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affiliate marketing

omparison-shopping engines (CSEs) come in a wide range of shapes and sizes. All have been built to attract people shopping for certain products, and assist them in

making the right choice. In return, the owner of the CSE normally earns revenue based on a commission or cost per click.

Should you be using CSEs? Probably. CSEs enable you to get your products in front of more people and allow you to tap into niches and other people’s traffic flow. They can be a very powerful way to increase volume.

Broadly the key types are:

Pure—their only activity is as a CSE, and they cover many product areas; a bit like a department store. See Kelkoo.com or PriceRunner.com

Niche—CSEs that focus on a specific product or category. See ComparetheMarket.com and ShopStyle.co.uk.

Hybrid—these CSEs broadly fall into two categories: A CSE that operates its own basket or acts as a shop itself; a shop that runs a CSE alongside its own products. See Shop.com, Notonthehighstreet.com, eBay, and the Amazon Marketplace.

Shop on the side—non-ecommerce sites that have a shop “on the side” to profit from their traffic. See ElleUK.com/shopping and Shop.Standard.co.uk.

Free—CSEs that don’t charge. See Google Base, also known as Google Product Search.

Every ecommerce site should have its products on Google Base because, for one, there are no ongoing costs so it’s free traffic; second, it can be a quick way to get high up the search engine results, so it’s good for SEO. Search on Google for women’s boots and you’ll see “Shopping

results for women’s boots” partway down the page—that’s Google Base results.

For the comparison-shopping engines that aren’t free, you need to choose carefully, your choice of CSE will contribute to how successful you are. Some

operate via traditional affiliate networks (Affiliate Future, Webgains, Linkshare, et al); others you can deal with direct; some you can work with via either. To work with any of them you need to provide them with information about your products. This is normally in the form of a product feed, but occasionally there’s a manual form to fill in. As a

minimum, a feed will be a CSV file incorporating

• product name• product information• link to product image• link to product on your website• price.

Almost all will send the customer to your site to purchase, but in some cases they will operate the basket and then send you the order to fulfil.

Optimising step 1: Select your CSEsKey things to consider are:

• Does the CSE sell other products in your sector?

• Which CSEs do your competitors sell on?

• Which CSEs attract your type of customer?

• What traffic levels are the CSEs likely to send you—is it worth the set-up cost and effort?

• Cost—commission or per click? Per click involves more risk.

• Cost—don’t forget the cost of building the feed and any integration required. Some will cost more than others. If they are operating their own basket then you also need to integrate your order processing system.

You almost certainly want to trial more than one.

Compare and conquerFour steps to get the most from comparison-shopping engines

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151 High Street, Ilfracombe, Devon EX34 9EZ • Tel: 01271 866221 • www.catalog-biz.com • info@catalog-biz.com

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Step 2: Build the foundationsOnce you’ve chosen your CSEs, optimising the performance is very similar to optimising pay-per-click activity. It’s all about how much you pay, the words or information you provide, and what you keep active. In order to optimise the performance of your CSEs therefore, you need to make sure you’ve got the tools in place to allow you to analyse the performance.

First, check out the tools that come with the CSE; several have their own analytics packages so you can see where the traffic and sales are coming from. Some of them require you to add their tracking code to your website to enable all the reporting functionality.

Next, check what information you’re getting from your site’s own analytics data. Can you identify the traffic that’s coming in from each CSE? Can you see what part of your feed drove that traffic? You may well be able to add tracking information to the URLs in your product feed to enable that to work better (if you’re using Google Analytics, for instance).

Step 3: The information in your product feedThere’s a lot you can do with your product feed before you even start submitting it to CSEs that will improve performance. Look carefully at the fields the CSE requests—the more of this information you can provide, the higher quality traffic it will be able to provide you with. For example, EAN and ISBN numbers can really benefit you if you’re selling CDs and books.

Make sure you’re providing accurate information, such as the correct postage charges, and as much product information as possible, such as technical specifications. And make sure your products will be in the right place on the site—so check the categories.

Some comparison engines like you to flag bestsellers for special areas of the site, this can really help increase traffic levels for you.

Each CSE is in part a search engine, so think about your keywords. If you sell only petite clothing, your site’s product descriptions probably don’t include the word petite, but on a search engine (or CSE) you want traffic that specifically seeks petite. So build your feed to add any qualifying keywords into the product names.

Send the right products; if something’s out of stock there’s no point in including it in your feed especially if you’re paying for each click! You may also want to exclude products that are

due in soon. It’s critical to keep the feed up to date; I’d recommend updating it every 24 hours. If you’re going to do so, find out when the CSE picks up the feed and synchronise with it. There’s nothing worse than posting your feed at 2am on a Monday and the CSE not picking it up until 1am on Tuesday—you’re permanently a day out.

Step 4: Collecting dataOnce your comparison-shopping engines are up and running you’ll start to see which categories and products are driving the sales, and which are costing you all the money—rather like PPC. This means you can start getting into the nitty gritty of feed optimisation. If, say, on Engine A half your spend is on the earrings category, but you’re not getting a sale from it then stop providing earrings products to the CSE.

Some CSEs will let you “bid” more by category; so, if on Engine 2 half your sales are coming from necklaces, but only 10 percent of your spend is on necklaces, a bid increase should bring you more traffic and sales. If your tracking is detailed enough you can break this down to a product-by-product basis.

It’s worth noting at this point that constantly amending your feed can build up hefty bills from your web company. So it may be worth investing in a feed aggregation company—it will take one feed from you and amend it for everyone you want to send to. You can do this stage of optimisation within its tool for no extra cost.

Step 5: Pick up the phone and optimiseIt’s worth getting in contact with the CSEs, they want to keep you on board. They’re usually pretty good at helping you work out what is working and what isn’t, and often have plenty of options for getting a better position.

Finally, always take a look at how your products look on the comparison-shopping engine. There’s a strong chance that it has a profile page for you, so make sure you’ve filled it with accurate and compelling information. Some CSEs give you a rating; it’s often pretty easy to improve your ranking—at the most basic level, even simply uploading your logo helps.

Chloë Thomas is managing director at e-marketing

consultancy Indium Web Management.

Choose carefully, your choice of comparison-shopping engine will contribute to how successful you are

©2010 Catalogue Development Centre Ltd.This article has been reproduced with the express permission of Catalogue e-business and no material may be used without our prior consent.151 High Street, Ilfracombe, Devon EX34 9EZ • Tel: 01271 866221 • www.catalog-biz.com • info@catalog-biz.com