CPC Management Strategies

CPC Management Strategies on Comparison Shopping Engines

Today we look at some questions our viewers have had about CPC bids on CSEs. The first one comes from Alex Pethick, an Internet Marketing Specialist at SearchEOBlog.com

"With Shopping.com, how do you go about setting bids? They’re the only CSE now (I think) that do not allow you to bid on individual products – which is exactly why I am successful on other CSE’s. What’s your strategy? The category bidding is so broad and it’s so hard to measure the results."

Great question Alex. It's difficult to optimize bids at a micro level on Shopping.com, but that doesn't mean you can't find a workaround to essentially optimize the bids for only positive performing products.

What you'll want to do is remove products that underperform, or have a cost of sale (spend divided by revenue) higher than you're comfortable with. Depending on the average price of your items, you can cut products with 30 clicks and no sales, 40 clicks and no sales, or 50 clicks and no sales.

This way, only products with a positive ROI or those without enough click data for you to make a strategic decision on will be in your Shopping.com feed, and any adjustment in bids will impact only those products.

The next question comes from Shailesh at  ATENsoftware.com.

It would be nice if [the Bidding Book] had a guide on which shopping engine to select, and a procedure for how to select one, since there are so many.

It would also be nice if you had a section on how NOT to engage in a CPC campaign. I often hear from our merchants that they burned out on CPC, spent a lot of money, and did not get much return. How can one avoid this?

Finally, some tips on bidding strategy would be helpful, i.e. when to exclude items from the shopping engine.

Great questions. For the first question, we release a quarterly study on the best comparison shopping engines based on conversion rates, cost of sale, revenue, traffic, merchant tools and merchant responsiveness ratings that merchants can use to find the best comparison shopping engines for their webstore.

Beyond our study, we understand that each merchant has a unique set of circumstances that must be analyzed in order to figure out a best-fit launch plan for comparison shopping engines.

In order to analyze that best-fit launch plan or to optimize your current comparison shopping campaign, we put together a free questionnaire for online retailers

to fill out and find the perfect launch strategy or the easiest ways to improve your ROI from comparison shopping engines (considering the average retailer misses out on around 60% of their total potential revenue on the CSEs, it's a pretty cool report you can use to your advantage). We'll send you a report that details these points and even walk you through them on the phone if you want.

Regarding how NOT to engage in a CPC campaign, for merchants starting out on any comparison shopping campaign, submit your entire feed but keep bids at a minimum. Make sure before going live that you have tracking set up, at the minimum 3rd party tracking, ideally the CSEs tracking pixel, to make sure you can optimize your bids and suppress products in the future.

Check your campaign often after you first go live to make adjustments to product visibility as needed. You may find the traffic is extremely small or way too much, and there are different ways you can throttle this traffic to suit your ROI goals. Remember, the most important function of an optimal comparison shopping campaign is CPC bid and product suppression over time.

A campaign that's optimized when launched will soon go sour if unattended to for even a week.

For tips on bidding strategies and when to exclude items from the comparison shopping engines, make sure you get a copy of our Comparison Shopping Handbook and Bidding Book.

The next question comes from Isaac Perlstein who runs the marketing department at QualityBath.com

Most of the time when we analyze CSE performance we look at brands or categories cost/sale. We see which ones are performing and which are not. And then we will cut out the fat. Other times we just run a report for non performing products and cut them from the feed. Both these ways are good ways to work. But the overlap, there may just be a few good products in a category that we cut out because the rest of the products are really bad.

But we need to analyze categories in order to figure out trends, to learn what works and what doesn't.

Great question. Here's the short answer: The more micro and personal you can get with your analysis of your comparison shopping campaigns, the better.

With a company of your size, in a highly trafficked category and with 100k+ SKUs, I can understand if that seems a little daunting sometimes. First you'll want to make sure you're doing everything you can to maximize your conversion rates, not with your landing pages, but with product listing optimizations like adding coupons. Shopping.com's Stock Description column is a great place to advertise promotions, Pricegrabber has a free coupon promotion space, and Shopzilla and Nextag have paid promo text you should test out.

Once you sync up your promotion strategy with your products, get into the data. Make it a requirement to check each comparison shopping engine three times a week. On Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to make sure products aren't wasting you extra spend or leaving money on a table by not optimizing CPC bids.

It's a lot of work, but the extra micro-management resources you invest will pay for themselves in gold.

- The last questions comes from one of our biggest supporters on the blog who has asked not to be named.

1. Most optimal amount of bids? Do the bidding once and let it run for 3 days or optimise daily?

2. How long before I change a product level bid to ensure that it becomes a decent ROI?

3. Recommended increments for novices to the bidding idea and for bigger clients?

4. Depending on catalog of the products listed with the CSE how would the best way be to distribute the entire budget be? A lot of high bids on high value item categories or take a slow and steady philosophy and measure it with tracking pixels and analytics to see what the best performing categories are?

Great questions again. I think I'm going to do more audience participation in upcoming posts. If you have any specific questions on comparison shopping that you would like answered on our blog please e-mail me at andrew@cpcstrategy.com.

1. The number of times you bid depends on your product count and category. A merchant with 300 products in the electronics category may need to optimize bids twice a week, the same as a home & garden merchant with 5,000 products. It's all relative to your products and the ROI goals you have. If you have extremely strict ROI goals, you'll want to check your campaigns more often to ensure no products are wasting spend and that your bids are fully optimized all the time. If you have looser ROI goals and are looking to drive more traffic, you may be able to cut down the amount of times you optimize bids per week.

Regardless of your ROI goals you should still be checking each account at least twice a week for products that get sales (optimize bids) and products wasting spend (suppress from the feed) as well as checking to see if any data feed or account errors that need to be addressed.

2. Remember that each bid you implement takes 1 – 2 days to set and go live on a comparison shopping engine. So a bid made on Wednesday will begin to track new data from it's new placement algorithm on Thursday or Friday. On Monday you should be able to see if there was an impact from this change in bid. By Wednesday next week you should be able to tell more. The next week after that it should be pretty clear what the impact of that bid is.

Usually a week's worth of data is the smallest set you want to analyze when determining if a bid optimization was successful or not. Two weeks is better. Always keep in mind other variables that are changing on your site, like landing pages, product attributes, site load time, and product price, which will have an impact on any bids you have set and should be accounted for when you optimize bids.

3. Great question. Bidding for novice bidders is completely addressed in the CPC Strategy Bidding Book. Bigger clients often have a little more wiggle room with the comparison shopping engines because they are paying such large CPC costs to each CSE. That doesn't mean their bidding strategy at it's core should be different, but it should be taken into account when managing each account.

4. This is a complicated question and there's no real across-the-board answer for online retailers. Each merchant's bidding strategy should be personalized dependent on website promotions and how aggressively priced your products can be. If you have data that will say, you have the lowest price on this group of items for this time period, and you're absolutely sure of it, take that into account for each campaign's bidding strategy.

I would shy away from bidding extremely high on high-ticket items, as these are most often clicked on by consumers to look at and say 'oooooh, ahhhhh' while they don't have any real intention of buying. Just something to be careful about.

If you compete more on customer service than on price, a slow, methodical approach for bids is probably the best. Remember with the right coupon, conversions can soar and your bids should increase to reflect that.

At the core of your strategy, the more micro you can get with your analysis and optimization, the better.

CPC Bidding Strategy Wrap-Up

Hope you enjoyed this quick Q and A session with some of the audience members on the CPC Strategy blog. If you have any questions you'd like answered, feel free to contact me at andrew@cpcstrategy.com. I'll answer it in person and if you'd like I can answer it on the blog.

If you're looking for more information on comparison shopping or CPC bidding best practices, make sure you download our Merchant Comparison Shopping Handbook and our Bidding Book. If you're looking for a detailed analysis of how you should launch on the CSEs or some easy steps you can take to improve your ROI, make sure you take our free Comparison Shopping Campaign Evaluation.