Shopping Engines and Click Quality

Your experiences

[badass101]

Hi All,

We're experimenting with different forms of advertising for our website and we've started a Shopping.com and a Shopzilla campaign. We're UK based, by the way.

We've spent around £60 on Shopping.com so far on approx. 230 odd clicks. However, we've not had a single conversion.

I know that the site works fine as it's been tested (and we're getting orders via other means).
The landing pages are (obviously) the product pages, and the buttons to add to basket/checkout are nice and clear.

Some people click in from these comparison engines and then click around the site for a bit, but most click in and never click again.
Why is this?

I *thought* that because they can see the product image, price and shipping price (I.e: a total price for their transaction) before they click through then the people clicking through would be people with their money out waiting to buy.

Same story with Shopzilla, just much less clicks.
(Damn, their 'pre-categorisation' of your products in the feeds sucks - Shopping.com is so much nicer...)

Anyone else got any experiences to share, as I'm baffled!

[jwolthuis]

My experiences are similar... hefty fees and an average conversion rate.

Depending on your markup, this may be ok. In my business, I've got slim margins (gotta compete against eBay'ers running things out of their garage).

I gave up on shopping.com, and BizRate due to CPC. I've had good luck with Froogle and Froogle UK (I'm in the US), and the cost is right.

[FalseDawn]

230 clicks is not a large anough sample size to draw any conclusions, unless you have very high historic conversion rates around 5% and higher (rare, but possible).

One of my concerns with shopping.com is that a user might repeatedly click on different items in the list displayed, so I'd be charged multiple times for the same user - apparently they count all clicks from the same IP within a certain time span as 1 click, but I'm not convinced.

Plus, their reports totally suck - have you tried to get a monthly click and expenditure report from them? Good luck!

[FalseDawn]

Also, there are several reasons that someone might click on an item to visit your store and then not click again.
They might be after an extended descripton, larger image etc.
They might just want to check out your store. If initial impression is bad(poor layout, amateurish looking etc), they will leave pretty much immediately.

[CernyM]

Our conversion rate from bizrate leads is a bit over 2.25% for January.

[harikrishna]

Shopping sites can only charge what the merchants can bare. Sorry to be blunt but if its not profitable for you then you have a poor conversion rate.

As far as duplicate hits/click fraud goes, ive generally found all sites to be pretty good with this. I measure the traffic from them and shopping.com are always lower than the numbers i pull out. I find it easy to trust them with this, as if they started billing for the same lead twice nobody would be making a profit out of it, and all the merhants will bail.