Premise:

As shoppers are becoming more sophisticated in e-browsing and e-shopping, product search engines, verses general search engines, are quickly becoming a large source for product and online store recommendations. This blog entry covers a strategic method of benefiting from other companies’ product search engine marketing efforts, adding yet another element to the online product marketing mix: Search Engine Merchandising & Pay-per-click Piggy Backing.

E-Commerce Dream Dashing

An excited client comes to your web company with a gleaming dot com product-selling dream and dollar signs in his or her eyes, wanting an online store selling products which, in their mind, will cut back on the common hassles of a brick-and-mortar store.

How do you explain to your new client that their website could have poor placement in Google for their primary keywords for up to a year or more? How does one make these eager entrepreneurs understand that Google, and Yahoo! to a lesser degree, has a “time out” period, or “sandbox,” before it allows new sites in the search listings?

Answer:

You offer more immediately gratifying search engine marketing solutions.

Typical Alternatives: optimize for MSN and create pay-per-click campaigns for Google and Yahoo.

Although these methods should still be utilized, there are a few disadvantages:

• MSN does not attract the sheer search volume that Google & Yahoo! do, which results in far fewer sales early on. On a tertiary level, this search engine does not give the same feelings of “prestige” most business owners want to feel by being in the top ten on Google. As SEMs and SEOs working for human clients, sometimes these ego-driving feelings do play a role in keeping the client satisfied.
• If done right and budgeted correctly, pay-per-click campaigns can yield tremendous results for company ROI. The problem lies with online product marketers having to compete and bid on keywords with the likes of Ebay, Amazon, and other huge names. These online giants are AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and MSN AdCenter customers as well, only they have bottomless pay-per-click budgets.

There is a less expensive way to corner the online market, build online brand awareness, and get your client’s products in front of their target market faster.

The Solution

Pay-per-click Piggy Backing– This method is the act of observing who of your search engine competitors that are advertising with paid search listings, and letting them promote your products with their pay-per-click ads.

This allows you to promote your client’s products paying only a nominal or contingency fee, sometimes even for free, without having to pay the premium ongoing pay-per-click bidding rate.

Pay-per-click Piggy Backing Example:

E-commerce store: CorvetteGearUSA.com

Products: High quality leather jackets and accessories sporting C5 Corvette and C6 Corvette logo.

Target Market: Corvette owners and enthusiasts

While researching competitors I noticed a pattern of ads, mixed with smaller company ads, which consistently popped up on the sponsored side of Google, Yahoo!, and MSN for different variations of our client’s primary buyer’s search terms.

The main product search engine advertisers for “Corvette Jacket.” as well as thousands of other products I am sure, are: Shopping.com, BizRate.com, Ebay.com, Amazon.com, Shopzilla.com (owned by BizRate.com, but still has separate ads), Pricegrabber.com (feeding MSN Shopping), and Yahoo! Shopping.

Each of these sponsored search ads, when clicked on, lead to a landing page, or auction search with the case of Ebay, with the term “Corvette jacket” already in the product search engine with the results displayed.

I decided that Corvette Gear’s products needed to be under every pay-per-click ad possible that leads to a product search engine page.

Once it is established what product search engines are promoting similar products, and they allow merchant accounts, sign up for their merchant or seller accounts and upload your products. Since main search enigines are where the traffic is at and individual product search engines pale in comparision, only sign up for the product search engines that consistantly have pay-per-click ads promoting and landing on your products.

Traditional merchandisers understand the importance of distribution channels, brand name equity, co-branding, and product endorsements. The same methods should be used when merchandising products online. By using the leverage of big names like Amazon, Ebay, and SHOP.com, your company has already established more credibility than trying to market solely on the strength of its own name. Furthermore, if your customers see your products in multiple places more trust and credibility is established.

The pricing to upload your products and hold a merchant account varies between companies. Many have a pay-per-click model, others are based on contingency of sales. Most are pretty simple to set up, once you have a product feed. For Amazon.com, to list apparel it’s $40 a month and a 15% commission. The $40 subscription is only taken out of what has been sold.

Three Steps to Pay-per-click Piggy Backing

1. Research and establish what major pay-per-click buyers are promoting similar products to yours and driving traffic to their product search engines by typing in your primary keywords in Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, and checking the sponsored ads.
2. Sign up for each company’s merchant account program and upload your products.
3. Optimize your products within each company’s product search engine so they appear on the first page of results when connected to the pay-per-click landing page.

By paying attention to the search environment patterns, and competitors, you can logically assume that a percentage of your target buyers are going to click on these ads whether the ad is number one or number ten. If Corvette Gear USA has products under multiple pay-per-click ads, there is better chance of the searcher to buy a jacket from this company if he or she has seen the name multiple times and feels more comfortable with it at the end of their browsing stage. This is only one strategic product marketing strategy I suggest when trying to build a presence on the web with a new product site. Combining this method with regular pay-per-click of your own while link building and using SEO practices should give any E-commerce site an excellent jump start.

Category: Web Strategy, Internet Marketing

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 4:48 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.