Product Level ROI Tracking

[phillypleez]

Hello,

I manage a electronics retail business and primarily use shopping sites such as Pricegrabber, Shopzilla and Shopping.com to promote our products. It looks like ROI is shrinking slowly as time goes by.

We need to be able to know which products to remove from these sites but shopping.com and shopzilla only gives ROI measurements only by category not by product. Some products in the same category might be doing very well and some products very poorly and we can't determine that.

Anyone run into this problem or have any suggestions? I spent all day looking for software or solutions but nothing specifically for this.

[solly]

We solved this by each product URL having a product keyword and referer (e.g., shopzilla) in the URL. That info was written to a log file, and also written to if a purchase was made...

[phillypleez]

Yes the conversion rate seems like the easy part but we are trying to get the cost per click totals by product also

[solly]

It's been a while since I had to do it, but some of those sites you mentioned only allow an estimate per click. Let's say you had 500 clicks on one product and only 50 on another--all in one category--and spent $550 total. You know that each click is costing about $1. Take the ROI using that...unfortunately, that's about as good as it gets.

On a couple of those sites, I found that one product was getting a lot of clicks because it was "featured" or showing for a generic keyword. And, of course, those clicks were basically worthless (well, to me, at least...I'm sure they loved it). I deleted the product from the feed for a while and added it back later. (Or changed the description so that it wasn't keying in on a generic keyword).