Amp Up Quality Traffic With Comparison Shopping Engines » Adotas

Amp Up Quality Traffic With Comparison Shopping Engines » Adotas

ADOTAS EXCLUSIVE — Increasing traffic to an online store can be done in any number of ways. One of the best – and strangely overlooked — methods is utilizing comparison shopping engines. Joining a merchant program of one of the big price comparison engines is one of the least resource-consuming ways to deliver products, services and relevant ads to Internet consumers.

Recent surveys show that the price comparison engines share of shopping traffic is approximately 20%, which naturally strengthens during the holidays and especially grows at the much ballyhooed end-of-year shopping season. This share grows, as more and more Web consumers become online shoppers and online shoppers become online buyers. More than 85% of Internet users worldwide have purchased something online, according to Nielsen’s “Global Online Survey on Internet Shopping Habits,” conducted in October and November of last year.

The price comparison engines marketing programs are designed specifically for online retailers –and their shopping search engines are highly effective. The typical business model is CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPA (Cost Per Action) based, which makes it simple to measure, evaluate and optimize. Boasting tens of millions unique visitors per month, being part of these merchant programs can flood an online store with high quality traffic. Simply put, shoppers coming from a price comparison engine are “ready to buy,” which makes them, arguably, much more valuable than those coming from a click on an ad, e-mail marketing or even a PPC result at a leading search engine.

Technically, the comparison engines use Web crawlers that “learn” how an online store’s product pages look and feel. Every 24 hours this crawler “scrapes” the entire Web site and updates products and prices. The scraped data is then analyzed both automatically and manually to match with the huge product databases of the comparison shopping engines. A well-designed Web site, with product pages that look alike HTML-wise, has a better chance for zeroing down crawler errors and maximizing conversions.

So, where do you get started? A first stop is eBay’s Shopping.com. In addition to easy-to-use search tools, Shopping.com also features millions of reviews from Epinions, making it the largest player in the space, right now. Explore ways to increase sales here.

Shopzilla is another strong opportunity. Shopzilla makes it easy to list your online store’s products and its BizRate division, a recognized leader in Web retailing, customer satisfaction, ratings and research, is a bonus. Learn more here.

PriceGrabber also provides an easy and comprehensive environment for consumers to compare prices and for merchants to reach consumers. Grab more information here.

Comparing prices online is not new. Comparing prices in one unique location, whether it’s a Web site, like those mentioned previously or even a downloadable client, isn’t either. However, what is new is that the popularity of comparison shopping tools is growing and rapidly. And the advantages are those key metrics desired: increased audience, sales, and ROI and conversion to sale.

There are disadvantages to comparison shopping engines, including competition with other stores and risk of bad user reviews, which can influence other users’ buying choices. However, these are every day risks of the Internet and I believe the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.

Google Adding Social Features to iGoogle?

THIS IS VERY VERY SMART!!!!!

Read Write Web
Google hasn't said so, but Read Write Web's Josh Catone surmises that the Web giant aims to turn iGoogle, its start page, into a social network. Earlier this week, Google unveiled a new developer sandbox for the start page that includes support for its OpenSocial APIs, which Catone says "makes this officially the start of a trend we're seeing in start pages to get more social."

In its FAQ about the new iGoogle sandbox, Google suggests as much: "This is not the final network that will be used in iGoogle," the company writes about its "friends" section. "Users will have full control over who their friends are and will be able to easily modify their list of friends. Stay tuned for details."

RWW and other pubs have pushed the idea of social start pages for some time now. The homepage, a users' most visited page, is certainly a natural competitor for a social network; "Facebook is just launching their platform," Catone says in a previous post. For companies that provide souped-up start pages, like NetVibes and PageFlakes (which was recently acquired by LiveUniverse), adding social features is a logical next step. If Google really is adding social features to its start page competitor, don't be surprised if that sparks an industry wide trend. - Read the whole story...

UK Search Looks to Boost Direct Sales - eMarketer

UK Search Looks to Boost Direct Sales - eMarketer:Let's get those sales now.

UK paid search marketers are placing a slightly higher emphasis this year on direct sales than on branding or lead generation, according to the E-consultancy-Neutralize "UK Search Engine Marketing Report."

In another survey, US marketers also said they are more focused on direct sales this year.

eMarketer estimates that search-related spending accounted for 50% of all UK online advertising spending in 2006, and 60% in 2007.

While the rate of growth in search-related spending is falling slightly as the market evolves, annual growth is still remarkable. eMarketer estimates that spending on search rose 57% between 2006 and 2007.

In 2007, E-consultancy predicted a rise of 58% in search engine marketing spending for the year in its "Search Engine Marketing: A Buyer's Guide," with total outlay on UK search engine marketing hitting £2.22 billion ($4.44 billion).

E-consultancy's prediction for 2007 search-related revenues was substantially higher than eMarketer’s £1.58 billion spending estimate. The nature and timing of the E-consultancy survey probably accounted for the difference.

E-consultancy interviewed senior executives from search engine marketing agencies (who were likely to feel very positive about the market’s growth and potential). But the survey took place before the cooling economic climate began to weigh on the minds of advertisers, marketers and consumers. Later in 2007 or in early 2008, interviewees might well have been less optimistic.

eMarketer projects that UK spending on search will top £2 billion ($3.8 billion) in 2008, and £3 billion ($5.2 billion) in 2012.

"In 2008, online spending will be buoyed by advertisers looking for cost-effective responses to the economic downturn," said Karin von Abrams, senior analyst at eMarketer.

"When the world’s financial markets hit a rocky patch, everyone feels the impact and advertisers get nervous," Ms. von Abrams said. "Because online channels are typically more accountable—and cheaper—than television, print and other traditional media, they can help advertisers to boost brand and market share even when money is tight."

Learn more about Europe's leading digital advertising market. Read eMarketer's UK Online Advertising: Reaching Maturity report.

E-Mail Marketing Still Works - eMarketer

E-Mail Marketing Still Works - eMarketer: "E-Mail Marketing Still Works

But consumer standards of relevance are high.

First, the good news: permission-based e-mail is great at getting consumers to buy.

Half of US adult e-mail users surveyed in April 2008 for Merkle's "View from the Inbox" study, conducted with Harris Interactive, said they had made an online purchase in the previous year as a result of permission-based marketing.

In addition, e-mail was second only to customer reviews on Web sites for influencing online purchases, according to DoubleClick Performics' "Green Marketing Study," conducted by Opinion Research Corporation in February 2008. E-mail was roughly equal to search results in terms of influencing online purchases.

Bad news for e-mail marketers included the fact that consumers are increasingly willing to revoke permission that they have previously granted and that the bar for relevance remains high.

About one-third of respondents in the Merkle study also said they had stopped doing business with at least one company as a result of poor e-mail marketing practices.

In the same vein, more than half of US adult e-mail users told Merkle in 2007 that they were only willing to get marketing or promotional messages in status or transactional e-mails if the offers were relevant to them.

"There is a substantial gap between what marketers believe is relevant to the consumer, and what consumers rate as valuable," said Lori Connolly, director of research at Merkle.

"Traditionally, marketers believed that relevancy meant pushing content that is based on stated preferences or behavior, but companies need to update their view of what is relevant," Ms. Connolly said.

Consumer wariness is often justified. Some marketers are the victims of spammers, who ruin it for everyone, according to David Hallerman, senior analyst at eMarketer.

"Consumers welcome relevant, opt-in e-mails from companies they have a relationship with," said Mr. Hallerman. "But the broad spectrum of spam—any unsolicited message—continues to degrade the e-mail environment for all parties."

The eMarketer US Online Ad Targeting report will be published next month. Click here to be notified when it is

Expectant Moms Spread the Word Online - eMarketer

Expectant Moms Spread the Word Online - eMarketer
APRIL 23, 2008

Researching and recommending on the Web.

Word of mouth is as important—possibly even more important—to mothers as it is to consumers overall.

In a 2007 study, mom-focused research company BSM Media found 64% of moms asked other mothers for advice before they purchased a new product. Moreover, 63% of mothers surveyed by BSM considered other moms the most credible experts when they had questions.

Need data for presentations? eMarketer subscribers can download charts instantly — over 50,000 choices. Request Info

Pregnant women and new moms also use WOM more than women in general or consumers as a whole, according to a Keller Fay Group and BabyCenter.com study fielded in 2008.

Seven out of 10 pregnant and new moms trusted what they heard from other moms. More than half said they tended to pass that information along.

NPD Group's 2007 "Juvenile Products: Exploring the Booming Baby Business" survey yielded similar results. Nearly three-quarters of the mothers surveyed received product information via word of mouth or from the Internet..

Women in general have a high propensity to share positive information about a product. According to SheSpeaks, 87% of female Internet users will mention a favored product in conversation and 64% will forward an e-mail link to others.

"Marketers and retailers must recognize and encourage moms’ interest in sharing ideas with other parents," said Debra Aho Williamson, senior analyst at eMarketer. "This helps empower mothers in their purchase decision process."

Moms are heavy Internet users. Read more in eMarketer's Moms Online: Browsing, Researching, Buying report.

Tips for success in a Web 2.0 world

By Dr. Augustine Fou

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MRM Worldwide's digital strategist outlines three key considerations for keeping up with the new online consumer.

Web 2.0 has been described as "lots of video," "cool user interfaces that use javascript," "social networking," "word of mouth." Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc. have been used as examples, as have countless other companies and terms, correctly or incorrectly. But what really is the essence of this new wave of websites rising from the ashes of the first web implosion? And what are the implications for advertising and marketing?

Web 2.0 versus Web 1.0
Web 1.0 was about the tools which made getting information online easier -- HTML, website creation software, standards, internet connections, etc. This led to an explosion of information online and generated the estimated several hundred billion web pages online today. Web 2.0 is about organizing, filtering and prioritizing the vast amounts of information so that the information becomes more useful, timely, and relevant. Web 2.0 was born out of necessity in the current "age of too much information." It also has profound implications for advertising since advertising messages are part of the clutter and people have accustomed themselves to tuning everything out until such time they are interested in researching something for themselves.

Modern users' high expectations
Web 2.0 sites, which include Google, YouTube, Facebook, etc., have collectively set extremely high expectations among users. These "modern users" are impatient -- they want their information right now; they are intolerant -- if a site disappoints or frustrates them, they won't come back, and they are vocal -- they tell their friends about good sites and about bad ones too. In their quest to cut through the clutter and find the information they want, they demand speed, collaboration, and trust.

• Speed: Modern users are impatient -- they want what they want as quickly and efficiently as possible. The simplicity and single-purposedness of tools like Google have conditioned these extreme expectations.
• Collaboration: Modern users expect the collaborative effort of the community to help them filter and prioritize content -- e.g. bubbling up the best videos to watch, recommending the best products to buy, etc. -- so that the users don't have to wade through the clutter themselves.
• Trust: Modern users have highly sensitive "BS radars" and they tend to go back to sources of information (people or places) that have earned their trust over time. Information from a trusted source is extremely valuable to them because it saves them the time of having to figure it out for themselves.

Implications for modern advertising and marketing
The diverse sites of the Web 2.0 landscape have set an extreme bar of expectations among modern users -- i.e. consumers. This fact has profound implications for advertisers and marketers who are fighting for these consumers' attention (to sell them something) in this "age of too much information." Advertisers must therefore satisfy the three key dimensions of modern users' high expectations:

• Speed: Make information easy to find, persistent, and deliverable through whatever channel or device the user chooses to use when searching for information. In a world where consumers tune everything out until they go looking for something, a broad brand message, targeted based on segments or personas and delivered through "push channels" is just not good enough, fast enough, or useful enough for individual modern users.
• Collaboration: Leverage the collective power and input of your most loyal customers (your power users or enthusiasts) to identify, filter, and prioritize the information for the "rest" of your customers or potential customers -- this helps fulfill both the 1st and 3rd parameters of speed and trust and it may even yield specific messaging that works -- i.e. how would they tell their friends about your "wiz-bang" product or service? -- use their words, not your own.
• Trust: Use more "two-way" tactics such as digital/online than "one-way" tactics such as advertising to create truthful dialogs with customers. Sustained dialog and careful listening engenders the trust necessary for customers to reveal insights about what they value, how they buy, who they tell, etc. This has implications for not only marketing messages but also product innovation (e.g. new features, etc.) or even business innovation (e.g. new pricing strategy, etc.).

Notable quotables
Chris Anderson: "Users are seeking more specialized and less generic products -- the "long tail" of retail -- and they are going online in this quest. The beauty of this is that we can observe what they value, what excites them, and what they talk about."

Malcolm Gladwell: "There are enough technologies, services, communities and information online that we have passed an important tipping point in the age of information -- the shift of power from advertisers to consumers. A single user post on Consumerist.com got amplified to the point that a telecommunications giant publicly announced the removal of an anti-customer clause in their terms and conditions."

Seth Godin: "Consumers are empowered with information, technologies, services and peers to tune out all 'interruption media' until such time they want something; and, even then, they get their information not from traditional advertising and marketing messages, but rather from trusted sources who act as filters that help them cut through the 'noise.'"

Esther Dyson: "Modern users are getting ever more cognizant and savvy about their personal information and who has access to it and how it is used. While traditional advertising pushed the boundaries of privacy in its quest for more information in order to do better targeting, trust and privacy are paramount to the modern user. In the next evolution of advertising, who will be able to achieve perfect targeting (to the level of the individual) while respecting and protecting that individual's privacy?"

Dr. Augustine Fou is SVP, digital strategist at MRM Worldwide.

A Web Shift in the Way Advertisers Seek Clicks - New York Times

A Web Shift in the Way Advertisers Seek Clicks - New York Times: "A Web Shift in the Way Advertisers Seek

By STEPHANIE CLIFFORD
Published: April 21, 2008

Tyler Townsend, a digital media manager who plans online advertising for travel clients at Ypartnership, an agency in Orlando, had $150,000 to spend on behalf of a Caribbean island’s visitors bureau. And this client did not care about branding — it wanted action.

So Mr. Townsend, who once might have made a simple buy on a site like Yahoo, created a complex campaign, which ran in March. He bought ads on Budget Travel, and he bought out Lonely Planet’s home page for a week. He"He used custom ad networks that included travel-themed sites, and another that would put the ads only on high-end sites.

Last year, Mr. Townsend said, many clients were happy to spend money just to raise awareness. Since January, however, “everyone’s retail-oriented. They want as many clicks for the dollar as possible,” he said.

So far, the threat of a recession has not slowed the migration of ad dollars to the Internet — as Google’s strong results showed on Thursday, when it reported a 30 percent jump in net income for its first quarter. But as Mr. Townsend’s campaign suggests, the slowing economy might be changing where those ad dollars are being spent.

Increasingly, marketers are looking to ad networks, which sell display advertising across groups of Web sites. Some networks offer targeted advertising; others, called vertical ad networks, include sites that focus on one subject, like travel or sports.

Their growth could mean a lower share of advertising for portals like AOL and particularly for Yahoo, which is particularly strong in traditional display advertising. (Yahoo will report its quarterly earnings on Tuesday.)

In 2007, United States revenue growth slowed at three of the four major portals (Yahoo, AOL and Google) according to an analysis by eMarketer. The fourth is MSN. Any downturn could also be bad news for media sites that attract a lot of display advertising, like CNN.com or nytimes.com, at premium rates.

In the United States, $21.1 billion was spent on online advertising last year, up from $16.9 billion in 2006, according to eMarketer. Search advertising — Google’s stronghold — is the majority of that spending, according to Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst at Sanford Bernstein.

According to a report by Imran Khan, an Internet analyst at JPMorgan Chase, ad networks “are growing much faster than the general graphical advertising industry.” He estimated that the top 20 ad networks had earned $2 billion in 2007, or 14 percent of the display market.

The reasons ad networks are thriving are price and improved technology. Ad networks charge much lower cost per thousand ads served (known as CPMs), as low as $4 on an ad network with some targeting, compared with $40 and up for some ads on premium sites like MSN or Yahoo.

“While the home pages are still very effective media buys, the price tags on them have become a little outrageous for many advertisers. For all the growth that has gone on from a site standpoint, there are other ways to amass that type of audience fairly quickly that are more efficient,” said Margaret Clerkin, the chief executive of Mindshare Interaction, a media-buying firm.

The improved technology has helped. Ad networks once served ads to pages where no advertiser wanted to be, like pages that get few hits or those with controversial content. Now, though, many attractive sites are not major home pages. Also, many ad networks now offer targeting (as do portals, for a higher price), matching ads to likely buyers.

For example, if an airline wants to promote a flight from Dallas to Chicago, it can direct those ads to users with Internet addresses from those areas. Marketers can also direct ads by content: a reader on a cellphone ratings site is probably looking to buy a new phone, while another reader on the Yahoo technology home page might be browsing stories about Wi-Fi and not looking to buy anything.

David Metter, chief marketing officer of MileOne/Atlantic Automotive, a group of car dealerships with over 3,000 employees, said that it was possible to “blow your spend” on a home page ad.

“I would much rather get more specific and go to the customers and have maybe less eyeballs and higher quality eyeballs, or less leads and higher quality leads,” he said.

Based on the success of ad networks, some big players are buying their way into the game. Yahoo bought BlueLithium for $300 million last September. Last July, AOL bought Tacoda for a reported $275 million, and in November, it bought Quigo Technologies for a reported $350 million. Last May, Microsoft bought aQuantive, which owns some ad networks through a subsidiary, for $6 billion. DoubleClick, which also owns ad networks, was acquired by Google for $3.1 billion. Dozens of other networks have sprung up — one tally at eConsultant lists more than 80.

“There’s no slowdown in terms of a really targeted ad spend,” said Mitch Lowe, whose network, Jumpstart Automotive Media, handles ads for 12 automotive sites. (Jumpstart was sold to Hachette Filipacchi Media last year for $110 million.)

However, the reliance on ad networks mean that two of their major attractions — that they are simple and that they are cheaper — are diminished.

“These are the gold rush days now for ad networks,” said David Hallerman, senior analyst with eMarketer. “And that kind of counters the appeal of ad networks for advertisers’ agencies, which was to simplify the purchase of ads. And that’s why its unlikely that a great number of ad networks will survive.”

Even given the choice of ad networks, the continued flow of dollars online means that prices are rising.

Mr. Townsend says that his clients were happy with their campaign and want him to do a similar one. Except this time, they want him to hit the networks even harder.

“We thought,” Mr. Townsend said, “for this amount of dollars, we can get you this many more impressions than we did.”