The views expressed in Guest Commentary pieces do not necessarily reflect those of ComparisonEngines.com.

Alaa Hassan is the Manager - System Administrator for iNetVideo. iNetVideo.com offers a variety of Movies (like It’s a Wonderful Life), Games (like Tom Clancy titles) and Music products (what happened to Ryan Adams?) through its website and other marketplaces such as Ebay.com and Amazon.com. iNetVideo recently started working with Shopping Engines and it has been a great success, but the company constantly faces challenges related to managing its accounts.

ALERT: Your Campaign is Down - Action Needed

Does that sound familiar? Well that’s the subject of every email I get from Shopping.com on a daily basis whenever my account has reached the budget allocated.

I can certainly setup my account on a continuous payment plan but I don’t. Why? This is the current situation: I use to worry when I got this email, but not anymore. When I get that message I always ask myself, why am I going to pay for something I am unable to see?

Shopping.com makes it really hard for companies like us to measure our ROI. They do offer tracking scripts, and that’s already implemented on our side. What about optimization? Every shopping engine article I read mentions something about optimizing your feeds in order to reach success. Is Shopping.com aware of that?

Don’t get me wrong, we do get traffic from Shopping.com, our conversion rate might be considered average, some listings are doing very well, but the question is: which ones? I am unable to focus my budget on performing listings because Shopping.com doesn’t offer the feature of being able to know what items are getting clicked on? Seriously, how can you be able to optimize a feed without that basic feature? All shopping engines need to follow Shopzilla.com. In my opinion, they have truly created the best Shopping Engine Management tools out there. I am able to get detailed reports on every aspect of my account including top performing products.

Now what’s my solution for Shopping.com? I had to cut down on the number of listings I put on Shopping.com in order to stay within my budget.