Benchmark Data
While we can’t give you an exact answer to the question, we can give you a benchmark against which you can measure yourself. Everyone loves a benchmark, right? Our benchmark represents aggregated data across an etailer data sample. It might not be suited perfectly to your individual situation, but it does give you a number to at least gut check your own experiences.

The data in the benchmark shows the following:

• The overall aggregate measure of conversion rate from the etailer sample is 1.91 percent.
• PPC Search traffic has a better conversion rate than straight Organic traffic, 4.52 percent versus 1.75 percent.
• Paid Comparison Shopping Engines convert at almost the same rate is Paid Search 4.24 percent
• Free Comparison Shopping Engines (there is only one we tracked, Froogle) beats everything at 4.63 percent

Seasonality has a large effect on these numbers. Just looking at the overall aggregate numbers, conversion rates during the pre-Christmas time period were 1.9 percent. From that period to today, the overall conversion rates are at 1.45 percent.

How to Improve Your Conversion Rates
So even though we can’t tell you what your specific conversion rate should be, here are a few guidelines that can help you improve your rates:

1. Organic traffic is still a large component of many of our customer’s web sites. This can be inferred by the weighting of the numbers. Organic traffic isn’t free, and this number shows that a well executed SEO campaign could have a large effect on your bottom line.
2. Paid search executed well can result in good conversion rates. Targeted ads and quality landing pages should result in higher conversion rates than your organic traffic. PPC when done right can be an important part of driving conversions on your site.
3. If you sell products, you should almost certainly be using some of the Comparison Shopping Engines. They have excellent conversion rates and good predictable bid prices.
4. Froogle is a great resource. It’s the only one we are highlighting specifically since it’s a bit one-of-a-kind. If you sell products, we can’t think of a reason why you wouldn’t want to be on Froogle.

A few more words of wisdom: make sure you have the tools to track conversion rates across all your advertising sources, including search engines, shopping engines, banner ads, email marketing, RSS feeds, affiliates, etc. It’s also helpful if you can roll up all of your results in a single dashboard so you can quickly see where you might have problems with a source or campaign.

By analyzing your profit generated from each source along with your conversion rates, you can make good, informed decisions about how to optimize any of the components that are affecting your conversion rates.

1. Registration of the file with each CSE
2. Daily reporting of feed results
3. Categorization of your products
4. Filtering and optimization of your feed by provider
5. Creation of the product extract from your database

Let’s review each of these items to show how much time and effort you will have to make unless you use a full service provider. Keep in mind that with the good conversion rates on shopping engines, your payback on a vendor that provides a more comprehensive set of services could be measured in days.

Registration of the file with each CSE

Each CSE has a unique user interface and process for registering your feed file. Their interfaces are not intuitive and learning one CSE’s interfaces will not help you when you log into the next CSE. The provider should know these interfaces and the process for registering the feeds. In some cases, the CSE has to be contacted to setup the feed and confirm the file. Let the feed provider handle this interaction for you since they know when to do it, and that saves you time by managing this process for you.

The low budget providers won’t perform this service, and you will be left trying to figure this out for yourself!

Daily Reporting of Feed Results

Not all feed providers provide a central place where ALL of your feeds AND online advertising sources can be tracked. In fact, this is one of the main reasons these providers are low budget since they don’t have an infrastructure that lets you monitor each CSE by the profit it’s generating.

Each CSE has its own method for reporting results. Some can send you an email, while others require that you log on to their system, look at multiple pages and even install additional tracking code. One of the primary benefits of using a full service provider with a profit tracking tool is that ALL of your search results from CSE’s and Search Engines are reported on and shown in one place. A qualified provider will consolidate all of this information in one place and leverage the same tracking code that was already installed on your site.

By having all of these results in one place you can more effectively optimize your advertising spending across CSE’s and other online advertising sources.

Categorization of your Products

Each CSE has its own product categorization hierarchy. As part of the setup of the feeds, the provider should either map your categories to the categories used by each shopping engine or spend the time to walk you through the process. Product categorization is very important as studies have shown that a significant number of users still find products by browsing rather than by searching. It’s also critical to ensure that your products get the most traffic possible.

By having your products in the appropriate categories, you are ensuring the customer can find your products easily and increase your return.

Filtering and Optimization of your Feed by Provider

Each CSE has a different audience and cost per click for their categories. It is very typical to want to send ALL products to Froogle since there is no cost to place your products on their site. However, you may not want to send your $1.99 products to Nextag since the average cost-per-click (CPC) could be over a quarter the cost of the product. You need to understand what the conversion rates are like on each engine, and using that information, along with your product prices, you can determine what an acceptable cutoff is. It is important to note that lower priced items may up-sell and cross-sell other items, so if your site or product mix results in good up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, then you may want to list all your products and let the feed optimize itself based on the profit that product generates.

You will want to set baseline filters for each CSE based on product price, category and particular CSE. The other fact is that the conversion rate for a product category can vary widely between shopping engines. This can be due to the demographic of the user base for that CSE or competitive pressure within your product categories.

Make sure you are able to constantly monitor your Profit on Investment (POI) for each product on each CSE. If your feed provider can’t provide this information on a daily basis, then you won’t have the information you need to effectively manage your feeds and filter out the underperforming products.

Creation of the Product Extract for Your Database

This is an often overlooked area of complexity. We have worked with hundreds of product databases and no two are ever the same. Everyone has some aspect to their product catalog that is non-standard, not-optimal, etc. Every feed provider will still require you to send them a feed that they can then send to the CSE’s. Your product database should always be analyzed first to make sure the feeds are being sent over in the best possible way. Some of the typical issues that can be encountered are multiple rows for the same product code, inconsistent usage of product attributes and attributes that say one thing but mean another (for example, we’ve seen more than one case where the UPC field in a customer database doesn’t really contain a valid UPC code). If your feed provider doesn’t offer to make an analysis of your raw product data/ table structure, then there is a good chance that the mapping of your data to the CSE’s will not be as optimal as it could be.

Summary

Time is money, so evaluate YOUR effort when reviewing any of the other feed provider services that are out there. Find a provider that offers a complete, integrated solution for managing all of your online advertising sources in the most efficient way. Make sure the provider can optimize your online advertising dollars using one set of tracking code and a consistent methodology that manages all of your online advertising spending based on real POI reporting.