Tips from Chicago Search Engine Strategies – Part 2 By Tanya MartinThe next session that I enjoyed was Shopping Search Tatics at Search Engine Strategies. Chris Bowler, Media Director and Search Practice Lead at Itraffic.com, Laura Thieme, President and Founder of Bizresearch and Craig Snyder EVP of Marchex were speakers. Detlev Johnson, President of Technology, SuccessWorks Search Marketing Solutions, moderated Forum.
I have chosen to go over Mr. Bowler’s part of session. This was by far one of best speakers I had heard all day. Probably because it wasn’t as much theory, it was based on a client case. He gave detailed enough facts that you could understand and grasp shopping engines potential.
Chris Bowler went over a client case “Barrie Pace”. A little about Barrie Pace: ·Barrie Pace offers women’s designer and exclusive career, business-casual, and special occasion fashions ·Sold $23+ Million in apparel online in FY2004
Barrie Pace uses customer email, search engines, online advertising/direct marketing and shopping engines to obtain sales.
Mr. Bowler then went over why you should use shopping engines. This is because you are placing products in front of shoppers that are already transacting. He also provided this chart on shopping engines:
http://www.tanyamartin.com/shopping-engines-traffic.jpg Source: Nielsen Netratings, October 2004
So far a pretty convincing case to why you should use shopping engines to promote your products.
Mr. Bowler then discussed shopping engines that Barrie Pace partnered with. These were Amazon, Altura/Catalog City, Froogle, AOL Shopping and Shopping.com.
Next he went over some tips for shopping engine newbie, these were: 1.Determine your financials 2.Crawl, Walk, Run! 3.Shopping Programs do not run themselves 4.Adjusting your feed is critical (a feed is a data file with your product details, product name, prices, product images all in one file, usually line by line .txt file) 5.Store Feedback is invaluable
Determining your financials questions you should ask yourself and analyze:
What’s your overall budget for shopping?
For Click-over Shopping Engines (pay per click engines): ·What’s an allowable bid price: By brand? By product?