Feed Management Service: Use Shopping Comparison Engines to Get In Front of Potential Buyers
Shopping Comparison Engines Defined
From Yahoo! Shopping and NexTag to Shopping.com and Shopzilla, use of shopping comparison engines is becoming more prevalent as these sites make online shoppers’ lives easier. These engines allow consumers to compare products, features, and pricing; as well as consumer and expert ratings and store locations; all from one centralized place. A user can either perform a search or browse categories to find products and respective vendors.
Retailers benefit from shopping engines because more and more Internet shoppers are using them to make online purchases. And an increasing number of consumers are using them to research products that they eventually buy offline. Additional marketing benefits of utilizing shopping engines include: ease of crafting and modifying listing creative, quick refresh of content, ease and accuracy of tracking results, and the ability to put products in front of potential customers when they are actively researching products, or at the moment they intend to make a purchase.
Submitting pages of your website to the shopping engines is done through a data “feed” rather than manually submitting pages one by one via an engine’s online user interface. A feed is a structured, automated text file that adheres to detailed specifications dictated by each shopping comparison engine. Once a feed is submitted to a shopping engine, pages are guaranteed to appear within the site’s index of Web pages, but they are not guaranteed a specific ranking within the search results. Rankings are still based on the specific engine’s algorithm for judging the relevance of a given website to a given keyword search.
iProspect’s Feed Management Service
Because retailers often sell their products across hundreds, thousands or even millions of Web pages at a time, it makes sense to utilize a feed management service to submit those pages to selected shopping engines. Utilizing an experienced feed management service provider like iProspect gives retailers the benefit of having someone effectively build, and then continuously optimize, the feeds so that they adhere to the individual requirements of each engine.
iProspect provides everything required for a successful shopping comparison engine feed management campaign, from strategy to creative development and testing, to reporting and analysis. Additionally, we can coordinate the prudent use of feed management in concert with natural search engine optimization and pay per click advertising programs.
At the outset of a feed management campaign, iProspect typically receives raw data from clients, which we process and convert into data feeds built using the specified file formats required by each individual shopping engine. Simultaneously, iProspect optimizes the content within the feeds in order to appeal to the various relevancy algorithms (so the listings will rank as highly as possible in the search results). Once the feeds are submitted, the individual search properties review the feeds on a mutually agreed-upon schedule (daily, etc.).
iProspect’s feed management service is unique in the marketplace. Our iSEBA paid search management technology optimizes your overall budget across as many shopping engine feeds as necessary, including Yahoo! paid inclusion. iSEBA monitors the results produced by each listing within each of your feeds and automatically turns individual listings “on” and “off” based on their effectiveness at achieving the objective you establish for your campaign (CPA, revenue, ROI, ROAS, etc.). Our unique approach ensures that your budget is spent more efficiently and that your campaign goals are effectively achieved.
iProspect’s proprietary tracking system feeds real-time data to the feed management system. Data is used to optimize the campaign and make appropriate changes to ensure objectives are achieved. Status calls between clients and an iProspect Paid Search Specialist are conducted on an as-needed basis to recap the campaign status and discuss strategy. A Paid Search Specialist works directly with clients to customize reporting requirements and deliver on an agreed upon schedule.
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