For better or worse, when most eCommerce companies look at their marketing budgets and decide where their money will go to drive more qualified traffic to their website, it’s usually hard to beat paid search and SEO, followed by affiliates and email in the general pecking order.
So where does eCommerce content marketing fit in and is it even worth paying attention to?
Relying on any two or three channels to drive traffic to your site and build a business of the back off is always a risky long term approach. With Google changing their algorithms constantly and paid search prices inflating every couple of months, slowly addressing an eCommerce content marketing strategy long time may not be such a bad idea.
In this interview with Daniel Feiler, Senior Director or Communications at eBay Asia Pacific, we discuss an array of eCommerce content marketing insights and tips to help open up your mind to the possibility that content marketing might just be the next strategy you should be eyeing out to help diversify your online marketing mix.
eCommerce Content Marketing Insights
The Conversation: Blow by Blow
50 sec – General FeedOptimise Overview.
3.09 min – Traffic quality between comparison shopping engines and marketplaces.
6.47 min – Getting started: The best comparison shopping engines to start with and budgets.
9.26 min – Testing keywords and networks, how much do you really need?
11.00 min – Essential elements to include in your feed for greater ROI.
15.08 min – Elements other than click cost to rank well in shopping comparison engines.
18.40 min – Blowing out your campaign from one channel to the next.
27.50 min – Dealing with attribution and reporting from multiple reporting dashboards.
Comparison Shopping Engines Highlights:
Critical product feed elements to ensure a strong ROI
Video Transcript
Daniel: Other than the obvious like price, and title, and whether the product is in stock or not, are there any other elements that you can share with us that are really important to helping the success of the marketing campaign? Any other elements that should be in the product feed?
Marcin: Sure. I mean, you ultimately should put as many elements as you can inside the data feed or elements such as… Again, that isn’t category-dependent because you might not feed that category. But let’s say consumer, electronic goods, or home appliances where products can be grouped together because there is usually more than one sub selling the exact same item and it’s quite easily for a user to know it’s the exact same item.
So for those particular products definitely I recommend things like making sure you have a proper bar codes, or making sure you have a proper manufacturing part numbers. Because like from the Google point of view, but not only, also other networks, is that then they can easily group you together with your competitors and then you’re gaining that edge of being in that particular group rather than being somewhere below that group. And users when they want to compare a price they will go directly to that group to see who sells the items.
Daniel: Right. So the deeper you can go with your segmentation of your products. So even down to an SKU number because I know especially in electronics, a lot of people, they’ll get an SKU number or a model number and not type it in to Google. And if you can have that inside your feed then you’re going to appear. And, I guess, what that does as well is it qualifies a person much more because somebody who types in the model number has probably done a bit more research than someone who just types in Apple iPad.
Getting Started: Budgets and Networks
Video Transcript
Daniel: What would you consider as a decent budget to start out per, say, per network to actually just see if you can get some traction on what works and what doesn’t work? And is there a preferred comparison shopping engines or is there like a better starting point than not in terms of which network to sort of start with?
Marcin: Sure. So ultimately I would recommend based on popularity. I mean based on what you’re using it’s quite a good example of, you know, where to start. So ultimately we pretty much only use Google.
Daniel: Right.
Marcin: So it’s a good point to start because, let’s be honest, everyone uses it. And the good stuff about Google is not only that everyone uses it, it’s that they give you a huge amount of controls. So you can bid as low as one cent. And that’s it, so, you know, you can just try yourself whatever low budget or try very incrementally increase your performance. So that would be Google. The other stuff is things like, for example, eBAY network. eBAY Commerce Network that gives you quite a big array of networks or websites but it also gives you an eBAY itself.
Daniel: Right.
Marcin: Which again it’s quite popular and lots of people is using but, you need to keep in mind that eBAY doesn’t always need to play well for you. It depends on what you’re selling and whether eBAY fits that particular niche. For example, if you sell quite business to business, like those products, EBAY might not be a good fit. Saying so, we have people actually doing eBAY. We try business to business and they’re doing sales. So, you know, its hard to say whether it work or it doesn’t. It’s good to try. That’s why popularity is a good indicator, because otherwise you just need to give it a go.
Daniel: Right.
Marcin: And that probably was a price but it would be also a good fit to start off with because of the Yahoo shopping, which is quite a big network itself. Quite a lot of people are still using Yahoo. That’s why this is kind of an indicator but saying so, you know, every single websites can work for you. It’s a matter of giving them a go for a month or so and keep an eye on them, of course.
Daniel: Yeah
Marcin: And this way you can see if it works or not.
Daniel: Right, so basically when it comes to comparison shopping engines you’re saying is let’s follow the crowd, let’s follow where the majority of…
Marcin: Pretty much.
Daniel: … shoppers really sit to actually find a starting point.
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