CPC vs Affiliate

Ahh, the age old deabte. So let’s ague it some more. Merchants generally only susbscribe to one of the two schools of thought. Both sources of traffic have their own merits and also downsides. In a very brief and hopefully succinct way here’s my appraisal of the market -

Affiliate

Pros:
*  No risk on the merchant side – all the risk of marketing is done by the affiliate
*  Pre-determined revenue share with the affiliate. Therefore you know exactly how much of your margin you’ll be giving away for each sale.
*  Very little effort or monitoring required by the merchant. The affiliate network normally runs the tracking
*  No pressure to improve things if no sales are forthcoming
*  Thousands of affilaite sites in circulation

Cons:
*  No way of affecting your positioning on the affiliate site.
*  Affiliates generally don’t bring in as much revenue as a CPC based site.
*  Unable to generate more traffic by spending more with the affiliate.
* Overall design of the affiliate sites is generally poor as they are not providing information
* Very little information flow between affiliate and merchant

CPC

Pros:
* Bidding allows changing of position.
* Accordingly by increasing the CPC cost gets better positioning.
* Higher traffic per site
* Often high visibility into clicks, sales and spending habits.
* Some even offer free research tools.
* High proportion of stores using these sites now

Cons:
* High risk as no sales are guaranteed
* Without proper visibility vast quantities of money can be wasted on poor perfroming products.
* Minimum CPC costs increasing all the time.
* Lack of transparency of clicks from some sites.

Clearly both methods of sales generation are important to use. When properly managed mercahnts can make a lot of money from CPC campaigns, however there is always the risk element to it.

My advice would be to look at all avenues for sales generation, the only problem could be, can you keep up with the orders???

The Importance of Cookies

Ever seen this symbol??   

The image above is the notification in Internet Explorer that a cookie has been blocked. Cookies are a vital part of the vast majority of tracking systems. This is a fact that Microsoft have a major issue with. They allow internet users to set their privacy policies in the options menu. Whenever a cookie privacy policy does not exaclty match the cookie policy it gets blocked. P3P was invented to have a unifying policy for all Priacy Policies. Privacy Policies are an integral part of successful Internet Explorer integration. A privacy policy is a two fold integration. You need to have a compact privacy policy in your headers of your site. You also need to have a privacy policy that can be seen publicly. As long as you have a privacy policy your cookies will be allowed.

Alas this process is not as easy as you might think. Firstly, the compact policy has many different abbreviations that are quite ambiguous. Secondly the Privacy Statement is not always found by Internet Explorer.

Overall Internet Explorer means well, but makes integratation very difficult.

P3P Implementation Guide | Shop Submit Privacy Policy

Shopping Search Marketing

Welcome to the shopping search and comparison shopping marketing blog. The aim of this blog is to help UK retailers understand the market and make the most of what it has to offer. I hope that we can help you unravel the mysteries that surrounds the myriad of shopping sites that are currently available.

The terms comparison shopping and shopping search are quite far apart in terms of what they stand for. Comparison shopping in essence is investigating who’s the cheapest on the 42″ LCD TV you’ve wanted for the past 2 years. Of course it’s good to see a broad range of prices so you are sure that you are not paying over the odds. All of the comparison sites offer this simple service. The real measure of quality can be defined through shopping search. Shopping search is not results based on part numbers, but on search terms very much like Google. So if I’m searching for a new black pin striped suit I’ll have results that fit this search criteria. Essentially it is this search functionailty that will set apart the men from the boys.

Relevance is the key!! The qulity of your feed is paramount. If I’m searching for my black pin striped suit I would only get results based on these search words. You would be surprised how often merchants don’t have this kind of information in the title or the description. It appears to be a very rudimentary requirement but often this gets over looked. The convention recently has been to ensure that the categorisation of the product is accurate and ignoring the important content. Of course it is important to have the item categorised correctly, however, how many people go onto a shopping search site and go through the layers of categorisation? Not many. People use the search bar more than anything, which means those that don’t have good titles and descriptions will never appear.

SKU / Part Number / EAN / UPC – which one is which???

Along the same lines as the shopping search lines, the unique numbers cause merchants a real headache. So what is the best practice? It must be apprecaited by all merhcants that each site has its own very frustrating idiosyncracys for product alignment. I’m sure all merhcants have encounetered this before to an extent. The simple fact must remain that there must be standarisation within the industry for all comparison engies to use the same number, where that be the the SKU (stock keeping unit) or the EAN (European article number), there must be one unifying code that everyone will use.  It can be argued that this already exists, however there is a limit to this compliance. You can have a SKU number of ABC-123, where 5 sites will use this ABC-123 formula and the others will use ABC123. The only real solution for a merhcant will be to send out bespoke feeds for each site which their own specific SKU number requirement.