2 replies to this topic

[rezla]

First of all, hello!

I've been a casual observer here for a few weeks, and finally got round to registering today. You'll have to forgive me if I've posted this in the wrong place or if someone else has already explored the topic - I've had a look around but couldn't find anything.

I manage a retail website, it does very well in terms of sales and has a good share of the market, being a long established player within it's own sector. We do very well within the major search engine's free listings, and I get what I consider to be pretty good return on my Overture / Espotting / AdWords campaigns.

In the UK we have several major shopping comparison websites, which are pay per click but tend to be fixed price rather than bid based, running at 25-30 pence per click (you can get somewhat reduced cpc if you are a higher volume user.)

I'm just trying to stimulate a bit of a discussion on how effective other people have found the likes of pricerunner, dealtime and kelkoo - especially given the expected arrival of google's own froogle at some point in time.

Of the first 3, I have found no discernable pattern at all. Their conversion rate from click through to sale varies wildly amongst them, the average spend per customer who buys is similarly unpredictable. Overall, my stats indicate they send a huge volume of traffic to the site, but far fewer people actually buy than through bpc providers. We are a retail website; visitors are nice, but shoppers are nicer!

With these big players linking to our site, does that impact on positively on our page rank in google at all? Clearly if pricerunner or dealtime were number one for a particular keyword on a given search engine, and your own site was considerably lower, you are essentially increasing your chances of being found - is there value in paying these costs over say an adwords campaign?

Clearly with a bid per click mechanism like overture, the value of the goods or services being sold will have a levelling effect on the upper limits of the bids appearing in first and second place etc. The downside with the comparison sites is that if you were selling lower cost, high volume goods there has to come a general cut off point where for goods of value £x, it simply isn't economical to pursue.

I'm going to leave it there for now - I have posed a few questions that I think I already have some answers to, but this is one area I'm sure is different for every business model and market sector. I would be very interested in any comments or observations people have.

rez

[printerbase]

rez,

We use both Dealtime and Kelkoo in the UK.

We are a new company with no much market share and a relatively small player in a very competitive sector.

We get a lot more traffic from Kelkoo then we do from Dealtime, usually around 6-7 times more visitors.

This may be down to the fact that our products look more competitive on Kelkoo than Dealtime, Kelkoo shows products with both the product price and price including delivery, Dealtime just shows the products price with no indication of delivery charge. We operate a free delivery policy so our products look less competitive on Dealtime because all our competitors charge a delivery charge. It could also be down to the fact that Kelkoo is more popular than Dealtime.

Conversation rates are low for both Dealtime and Kelkoo in our experience, a lot of visitors but not many shoppers and with a high click through rate of 30pence and a low product margin it makes me worry about ROI.

By continuing to use the likes of Kelkoo and Dealtime are we throwing good money after bad, I am seriously beginning to wonder, I think a click price of around 15pence would make it a lot more economical for us but I don't imagine it would work for the likes of Kelkoo.

As for gaining the links to our websites the links they use are generated dynamically when you click on the link so googlebot and others cannot follow them.

Peter

[Jill]

Welcome, rezla!

I'm expecting a guest article at some point in the near future about shopping engines, which hopefully will discuss some of those points.

With all the shake-ups and buyouts in that sector, I suspect things will be constantly changing.

Anyone else use shopping engines?

Jill