Are you looking for a new way to drive traffic to your website?  Amazon Product Ads is hosting a free webinar that SingleFeed merchants might be interested in attending.  Learn about Amazon.com’s CPC advertising program that puts your products in front of millions of Amazon.com customers.  Register today to discover how you can begin making Amazon.com customers your customers!

Introduction to Amazon Product Ads

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

10:00-10:45 AM Pacific Time

As a Product Ads seller, SingleFeed will upload your product catalog and you set your cost-per-click bids and daily budget.  Amazon.com will then display your ads in highly targeted placements throughout the Amazon.com site.  When customers are interested in buying your product, they click through to your website and purchase the product directly from you.

Reserve Your Seat and learn:

• What is Amazon Product Ads?
• What’s the benefit?
• How does it work?
• How to get started?

Yes, it is true. As of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping will no longer be accepting feeds via Yahoo! Product Submit. Instead, they will be receiving all their product data from Pricegrabber.

If you already have a Pricegrabber account, your products will automatically be sent over to Yahoo! Shoppping, as of 3/11/10.

If you do not already have a Pricegrabber account, you can set one up here. For a limited time, you can choose to submit to Pricegrabber and their network of sites, including Yahoo! Shopping, or you can choose to submit only to Yahoo! Shopping.

Due to this change, you’ll notice that Yahoo! Product Submit is no longer an available engine in your SingleFeed account.

In your SingleFeed reports, bear in mind that historical traffic data antedating 3/11/10 will still be attributed to Yahoo! Shopping. Any Yahoo! Shopping traffic postdating 3/11/10 will be attributed to Pricegrabber. This is because all Yahoo! Shopping traffic is being fueled by your Pricegrabber feed. However, Yahoo! Shopping will likely be extending a grace period with their feeds as merchants run-down any remaining funds in their Yahoo! Product Submit accounts, and as merchants continue to migrate over to Pricegrabber. For that reason we suspect that you’ll still see some traffic post 3/11/10 being attributed to Yahoo! Shoppping.

As far ramifications to your overall CSE campaign performance, there are a few considerations. As Brian mentions in his post, Pricegrabber will gain more click-share as it appropriates all Yahoo! Shopping traffic.  But this could be a mixed bag. Yahoo! Shopping is a popular engine, and it does bring in quite a bit of traffic, but not as much as we all would assume, considering its big name cache. On top of that, conversion rate at Yahoo! Shopping is lower than that of Pricegrabber, according to aggregrate SingleFeed statistics. So you may likely see traffic for Pricegrabber go up, but conversion rate may actually go down. But if you’ve been live on Yahoo! Shopping for a while, and you are happy with the performance, then there’s nothing to worry about. Not much will change, except how your product data gets to Yahoo! Shopping.

We have two upcoming webinars this month with some great ecommerce platforms/shopping cart solutions.  If you are a merchant using either of these platforms we encourage you to sign up and learn more about how to submit to the shopping engines and increase traffic and revenue.

CommerceV3 – Thursday, March 18th from11am-12pm PST.  Register Now

Join CV3 and SingleFeed and learn the following:
- How to use SingleFeed with CV3
- Setting up your CV3 store for shopping engine success
- Industry best practices
- Data Feed Optimization tips and advice

Miva Merchant – Tuesday, March 23rd from 10am-11am PST.  Register Now

Join Miva Merchant President and COO Rick Wilson and SingleFeed and learn the following:
- Why are the shopping engines important
- Setting up your store for shopping engine success
- How to use SingleFeed with your Miva Merchant store
- Data Feed Optimization tips and advice
- Industry best practices

Both of these webinars will be recorded in case you can’t attend. We’ll link to the recordings from this blog.

Google has been sending out emails recently that appear to be partially in error. The subject reads: “Google Merchant Center problem with data feed file: storefeed.txt”. I say partially in error because from what we’ve seen the feed filenames are in fact registered with merchant’s Google Merchant Center accounts, but the file delivered on or around March 2 may have failed import on Google’s side. It does appear that merchant’s products are still published and searchable. If you have been live on Google Product Search for a while, and haven’t changed your feed filename recently, this email is probably not much to worry about. We still recommend logging into your Google Merchant Center account and doublechecking that you DO have a feedfile name there, and that your products are currently searchable. The body of the email reads:

“Dear Google Merchant Center user,

On March 2, 2010 3:59:44 PM EST you uploaded to Google Merchant Center via FTP a file named “mystorefile.txt”, but you don’t have a data feed registered with this name. Please verify that you provided the correct file name, including correct capitalization.

This is a computer-generated email. Please do not reply…”

We’ll keep you posted here as we learn more…

UPDATE: On 3/3/10 we received notification from Google that they experienced an error with FTP uploads, but they now believe they have it resolved. No action is required on your part.

Join SingleFeed & FastPivot on Wednesday, February 24th at 11am PST for a webinar for Yahoo! Stores.

We will share our expertise and advice in getting started with the comparison shopping engines and providing data feed optimization advice. Yahoo! Stores design and helper company FastPivot will be joining us to not only discuss how to properly track your shopping engine campaigns with Yahoo! Analytics, but also help you understand what metrics to keep an eye on.

We’ll be covering the following topics:
- How to add custom fields to your Yahoo Store
- Properly measuring results with Yahoo/Google Analytics
- Take home action items/tips to optimize your feed
- Yahoo Shopping & Pricegrabber changes

Register for the webinar

For those of you who missed our Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo! Stores webinar, or want to catch it again, head over to Rob Snell’s website  or watch below.

http://www.robsnell.com/singlefeed-webinar.html

Stay tuned for another webinar coming soon!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that SingleFeed will be closed for MLK Jr. Day. We’ll be back Tuesday. If you also have the day off, take a look at MLKDay.gov.

Thanks. -brian

Sign up: Visit https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/963586179 today!

Approximately 1/3 of Americans use comparison shopping engines at least once per month. Your ecommerce site should be earning 10-20% of your monthly traffic and revenue from your listings on comparison engines. Are your results on par?

This webinar is for serious Yahoo! Store owners who are committed to increasing revenue in 2010. Have you ever wondered how to increase your traffic and sales on your Yahoo! Store? Whether you’ve struggled in your attempts to list your products on comparison shopping engines like Google Product Search, Yahoo Shopping or Shopzilla, or just want to find out more about data feed optimization this is the webinar for you!

Join SingleFeed as we share our expertise in getting started with the shopping engines, employing best practices for success and streamlining the process as much as possible. You will also hear from Rob Snell, author of Yahoo! Stores for Dummies, a Yahoo! Store evangelist, and one of our valued clients. Rob has seen impressive results on the shopping engines since getting started with SingleFeed.

Join SingleFeed and Rob to learn how to get up and running & succeed on the comparison shopping engines.

We’ll cover these topics:

* Why retailers partner with shopping engines
* How to list your products
* Tips for optimizing your product feed
* A real customer success story
* And we’ll leave plent of time for questions

When: Wednesday, January 27, 2010 from 10:00 AM – 11:00 AM PST

Presenter: Ryan Douglas, Business Development Manager, SingleFeed

Special Guest: Rob Snell, Owner, Gun Dog Supply, Author, Yahoo Stores For Dummies

Visit https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/963586179 to sign up today for free!

As of March 11, 2010, merchants wanting to list on Yahoo! Shopping will have to do so through PriceGrabber because Yahoo! Product Submit is being shut down. For more details on this change, make sure to read my post over at ComparisonEngines.com. Yahoo! has provided a FAQ to help merchants with this transition. If you’re not already listing on PriceGrabber and want to take advantage of Yahoo! Shopping traffic, make sure to sign up soon.

We’re taking the opportunity over the next few days to reprocess our reporting log files. When accessing your reports, you will not see new data. However, we are still processing clicks and will re-populate this data as soon as possible. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might cause you.

The work we’re doing will result in more accurate reporting data. This is all part of our mission to improve SingleFeed’s reporting system. We launched a much improved reporting interface at the beginning of the holiday shopping season. We added simple SKU suppression through the reporting interface just a bit later. We’re always trying to improve the accuracy of the reports and the log reprocessing happening right now is one step in that direction. We’re launching more useful exports in the upcoming weeks to allow you to slice and dice your data however you see fit. Coming soon will be improved click cost data from many shopping engines. And that’s just the beginning.

The disparate reporting systems the shopping engines maintain make it difficult for merchants to effectively take action to improve their results. However those systems do provide some great data and become very useful when a merchant uses the ROI trackers the shopping engines provide. In addition to recommending installing the shopping engines’ ROI trackers, we always recommend using a third party analytics program like Google Analytics, Coremetrics, or Omniture. This has become a must for all smart online marketers.

But the more data, the better. The more targeted data presented in a more useful way, the better. And because we know what matters on the shopping engines, we know SingleFeed’s reporting system is becoming the heart of our merhcants’ shopping engine campaigns. We’re not only giving you the data needed to make informed decisions, but helping you take action on that data to improve your shopping engine results quickly and easily.

Again, I sincerely apologize that you’ll not be able to see new data for a bit, but we promise to re-populate the data as soon as we can. Stay tuned for more reporting upgrades in the near future.

Happy Holidays!
-brian