Effects of Pricegrabber Post Yahoo Partnership
It’s been almost 3 weeks since Yahoo Shopping became an official co-brand of Pricegrabber, meaning all shopping results from Yahoo Shopping was produced via Pricegrabber feeds.
There are two main factors that a merchant should be concerned about regarding the switch: traffic and conversion.
We initially theorized that merchants on Pricegrabber will see an increase in traffic (by way of Yahoo Shopping users), accompanied by a drop in conversion rates since historically we’ve seen that Yahoo Shopping traffic doesn’t convert nearly as well as some of the other major engines, such as Pricegrabber.
In practice though?
That’s what we sought to find out.
The Study
Our goal was to analyze some of our clients’ campaign data since the change took place (March 11th), and compared it to the same period prior to the change.
We also compared the same merchants to their campaigns on another major shopping engine, Nextag, in order to normalize the data and remove any seasonal bias of that particular merchant.
Traffic Change
Below is a chart of eight merchants from various industries detailing the % change from when the change was made (March 11 to March 30) compared to the 20 days prior (Feb 19 – March 10):
We can observe two things from this chart:
a) While some merchants saw relatively a flat increase/decrease in traffic on Nextag, some of those saw a very dramatic rise on Pricegrabber, which can be attributed in large part to being listed on Yahoo.
b) For merchants that experienced significant drops on both engines (due to seasonality) of their products, the drop on Pricegrabber was less significant than on Nextag, which again may be Yahoo Shopping consumers mitigating the drop off for Pricegrabber.
Conversion Change
The other important factor that a merchant should be concerned with as we mentioned above is conversion, or cost of sale % (cost/revenue).
The chart below represents a merchant’s change in COS, so if in the period prior to the change they had a 20% COS, then post-change they got 16%, they would be noted as having a change of -4%:
The results here are less conclusive than the ones above. There are both cases of the Nextag merchants seeing a greater decrease in COS %, as well as vice versa.
Overall though Nextag merchants saw a greater decrease in COS, and even seeing drops when the same Pricegrabber merchant saw an increase.
Conclusion
We should always be careful to make any gross conclusions from analyzing traffic/conversion data from the CSE’s, as there are many factors to consider that could influence the results.
Still, given the short amount of time since Yahoo Shopping results was taken over with Pricegrabber’s, we observed that merchants seeing drops in traffic on other mediums (Nextag) that the drop was less dramatic on PG, and those who saw an increase on Nextag saw an exaggerated increase on PG.
Conversion rates were less clear, as we saw both improvements and declines from Pricegrabber as compared to Nextag in the same time period.
We will continue to monitor traffic on Pricegrabber as well as conversions to see the impact that Yahoo traffic is having on Pricegrabber.
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