Exporting Shopping Feeds

Factors that Affect Product Rankings

Before we jump into the bid process, we need to talk about ranking. Bidding boils down to how well you want your products to rank on a given comparison shopping engine’s search results page. But there are other factors other than bidding that will affect your product placement on a results page. Let’s look at the factors (sans bidding).

Account Maturity

This is built out over time. If you have a good relationship with a CSE, meaning no stalls in your campaign, over a long period of time (more or less 1 year), they’ll actually start to like you. This will often factor into a CSE’s ranking algorithm.

Seller Rating

Seller rating is not publicly part of the ranking algorithm, but it can certainly influence it. This can also affect whether a shopper clicks on your listing or not, especially considering that your merchant rating will be side by side other merchants’ ratings on major comparison shopping engines like Google Shopping.

Free Shipping

Free shipping is not known to factor into the ranking algorithm, but most CSEs will make it easier for shoppers to find products with free shipping through sorting. Let’s also not forget the growing demand for free shipping options from retailers, and many times a shopper will filter the results to  look at only the retailers that offer free shipping.

Price

Price is not really a part of the CSE ranking algorithm, but put yourself in the customer’s shoes. The beauty of comparison shopping engines is that they give customers the ability to rank products from lowest to highest price, so the lower your price, the higher up on the list you’ll be.

Feed Relevancy

Keywords are a crucial element of your feed relevancy. Those in your title are weighted more than those in your description column, so make sure you match these up closely with your website’s product listings and include all relevant descriptive words. This, along with bidding, is certainly in every CSEs’ ranking algorithm.