Driving Traffic Through Shopping Search Engines

Use Google Base, Yahoo Shopping, Shopping.com and Shopzilla can help your site achieve better traffic. It is better to be a part of online shopping networks if you sell products. Joining shopping aggregators broadens exposure and gives you access to third party review sites, but can also produce low ROI.

Essential Feed Checklist

1. Do everything you can to get reviews. Reviews will increase secondary sales, and store reviews can have independent search engine results, possibly giving you more than one position on page 1.
2. Watch your ROI. Shopping aggregators do not allow you to set CPC prices, so you are at their mercy. If you don’t make sales from shopping network clicks, lower your spend or choose a different ecommerce aggregator.

An anonymous retailer says that using Google Base has helped him/her get an increase in traffic and the person encourages others to try it out.

“every[site] we’ve submitted a product feed for is doing surprisingly well with it.”

Reviews are hard to get with only 3% of the people who buy actually leave a review. One way to encourage users to leave a review is by offering a coupon or discount for reviews.

Here is an example of what one ecommerce vendor did to encourage reviews:

Break out the adwords budget a bit, get that nice shopping cart logo on adwords and start driving traffic to your top 10 selling items. If you use two or three check out methods, a discount for using Google checkout. We used a 5% off your order type of coupon we made in our Google Checkout panel, leading to a review page.

The more shopping engines you advertise on the more reviews Google will pick up, assuming you get reviews on those other shopping sites.

Leverage online sites to maximize product reviews. Social shopping is the promise of web 2.0 retail.