It’s that time folks! The special announcement you have all been waiting for! We are proud to announce CPC Strategy’s first ever Holiday CSE Awards!!!
Our analytics guru Tien Nguyen is at it again (intentional use of rhyming) and wanted to see how the CSEs performed relative to one another during the 2010 Holiday shopping season. He used the same methodology as our quarterly rankings to analyze our client’s performance on the CSEs from Thanksgiving to Christmas.
So without further ado, here are the first ever recipients of our 2010 CSE Holiday Awards:
Best Overall Engine
Google Product Search is the Avatar of the CSE world. Unfortunately for most merchants you have a better chance of getting someone on the phone from Pandora than from Google Product Search. (just kidding Google, you’re the best)
From Thanksgiving to Christmas they drove more revenue to our clients than any other CSE and despite the annual rumors that Google Product Search will start charging for traffic, they sent 40% more traffic to our clients than they did during the same period last year.
Best ROI from a paid CSE
This was definitely surprising to us. Not quite on par with the shock of Crash winning the Best Picture Oscar in 2004, but surprising nonetheless.
Become had a 13% Cost of Sale (COS) percentage which was a full 2 percentage points better than Amazon Products which was its closest competitor. Kudos to Become for continuing to focus on the quality or their traffic and hopefully this trend will continue throughout 2011.
Most Total Revenue
Google sent 32% more traffic than Nextag which was the second highest revenue driving engine. Did we mention that it was all free?
Best New Engine
If TheFind is not on your radar yet, they should be since they have the most sitewide traffic of any CSE outside of Google Product Search. The traffic is still heavily diluted due to the vast amount of sellers (they can crawl and therefore don’t need a data feed from each merchant) but the CSE who has the customers, has the power.
You should expect to hear a lot more from TheFind in 2011 as they continue to blur the lines between comparison shopping and social media.
For the full details of the study, click here to learn more about our 2010 CSE Holiday Shopping Report.
Congratulations to all of the winners and keep up the good work in 2011!
