E-dreamz Company Blog

Most online advertisers focus most of their energy and money on their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaigns. Social Media Marketing is the latest and hottest online marketing trend - gaining an increasing amount of attention when online marketers prepare their budgets.

However, often forgotten or ignored in the online marketing mix is potentially the MOST EFFECTIVE advertising medium for E-commerce sites - Comparison Shopping Search Engines. Comparison Shopping Engines (CSEs) such as Google Product Search, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Pricegrabber allow users to search for products, compare prices at various online vendors, read reviews and ratings - and ultimately find users the products they want at the best prices.

Similar to pay-per-click advertising programs such as Google AdWords, you pay the CSEs each time a potential buyer clicks on your product listing. Google apparently doesn't need the money, so clicks in Google Product Search are absolutely free.

CPC Strategy does a great quarterly review of the top 10 comparison shopping engines, discussing which engines give you the most traffic, best bang for your buck, etc. At minimum, you should take full advantage of the free clicks waiting for you at Google Product Search by setting up a product feed at the Google Merchant Center. Google is allocating more and more of their search engine results page (SERP) real estate to product listings. Product listings often appear within Google's main results when performing product-specific search queries. You may have noticed that "product image" shots are now also appearing in the Google AdWords "Sponsored Links" section on the side (you do have to pay for these clicks). 

Our clients have regularly experienced higher conversion rates on the CSEs than on their PPC ads. Potential buyers are further along in the buying cycle and can already view your product and pricing without having to click on your listing - so the purchasing decision is more likely to have been made before you "pay" for the click. With PPC and SEO, shoppers have to go to site after site to compare - so the click occurs before the purchasing decision has been made.

Additionally, as PPC advertising has become ultra-competitive - PPC click costs are often too high to maintain a positive Return on Investment (ROI). The CSEs are not nearly as competitive, often leading to lower click costs and higher ROI. Furthermore, the CSEs actually advertise in the major search engines for you and often rank well organically for specific products. 

Bottom line, if you sell products online - you NEED to include your products in the major Comparison Shopping Engines. However, with all the different product-feed specifications at the different CSEs, the task of setting up and managing these feeds can be quite confusing and labor-intensive. Contact E-dreamz to discuss how we can help you add your product listings to the major CSEs and take your online product sales to the next level.

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