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Each quarter, CPC Strategy releases their Comparison Shopping Report, a compilation of data from more than 4 million clicks and more than $8 million in revenue. The Report ranks the industry’s top comparison shopping engines (CSEs) for online merchants based on significant metrics like overall traffic, revenue, conversion rate, cost of sale, average CPC, and merchant response ratings.
Ecommerce merchants can use this data to tailor their marketing budget to make more sales and increase product exposure on the sites that online shoppers frequently use to find great deals on products. Here are the 10 best comparison shopping engines.
1. Google Shopping (CPC)
Since Google Product Search became the paid Google Product Listing Ads / Google Shopping program, it has been the top-performing shopping engine in nearly every significant ecommerce KPI. It's only getting better, too, with overall traffic growing 82 percent from Q4 2012 to Q1 2013 and another 40 percent from Q1 to Q2 2013.
Compared to every shopping engine over the last three quarters, Google Product Listing Ads has generated the most traffic and revenue while maintaining the lowest cost of sale for ecommerce merchants.
Merchants can manually upload feeds or use an FTP to upload in bulk.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
2. Nextag (CPC)
Nextag is a paid comparison shopping site that allows businesses to list physical products, event tickets, real estate, travel plans, sales, and more.
Ranking in second place for the last two quarters, Nextag used to be the top paid shopping engine before Google PLAs kicked into gear. It generated the second highest amount of traffic and revenue in Q2 2013 as well as achieved the third lowest cost of sale for merchants.
Nextag has a nice CPC bidding model too, allowing merchants to bid at the product, brand, and category-level. Nextag also supports bulk product imports.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
3. PriceGrabber (CPC)
PriceGrabber is a paid comparison shopping site that features many deals, coupons, and weekly specials. PriceGrabber has a no-minimum CPC bidding model, which allows retailers to penny-bid, or bid as low as $0.01 on a product.
Last quarter, PriceGrabber had the second lowest cost of sale for merchants. Merchants using Pricegrabber also have the added advantage of sending their product listings to Yahoo Shopping.
The shopping engine also allows for a bulk data feed upload through an FTP.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
4. Google (Free)
This is the lingering presence of Google Product Search and no one should count on Google's free clicks heading into the near future because they are significantly decreasing.
Nevertheless, Google Shopping and Product Listing Ads, Product Search's replacement, is a highly profitable marketing channel that now makes advertisers pay to play.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
5. Amazon Product Ads (CPC)
Amazon Product Ads (APA) benefits from the huge traffic pool of Amazon's Marketplace program. Unlike Amazon Marketplace, Amazon Product Ads links shoppers to a merchant's external web store to make a transaction.
This is a great option for retailers who already have listings on the Marketplace or even just for retailers who want to list on Amazon without subscribing to the Marketplace program.
APA had the fourth lowest COS, sent the fourth most traffic, and generated the third most amount of revenue in Q2 2013.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications (Requires account login to view.)
6. Shopping.com (CPC)
Also known as the eBay Commerce Network, Shopping.com is a paid comparison shopping site. Its CPC bidding model allows for only category-level bids.
Shopping.com finished third in overall traffic in Q2 2013, and this is partly due to the fact that merchant listings on Shopping.com also receive exposure on Google Shopping.
The shopping engine allows for bulk uploads via an FTP.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
7. Bing (Free)
Bing Shopping is a free comparison shopping site that is similar to how Google Product Search functioned when it was free. Merchants need to have a Bing Ads account to list products on Bing.
Bing had the second highest conversion rate in Q2 2013. A paid Bing Shopping program isn't an unrealistic prospect in the next couple of years.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
8. Shopzilla (CPC)
Shopzilla is a paid comparison shopping site that, like Shopping.com, also offers high product exposure through listing on Google Shopping. For merchants, Shopzilla features one of the easiest bidding tools and it allows retailers to zero-bid, or bid nothing on a poor-converting product.
It is partnered with BizRate, so merchant ratings are easily distinguished for shoppers to look at when considering purchases. Shopzilla featured the fifth highest conversion rate among studied shopping engines in Q2 2013.
Shopzilla also supports bulk product feed uploads via an FTP.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications(Requires account login to view.)
9. Become (CPC)
Become is unique because they aggregate research on products (expert reviews, consumer reviews, articles, buying guides, forums, etc.) to provide all the relevant information for shoppers to make a purchase.
For merchants, Become has the highest engine responsiveness ratings among all the shopping engines, so problems with your feed or campaign will be addressed quickly.
Become supports bulk product feed uploads via an FTP.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
10. Pronto (CPC)
Pronto makes it easy for shoppers to find current sales and facilitates buying popular products (e.g., HDTVs) with buying guides.
For merchants, Pronto was third in conversion rate among studied shopping engines in Q2 2013.
The comparison shopping site allows for whole feed processing via an FTP.
Get an Account | Sample Data Feed | Data Feed Specifications
Original Article Post by Mary Weinstein @ Search Engine Watch
Do you have a small website that isn't performing as well in Google's search results as you think it should? If so, you could have the opportunity to have someone on the Google webspam team look at it personally.
Google's Distinguished Engineer Matt Cutts has asked small website owners to submit their site via a Google Docs form detailing why you think your website deserves to outrank the current websites in Google search results, and why you think your website is better than the ones that rank.
Google would like to hear feedback about small but high-quality websites that could do better in our search results. To be clear, we're just collecting feedback at this point; for example, don't expect this survey to affect any site's ranking.
So what exactly is Google looking for website submissions? According to Cutts, one of his engineers "was looking for more concrete examples of small sites/mom-n-pop sites."
He also said that they are looking for a wider range of examples than simply a group of engineers sitting around come up with, so they are "looking for feedback from a wider circle of folks so we can assess the scope of things" and "get input from a wider circle of folks."
Cutts also revealed that it was a tech lead on his webspam team who was thinking of looking into the issue of small websites ranking, "but wanted more data. I offered to ask 4 data"
So your website might not necessarily rank higher because of filling out the survey, but it seems like Google is at least starting to look at the problems where smaller websites are having a tougher time keeping against larger authoritative sites in the search results right now – something people have complained about since the Vince update.
Cutts said he has been looking personally into some of the submissions for small websites that have ranking issues. Meg Geddes, (a.k.a., @netmeg), who is well-known in online marketing circles, had back and forth tweets with Cutts that shows he is clearly looking at some the submissions.
Surprisingly, Cutts commented yesterday that they'd only received a couple hundred submissions, so it is definitely worth taking the time to submit your small website, if you think it's not ranking as well as should.
Article Post @
Search Engine Watch
Google has now made it possible to "analyze and optimize your search footprint" with the new AdWords Paid & Organic report.
Adding this functionality was a bit surprising, since Google has done all they can to stop co-optimization analysis from happening. They have threatened to take away, and actually taken them from some, the APIs that make this easy.
Here's what Google said the benefit of this reporting is:
- Discover additional keywords. Use the report to discover potential keywords to add to your AdWords accounts by looking for queries where you only appear in organic search with no associated ads.
- Optimize presence on high value queries. Use the report to improve your presence in paid results and monitor your high value queries for organic results.
- Measure changes holistically. As you test website improvements or AdWords changes to bids, budgets, or keywords, you can more easily report the impact across paid, organic, and combined traffic.
Of course, Google wants you to use it to "find more words" so that you can spend more money on in AdWords. I really love the second point – "Optimize presence on high value queries". At first I thought they might actually mean to monitor the collaboration, but it is to improve your presence in paid results.
I am completely biased on this topic. I have spoke about co-optimization concept since GoTo offered paid ads in 1998. For the past two years I've been developing a tool that doe this monitoring at an enterprise scale. The biggest problem barrier have been ad agencies that don’t want to lose revenue and marketers that don’t want to tell their bosses that SEO actually matters.
Google provided little details on how to use it so I tried to dig into it a bit and using their provided screen capture we can see a few interesting things:
Organic Listing Improved Paid Click rate by 64%
Yes, that's correct – the lowly organic listing improved paid clicks. This is exactly why paid and organic need to be integrated. Lets look at the contribution of the newly achieved organic listing.
The paid only click rate was 14.95 percent, which seems pretty high until I saw the CPC at $0.06, which suggests it's a branded or a long-tail term. Nevertheless, like magic when the organic listing appears, the paid click rate jumps to 41.77 percent, which is a massive 64 percent increase.
Wowthat is an amazing increase. Strange that if I can increase my click rate that much by increasing my organic rank Google should do all they can to help high major brand CPC advertisers rank better and have crappy snippets – oh wait, they do that already.
If I had to guess why the click rate increased it would be due to brand recognition added by the organic listing or a specific offer for something in paid. It's possible while the organic brand awareness is powerful, the organic listing wasn't as effective as the paid ad.
I wrote about this last year with an example from Adobe where their paid ad offer was overpowering their organic. The key point: when the organic was added, paid performance improved. This is why the first test I tell people do for co-optimization is to understand how many of your top paid keywords don't have organic listings.
In my Advanced Keyword Modeling Session at SES Conferences I give that as homework to the audience. So far, 187 people have told me looked at the lists and only two had more than 15 of their highest CPC words ranking in top three positions.
Organic Listing Increased Overall Traffic nearly 4x
Let's assume the organic listing didn't appear in the top positions. Paid search alone would have only 23,956 visits (160,244 total queries * 14.95% [the paid only click rate])
So by adding in the top organic listing the total clicks from both paid and organic increased to 110,171 nearly 4x the number of clicks that would have happened without the organic listing. Organic alone brought nearly 50,000 clicks just over one-third of the total queries.
Pause Paid to Reap in the Organic Windfall
Now some of you would say that now that we have the organic listing we don’t need the paid listing. We could make that argument since that organic listing alone had a nearly 37 percent click rate, which is 2.5 times the paid click rate and brought in 49,377 visits at no cost and was significantly more than what we would have had with paid search only.
You can also argue that the organic click rate was cannibalized by 6.59 percent (36.88 percent vs. 30.29 percent) when the paid search was running.
We can now quantify the efforts of the SEO team by showing the organic traffic value since to buy those "free clicks" would have cost us $2,962.62 (49,377 organic clicks * paid only CPC $0.06).
Before you turn off the paid, we can't ignore that 64 percent improvement in paid click rate. The impact of the organic listing resulted in an additional 60,736 paid clicks for an incremental cost of $5,466.24 (60,736 paid clicks * $0.09)
That is exactly why you need to monitor them. If you were budging based on the 14.95 percent click rate you may not have the budget for those incremental clicks and missed out on the incremental impact.
Monitor Paid & Organic Collaboration
From this single listing we can see the benefits of co-optimization. The things you should do immediately are:
- Turn on this function in AdWords and authorize in Google Webmaster Tools.
- Make a list of your highest CPC keywords and match them to your organic ranks and see how many aren't ranking.
- For those that have paid and organic simultaneously is the correct page ranking?
- If the correct page is ranking are the messages collaborative or cannibalistic?
No matter what you believe just take the time to look at the data. I've seen hundreds of cases where when you dig in you can find a significant number of opportunities on both sides of the search aisle.
Article Post @
Search Engine Watch
A couple of weeks ago, I took a summer trip with friends. I found myself using plenty of Google tools while we were on vacation: from finding the best flight there and a last-minute hostel reservation, to discovering hidden gems in each city we visited, even I was surprised by how much Google made everything easier and smoother.
With that inspiration, we’ve created a one stop shop at g.co/summer with tips to help you also make the most of these last few weeks of summer.
Here are a few tips you might find useful too:
Meanwhile, my mom back home in New York found some great local activities and museum exhibits, like the MOMA Rain Room, using Google Now in her Google Search app. She even tried some Google+ MakerCamp classes, which inspired her to create her own DIY projects at home.
Post about your summer using hashtag #SummerTimes, and see what other folks are up to.
Happy summer!
Posted by Liz Wessel, Marketing Manager and Summer Traveler @ Google Blog
Several high-profile technology companies have co-signed a letter that asks President Obama for permission to report on PRISM data requests.
Firms including Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Reddit have put their names to the letter, and Yahoo has provided a copy of the letter (PDF). Yahoo general counsel Ron Bell called it a "call to action."
"Democracy demands accountability, and accountability requires transparency," he said. "Today, we are proud to join dozens of our partners across the tech industry, civil society organizations, and trade associations to urge greater transparency by the U.S. government regarding national security demands for our users' information."
The letter was also addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder and Senate majority leader Harry Reid, among others.
It asked that the government release its own transparency reports that show the number of individuals targeted and the number of accounts and devices covered. Supporting this would be more detailed transparency reports from the companies involved.
"Basic information about how the government uses its various law enforcement related investigative authorities has been published for years without any apparent disruption to criminal investigations. We seek permission for the same information to be made available regarding the government's national security related authorities," added the letter.
"This information about how and how often the government is using these legal authorities is important to the American people, who are entitled to have an informed public debate about the appropriateness of those authorities and their use, and to international users of U.S. based service providers who are concerned about the privacy and security of their communications."
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