In the US, 25% of internet audience (50 millions) passes through a shopping engine. Close to 75 % of traffic goes to the TOP 7 websites. If you're looking to increase your ROI, this research identifies key insights that will sharpen your marketing decisions. If you're looking to increase your ROI, this research identifies key insights that will sharpen your marketing decisions. Throughout the presentation, Matthieu Dejardins explored the following questions/points: - Why shopping engines? - Who are the Comparison sites users? - Shopping engines challenges - Pre-launch checklist & what does it takes? - Top 10 Data Feed Optimization Tips - Vertical Segment for search engines - Which CSE? Amazon & bing opportunities - Which results to expect?

1. Product Comparison Shopping Engines Study Goals, recommendations & opportunities to boost revenues by 16%

6. Pre-launch checklist Stand alone website Experience with SEO/PPC Quality website that converts Analytics program Ability to download and manipulate your catalog SingleFeed Channel Advisor Channel Intelligence

9. Vertical Segment for search engines Comparison Shopping space is just a way to attract merchants and offer them additional services such as Search, Contextual, Content, and Display ads. In fact, most of the Search Engines offer a vertical service: Google is taking ecommerce seriously by moving around product search results (from Google Product Base). They also implemented last month a new interesting tool called Google Squared by extracts data from Web pages and presents them in search results as squares in an online spreadsheet. After a successful and leading business model at the beginning of the 2000 years with Yahoo Store solution, Yahoo! Shopping adventure was unfortunate with CSE (Kelkoo sold in Nov 2008) but kept a leading market share by offering a suite of merchant solutions: Yahoo! Ecommerce , Yahoo! Shortcuts , Yahoo Web Analytics , etc. Microsoft acquired Ciao.com (Greenfiled Online) for $486M – Aug 2008 in Europe and launched CashBack Search Engine in US on May 2008 (based on Jellyfish, purchased in Oct 2007). Microsoft/MSN/Live has no fewer than 3-4 CSEs now and they seem to be combining them into one platform bing.com. AOL is rolling out their own CSE (used to be Pricegrabber partnership).

10. Which CSE? Source: Nielsen Mega View Search (April 2009) Source: Comscore (April 2009) In the US, 25% of internet audience (50 millions) passes through a shopping engine. Close to 75 % of traffic goes to the TOP 7 websites. According CPC Strategy LLC, a full service comparison shopping management agency , among Internet Retailer's Top 500, Google Product Search leads in market penetration with 72.2%. Shopping.com and Pricegrabber follow with rates of 53.8% and 50.6% respectively with Microsoft's snagging 30.2% of the top 500 market.

13. Which results to expect? According to the Q12009 study from CPC Strategy LLC, the “big 5″ primary traffic drivers to merchants’ sites were Shopzilla.com , Nextag.com , Shopping.com , Pricegrabber.com , & Google Product Seach . There’s a strong correlation between the average revenue generated by each engine and the traffic that was brought in. It is explained by the fact that more traffic in theory should lead to more conversions. It is interesting to notice that in the study Nextag pulls ahead of the pack due to their strong abilities to drive quality traffic to merchants’ sites - but each engine has the ability to drive a decent amount of revenue to each site. Source: CPCstrategy.com – The top 10 CSE compared - May 2009

14. Which results to expect? The Cost Of Sales (spend/revenue), ROI for every dollar spent, is demonstrating that Google Base (free) is in top position followed by Microsoft’s Cashback slightly behind with the revenue sharing percentage (5-10% is a good range to generate sales & keep costs low but enough to create incentive to buy). For many merchants this is the most important metric in a campaign as they generally seek to maximize the return on their spend. Regarding Average PPC costs, Google Base and Microsoft’s Cashback top the list since their traffic is essentially “free” (you pay a fee per transaction with Cashback), while Become and Smarter, being two of the smaller shopping engines they have lower rates in order to allow them to compete with the larger engines. Source: CPCstrategy.com – The top 10 CSE compared - May 2009