RSS gives PriceRunner search marketing results without SEM costs
Some retailers already use RSS as a way to deliver subscribed content on deals and bargains to customers. Soon, they could be using it to deliver advertising as well. The experience of comparison shopping engine PriceRunner with Pheedo, an online advertising platform that delivers contextually relevant ads along with subscribed content to users’ RSS readers, offers a glimpse of what’s possible: using Pheedo, PriceRunner is getting results comparable to search marketing results at less cost, general manager Martin Andersen tells Internet Retailer.
PriceRunner, a comparison shopping engine owned by ValueClick Inc., now covers about 5,000 retailers, says Andersen. It’s a model that lists online and local store prices for a product, where possible, by gathering the store information weekly in local markets—hence the name. The engine, which also carries product and retailer reviews from consumers, always lists the lowest price available for a product first. So though PriceRunner gets a fee from the retailer when a user clicks on one of its listed merchants, there is no competitive bidding for position among retailers sending product feeds to the engine.
To garner traffic for its merchants, PriceRunner does online marketing. “We always try to find new ways to get good quality traffic to our merchants, and one way of doing that is blogs and RSS,” Andersen says. Receiving a product feed from PriceRunner, Pheedo serves up ad listings for PriceRunner merchants, on a contextually relevant basis, in the subscribed content it syndicates via RSS. What RSS subscribers see in their feed aggregator as a result is the different feeds they subscribe to, interspersed with relevant sponsored listings, which are clearly identified as advertising.
It’s entirely text-based contextual placement within feeds, Andersen says. Because RSS delivers user-selected content, advertising in RSS feeds is very targeted, he adds. “We can target digital cameras into a digital camera content feed, for example. It’s a very natural placement, and because of that we get a high return on investment,” he says.
Andersen says conversions off Pheedo are about equal to those from SEM marketing. “In talking with some of the merchants about it, they definitely see the traffic as good traffic,” he says. Andersen won’t say how much advertising through Pheedo is costing PriceRunner, but he says it’s currently less than his cost of search engine marketing. According to Pheedo, its cost per click rate currently ranges from 30 cents to a dollar—considerably lower than the top end of pay-per-click rates. “As this gets more popular I would suspect that down the road prices will become equal to any other PPC advertising, but right now, the price is lower than what we pay on SEM,” Andersen says..
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