We asked our contacts from each of the shopping engines ranked in our Top 10 to give us three tips to help merchants make more money in 2011. Today we feature tips from Nextag. At the bottom we added a couple of bonus tips. Enjoy!
1. Optimize your feed before important holidays
Take out low performing products and raise bids on high-converting products to maximize your ROI during all Holidays.
For example, Valentines Day is coming up. What products in your inventory will do the best for the rest of January and into February? Bid up on products that convert well in the past 30 days, and bid up on products you know will get sales for upcoming Holidays.
2. Coupons, coupons, coupons
Use coupons codes- shoppers are looking for coupons more than ever in this economy.
Personal experience: One of my clients’ revenue went up over 100% with the inclusion of a coupon on Nextag. Put the right coupon out there and shoppers will bite.
If you’re stuck with MAP pricing, get creative! There’s ways to make coupons work.
3. Use Nextag’s Reporting Tools
It’s very important to take advantage of any tools on our dashboard that help manage ROI.
The red dots are a few important areas we frequent when managing comparison shopping campaigns. Below we briefly define their function from top to bottom:
-Manage product and category level bids on the fly, see sales data side by side your bids before adjusting CPC’s.
-Add marketing messages / coupons to your Nextag campaign.
-Review your product file quality to quickly check if your data feed is being processed correctly.
-View clicks by product and category, has the ability to export these reports via e-mail.
-View sales from Nextag, gives you the ability to match up order IDs, etc.
Bonus Tip #1-
Try testing Fixed vs. Max bids.
Most CSE’s automatically make you pay one cent above the highest CPC. Nextag, however, gives you the option of changing from a fixed CPC to a Max CPC. It’s pretty self explanatory, fixed is a set CPC you’ll pay per click, while Max is the max you’ll pay for a click. Do some bid tests and see if you can optimize your ROI by changing the type of bid.
Bonus Tip #2-
Capture buyer reviews.
Just like the increased popularity of coupons, reviews are being used more and more by first-time shoppers to determine a webstore’s credibility. Nextag makes it pretty easy to start capturing buyer reviews.
Their Merchant Help Center talks about 4 ways merchants can capture buyer reviews. The video gives step-by-step instructions for each method. Wait at least a minute or more if you have a slow connection for the video to load.