Which Comparison Shopping Engines Drive the Most Revenue?
Which sites are successful at driving the greatest amount of revenue for our clients? To answer this question I plotted the percentage of aggregate client revenue contribution for a handful of the “largest” CSEs over the last 13 months. I had to limit the results because the chart would be unreadable with 40+ CSEs (and my color scheme would have been even worse).
Although it is probably best not to read too much into these aggregate statistics (results vary based on vertical market and retailer), one trend is very clear. Google, in the form of “Froogle then Google Base now Google Product Search,” has made steady gains in terms of driving CSE revenue. This should not come as too much of a surprise because Google runs a little search engine on the side (you may have heard of it) and they are increasingly including Google Product Search results above organic search results. This is called Google “one box”. You can see this below.
As a reminder (“don’t read too much into aggregate statistics”), these results are highly variable. Some of our largest clients drive far more revenue on Shopping.com, Shopzilla, or Nextag than through Google Product Search. But, it’s clear that Google is making substantial inroads into this market.
One additional item of interest is that Gifts.com, after a good Q4, has been steadily increasing share in the first half of 2007.
We’ll continue to keep an eye on these trends as we move through the rest of 2007.
And if you’re having trouble gaining this type of control and visibility into your comparison shopping campaigns, we recently announced ShoppingAdvisor to help you manage your comparison shopping business more profitably.