question and offer insights from our experience with merchants on ways to leverage your retail brand on CSE shopping sites.

My opinion, based on the merchants we work with, is that branding does matters in the success of online shopping site marketing. The conventional wisdom has been that comparison shopping engines ("CSEs") diminish the value of retail branding and tilt the balance of power in the buying cycle in favor of the consumer and the unbranded direct marketer. While this thesis is certainly true to an extent, I believe that the facts suggest a more 'nuanced' answer... one that accounts for the value of a merchant's brand equity.

CSE sites as a Killer App, not a Brand Killer

With the reach of shopping comparison sites growing by over 40% a year, more and more consumers are looking to them before making a purchase decision. In fact, the rate of the growth in the use of online shopping sites is three times the rate in which ecommerce in general is growing. Comparison shopping information delivered over the Internet to mobile and desktop computing devices is clearly one of the killer web applications of our early Web generations [1.0 & 2.0].

Consumers not only use CSEs to make online purchases but to research offline purchases as well. Having an offline retail brand online at the points of highest purchase intent is a really really smart idea. This is one of the biggest reasons why branded merchants need to have a well managed presence on the shopping comparison sites.

What we find is that branded merchants thrive alongside unbranded merchants on these CSE sites. In fact they thrive in a way and to a level that is not found on eBay but appears to be unique to comparison shopping engines, including Amazon.com and SHOP.com.

Retail Brand as a CSE Marketing Advantage

Comparison Shopping Engines allow a retail brand to speak in unique ways. A merchant's brand can be given voice on CSEs with: 1) brand logos next to each product listing, 2) branded advertising banners (often appearing in contextually relevant SERPs), 3) branded site sponsorship placements, 4) branded marketplace 'storefronts' (in the case of Amazon's Merchants @ program for instance) and 5) the actual display URL of the merchant containing the retail brand name.

What a branded retailer can expect is that the power of their brand will increase their click through rate (or conversion rate if you're on a self-contained marketplace like Amazon or SHOP.com) independent of the strength of their offer. It gives the merchant an opportunity to merchandise to the consumer on their web site even if they don't necessarily have the best 'published offer' on the CSE.

The strongest marketing formula we've seen on the CSE's is: Strong Retail Brand + Strong Merchant Ratings + Best Offer. This provides a rock solid basis on which to further optimize shopping channel marketing with CSEO, CPC bidding and product & performanced-based merchandising techniques.

In summary, we find that the lack of a strong retail brand may be compensated for by strong merchant ratings and a competitive offer... but where a great retail brand is present it often takes precedence even over a stronger offer.