Online Merchants: Should You List on Pricegrabber?
Every quarter we analyze the top comparison shopping engines (CSEs) to determine the number one engine for online merchants.
This quarter, Q4 2012, Amazon Product Ads and Google Shopping battled it out for top metrics including traffic, conversion rate and cost per click (CPC) rates.
Behind the glam of Google and Amazon, other top performing engines like Pricegrabber tend to get the cold shoulder. Which is too bad for Pricegrabber, as the engine consistently ranked second overall and in many CSE categories including traffic, and shopping engine responsiveness.
Pricegrabber Performance
In the comparison shopping engine Olympics for Q4 2012, Pricegrabber isn’t a gold medal winner, but the engine did go home with quite a few silver and bronze medals.
Pricegrabber: 2nd Best Comparison Shopping Engine Overall
With all the fuss about Google and Amazon, its interesting to note that although Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) won out for the best comparison shopping engine, Pricegrabber came in second place. Overall Amazon came in fourth place for the overall rankings, right behind Nextag.
Google and Amazon are definitely engines online merchants should be listing on, but Pricegrabber also definitely merits some time investment as the second best CSE. Cmon, second best still deserves a second look!
Pricegrabber: 2nd Best CSE Support
Merchant support is generally underrated in respect to metrics like highest traffic or revenue generating CSE. But when you actually need to solicit help from support, this ranking is immensely important.
You’ll notice that Google and Amazon both rank low for Shopping Engine Responsiveness, in 7th and 9th place- ouch!
Pricegrabber: One of Only 2 CSEs Without Higher Cost Per Click (CPC) Rates
While all of the CSEs listing on Google Shopping saw increased traffic with the paid Google PLA switch, Pricegrabber and Become were the only engines which did not see higher cost per click rates for Q4 2012.
Pricegrabber: 2nd Highest Traffic Generating Engine
Pricegrabber is right behind Google Product Listing Ads (PLAs) for overall consumer traffic for the holiday season.
Having generated more traffic than almost every other paid and free shopping engine.
Nextag is generally the highest traffic generating paid engine, which is the trend for the previous quarter.
However, across the board, all of the CSEs had higher traffic this quarter due to Google Shopping’s switch to paid listings.
Pricegrabber: Number 2 for Best Merchant Tools
Hand in hand with comparison shopping engine support are merchant tools. CSEs which have less options for merchants to analyze data and make changes to optimize their campaigns are just less desirable.
Google wins best merchants tools because they feature great services like Analytics, and allow merchants to break down metrics in AdWords, and segment campaigns based on price buckets and seasonal items, etc.
Pricegrabber has really great options for merchants to get more granular with CSE management.
1. Bid Below The Rate Card On Pricegrabber
Pricegrabber is one of the only CSEs which allows you to bid below the rate card (that is bid lower than the minimum CPC).
This is a really great option if you want to downbid products which aren’t performing well, and doesn’t require you to take anything out of your product data feed.
2. Bid on Specific Products with Pricegrabber
Pricegrabber is also one of only a few engines that lets merchants bid on individual products.
You can’t do this with Amazon Product Ads or on Shopping.com.
On the opposite end of cutting products which don’t perform well, increasing bids for individual products which do perform well is a great way to get the most out of your CSE campaign.
Pricegrabber: Cost of Sale (COS), Revenue and Conversion Rate
Ok so Pricegrabber can’t always be second best. But for other key comparison shopping metrics, Pricegrabber generally did well in the Q4 2012 engine rankings.
For cost of sale (COS), Pricegrabber came in 3rd, beat only by Google PLAs and Amazon. Pricegrabber also came in 4th for overall revenue generation, behind Google PLAs, Amazon Product Listing Ads and Nextag. For Conversion Rate (CR), Pricegrabber fared a little worse, coming in 5th place.
What Else Should I Know About Pricegrabber?
- Unlike Amazon, Pricegrabber has its own in house- tracking.
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