Comparison Shopping News Two Week Recap: April 22, 2011

By Tinuiti Team

Apr 22 2011

Comparison Shopping News for the past two weeks. CPC Strategy’s semi-monthly news series highlights recent happenings within the comparison shopping landscape as seen through our eyes. The Comparison Shopping News Series recaps what’s happened on paid CSEs, free CSEs and the broader implications that search has on comparison shopping.

CPC Strategy’s Comparison Shopping News Headlines:

Amazon Product Ads Adjusts Minimum Bids – On June 1^st, Amazon Product Ads will increase minimum bids in 32 categories and lower them for 4. Amazon will automatically set your bids to the new minimums on the declared date so be mindful of how it will affect this particular comparison shopping campaign.
What Happened to Google Shopping Sellers on March 16^th? – Google Shopping sellers saw significant traffic drops in a phenomenon that we’re aptly calling the March 16, 2011 Effect. This post analyzes the significance of the traffic drop for the date in question and lends insight into what the pattern means for merchants on Google’s free comparison shopping engine.
Product Feed Management Tips: Know Your Product Feed – Blog series from CPC Strategy about managing your comparison shopping product feeds. This post covers the fundamentals to auditing your product feed for the comparison shopping engines.
Bing Shopping’s Category Tab vs. Bing’s Category Columns in the Bing Shopping Feed – Bing Shopping has a new category tab in the AdCenter that merchants can use to activate a left-navigation feature on Bing free comparison shopping engine. Read this post to learn how this is different than categorization in your comparison shopping feed.
Email from Google: Robots.txt File Creates Issues for Google Product Search Images – Robots.txt issues were announced to merchants in mass emails from the Google Product Search team which seems to primarily affect Yahoo! Store merchants.
“No Items Inserted”: Google Merchant Center Hiccups Over Weekend – Google shopping feeds return an error message for overnight uploads to the Merchant Center. Is Google still playing April fools jokes? Merchants obviously aren’t amused.

Want more than just what’s listed in this edition of Comparison Shopping News? Browse our blog to see other tips and recent happenings, or check out older editions of Comparison Shopping News.