Google Product Search Marketing

by Mark Vandegrift

Q) A strategy talks about expanding into low risk CSE's and specifically talked about Bing. Given that Bing shopping is buying a product feed from shopping.com (and we send product to shopping.com) I am wondering how helpful this would be? I would love to get some insight into: (a) how the purchased feed results would rank on Bing vs. a feed sent direct to Bing (if the feeds were basically the same) and if they might cancel each other out (duplicate listing are sometimes eliminated or punished in the rankings) And (b) the economics of the CPC shopping.com feed being
sent to Bing vs. the CPA direct to Bing model (in your experience which is really more profitable)

A) Bing is displaying your shopping.com data because the old MSN Shopping platform, which is no longer visible at shopping.msn.com, is still active behind the scenes. That platform has used data from shopping.com and pricegrabber for a long time and it continues to be used for any merchant not sending data directly to MSN/Bing.
They aren’t allowing for duplication – Bing listings appear in lieu of anything coming through the old msn shopping platform (which as I said includes shopping.com and pricegrabber). In terms of rank, the answer can vary depending on whether or not there are other merchants selling the exact same item. If so, your listings sent directly to Bing would likely appear higher than your current shopping.com
listings because the default sort on product pages on Bing is price low to high, but (here is the important part), the price displayed is NET of the cashback to the consumer.

Look at this page and expand the little plus symbol. You’ll see the actual price is higher than what Bing is displaying, meaning the Bing advertiser is getting a boost by participating in the cashback program. In this case, it didn't have an impact on the rank of that item within the page, but if they increased their cashback offering from 8% to 15%, they
would rank first.

For items where there is no direct competition on the product and therefore no matched page, I would guess Bing still gives weight to merchants in the cashback program, but the final ranking is likely heavily determined by the user’s query and some sort of popularity historical traffic/CTR). This probably applies to how the product pages themselves are ranked in search results as well.

With regard to profitability, I would say the majority of the time, a CPA model is preferred. As mentioned in the webinar, it limits risk, but also because of the nature of the Bing model, it gives you a lever for testing the Bing market specifically. What I mean is, you can try increasing your cashback from 7% to 10% on Bing, effectively lowering the price just for Bing users, and seeing if that drives an increase in volume. Even at a lower margin, the higher volume may mean more total profit.


A few links.
Google Base help form:
This will help guide you through some commonly encountered
issues with Google Base/Product search.
Google Help Forums:
Community driven forums but Google folks do participate.
Google Error form:
Use this if you are getting an error and can't get it
cleared up through help form or the forums.
Google Webmaster Video on GPS best practices:
There are a few valuable nuggets of info in here.
List of Google Rating Sites:
The most complete list and some good conversation about GPS in general, courtesy of SEOmoz.

I can't say I agree with everything on this page but since the GPS algorithm is hard to pin down, different omerchants are likely to see different results.

www.csestrategies.com