Introduction
Where keyword paid search allows marketers to advertise on relevant phrases, feed-based search allows you to advertise relevant URLs.

These shopping comparison data-feeds can be an effective way to ensure the engines send traffic to every page on your site that you wish. They can be effective at pulling value from the “long tail” of the search distribution.

Choose which shopping comparison sites to work with
Working with companies ranging from start-ups to the Fortune 500, we’ve found it profitable for catalogers to provide feeds for such sites as Yahoo Shopping, Yahoo SiteMatch Exchange (the former Inktomi), Froogle, Shopping.com, Pricegrabber, MSN Shopping, and Gifts.com. While these sites command far less traffic and generate far fewer sales than Google or Yahoo search, they can provide modest additional revenue at reasonable advertising cost.

This article gives you some tips to help you get more out of the feeds.

How can you advertise your pages via the feeds?
Work with your in-house IT resources or out-sourced agency to prepare special files containing information on each URL you want to promote. Information for each page typically includes the product name, description, price, and image link. Independently or through your agency, submit these special files to the feed engines. Typically, retailers submit feeds daily or weekly.

The decision to in-source or out-source feeds depends on the availability of IT resources, and the skill of your marketing team in optimizing feeds for each engines.

Working with an advertising agency
If you choose to work with an agency, ask them if they are building your feeds themselves or if they too are outsourcing them.

If your agency is outsourcing their feed work, ask which company is actually doing the work, and what level of service—frequency of updates, speed of problem resolution, billing audits, etc.—you can expect from your agency and their partner.

Consistent reporting
Make sure your reporting platform integrates all your efforts across all the data-feed venues into one set of unified reports. It’s helpful to also integrate your paid keyword search into the reporting as well. This lets you avoid “double counting” orders.

As an example, double counting can occur when prior to purchasing from you a person clicks on both a paid search ad (say, a Google AdWords ad) as well as a data feed ad (say, a Yahoo Shopping link).

Valid Feeds vs. Effective Feeds
There are 2 aspects to feed quality: feed validity and feed effectiveness.

Feed validity is about making sure your feed is well-formed, adhering to the engine’s spec. Feed effectiveness is about making sure your feed is the most effective marketing vehicle it can be. While all effective feeds must be valid, often valid feeds aren’t particularly effective.

Conform to Content Specs
Each feed engine has its own rules governing content: copy, superlatives, use of brand names, etc. Make sure your feed conforms to these specs.

Taxonomy Matching
Creating a valid feed hinges on matching your product categorization or taxonomy to that of each feed provider.

The feed providers often place urls sent to them into a slot in their taxonomy, in effect, a “bin.” Your goal is to make sure each of your product pages lands in a bin, and in the bin most likely to be explored by a qualified customer.

Product Categorization Challenges
A key challenge is that product categorization may change seasonally on both the retailer and engine side. You can help your products get listed in the appropriate categories by staying on top of the engine’s changes and as well as your own changes.

Tip: Make sure your internal expert or agency is informed whenever your merchandising team revises product categorization. Failing to do so can lead to mis-matched or “orphaned” urls.

Fresh Feeds
Set up an automated routine to remove discontinued items from your feeds. This should be done automatically each day or week.

Feed Monitoring
Continuously monitor your presence on the feeds: Most of the feeds will simply drop any urls they consider malformed, but only some will tell you when they do so.

While it may not be practical for retailers with broad assortments to confirm the presence of every sku, it’s worth checking regularly on your most important products.

Feed Effectiveness
Feed effectiveness is where it becomes clear that serving feeds is not just an IT function, it’s a job for your marketing team. As with paid search, you want to fine tune your program to hit specific economic targets.

The techniques you use are actually of a similar flavor to those that characterize organic search optimization:

Success in natural search starts with getting your pages found (indexed) and increases as you tune these pages to increase their importance in the eyes of the engines.
Success with feeds starts with valid data and increases as you get more of the right terms and words into the right data fields.

Batch Optimization
But unlike natural seo, here you’re not optimizing single pages, you’re optimizing a batch.

You need an algorithm that handles your entire product assortment. While some of the engines allow you to improve placement by bidding, many do not. Success depends then on what you send: Each feed requires it own recipe.

You’ll also want to use product titles that reflect how most people describe the things you sell; jargon can make you hard to find.

Feed Trimming
Just as effective paid search requires monitoring of individual keywords economics, success with the data feeds depends on atomic analysis.

Obviously you want to remove chronically under-performing products, and there are times you may want to suppress marginal performers as well.

Retailers are often excited about the prospect of using their feeds to showcase their entire product catalog, but this is not always wise.

Say a cataloger offers 400 skus. If all her sales are generated by the top 80 items, she should consider eliminating the remaining 320 from the feed.

An extreme example, but relevant, as many retailers will find it challenging to control the order in which their products are presented by the shopping comparison sites. By intelligently pruning your product list, you can make sure your best products aren’t competing for attention with your duds.

Feed Testing
Each feed for each engine requires its own recipe, and just as the best chefs are always experimenting, smart marketers are always testing.

Work with your internal team or search agency to establish a feed testing regimen. Test one feed algorithm against another. As always you’ll want to ensure that each url has a unique tracking code identifying the specific product on your site and the engine where your ad is served.

Conclusion
The bottom line? Approached intelligently, the shopping comparison data feeds can help search marketers sell more.