Wow, I was stunned when I received this email yesterday….
Comparison Shopping Engines, like Yahoo and Shopping.com among others, are all starting to adopt a bidding option. They are all finally starting to realize that they can make more money this way because people are willing to pay more for clicks that they know will convert at a certain rate. So although Yahoo will not be offering product level bidding just yet, I would imagine that once they iron out all the kinks with the category level bidding that they will open the bidding to the product level.
Initially I was completely against this, probably because I was so good at optimizing my feeds for natural placement. But after playing around with the bidding functions at all the major shopping engines I am a big fan. The shopping engines are so closed with their ranking algos and no one can really understand them, the same goes with their combination of bidding and ranking algo. So because of the closed and unknown ranking factors with the shopping engines, having a known (bidding) strategy as an option is really nice. For instance I can see, through Google analytics ecommerce tracking, that each visit from say NexTag is worth $12.71. And if my overhead is 70%, this means that I can bid pretty high for clicks and still maintain a profit.
I was really surprised to see Yahoo! showing improvements to their Product Search. Rumor on the street has had it that they have all but completely abandoned investing in improving this segment of their business. And I was JUST thinking to myself the other day, as I noticed a transaction that came from Yahoo Product Search, that I wished they offered product level bidding! Now I just have to wait for them to make it fully available. If you are listening Yahoo!, hurry up!
