The Feed Headhache

I recently read in an e-consultancy article, feeds were a showstopper when first  starting working with Comparison Shopping Engine (CSE) and to be honest I though “yes, yes it should not be that hard”….Well better think twice.

Submitting and optimising feed is a real struggle, all CSE have different standards and different needs, wouldn’t it be easier for them to get together and reflect on some universal submission? Depending on how many CSE partners you’re working with and the numbers of clients and/or products, it can take valuable hours if not days to get your heads around submitting the perfect feed.

Ok, I am winging about it but at the end of the day I should admit for me, the gain in incremental sales and new customers is worth the pain, may not be the case for everyone though.

So here are some tips, before engaging too much money, time and resources in this channel, follow those easy steps

1) Do not try to be on all of them, the 80/20 rule applies to CSE, working with only the 2 or 3 main players will cover up to 70% of the traffic so do you really need to strech yourself to reach those extra 30%? Does it really make sense as it will require a lot more resources?
2) If you run Pan European campaigns, always start with a test country (choose your best performer country), if it does not work in this country, you may not be ready for the CSE adventure
3) Take the time to optimise, from experience I would say a CSE campaign shows potential after several months, sometimes it can take 6 months before the channel being profitable so make sure you integrate this notion in your strategy and forecasts
4) Build your feed with ROI in mind, if you have 20,000 products in your catalogue, you may not want to promote them all, concentrate your efforts on your top 100 and grow your feed as you get along and get more experienced
5) TEST, TEST, TEST, I will never stress enough testing is crucial in the success of your campaign. TEST everything from description, to price point, positionning, landing pages, purchasing path, even images I know it may seem strange, why the hell does she want me to test images? Well let’s say your product is available in different countries and languages BUT you always submit the English version as an image, your potential customer may think your product is only available in English and you would loose sales your competitors would be happy to get