Tis the season for shopping engine CPC rate increases. Five years ago, it was common to see all the shopping engines implement a 25% CPC rate increase across the board…because, well…fork lifts also see a lift in conversion during the holiday shopping season. Yeah, I didn’t buy it either.
The original party line was that conversion rate goes up 3x during the holidays and the shopping engines were adjusting CPC rates to get their fair share for driving qualified leads. If you pressed a little bit, the shopping engines would talk about CPC rates on Google AdWords going up; and if the CSEs’ traffic acquisition costs (TACs) were rising, then they’d have to pass that additional cost onto the merchants. OK, that made sense, but that also pointed out how dependent the shopping engines are on Google AdWords.
Fast forward a couple years (to 2007), and Shopping.com did something different. They didn’t do an across the board increase in CPC rates, but rather implemented a variable rate increase. At the time, Alisa Weiner and Tomer Shoval explained:
We’ve done some analysis looking at previous years, looking at deltas in different categories in rate cards from our search partners. As opposed to one size fits all, we’ve done the analysis to figure out what’s needed to cover our costs. And we’ve moved the [rate increase] from November 1 to November 15 to better reflect when that increase kicks in. What we’re trying to do this year is be more sensitive to reflect what we’ve seen in the past. In some categories the keywords [cpc rates] increase more, in some categories the keywords [cpc rates] increase less.
So you’d expect the other shopping engines to follow suit. Well, that didn’t exactly happen the last couple years. Of the big, tier 1 shopping engines, NexTag and PriceGrabber have stuck with their across the board CPC rate increases. Bad!
Shopping.com stuck with its guns and maintains its variable rate increase. And they got Shopzilla and Pronto to copy that model.
However, for the first time in the last 5 years, two major shopping engines have no CPC rate increases. Amazon Product Ads and Become are my PPC shopping engine heroes of this holiday shopping season with no CPC rate increases in any categories.
So if you’re not up and running with Become or Amazon Product Ads, what are you waiting for?
Posted by Brian Smith 
