Become.com Optimization

With the Christmas shopping season just around the corner, we've examined become.com's performance. become.com is a new shopping portal we've just added to our marketing campaign so we are required to look at its performance. In September 2010, we received 1018 clicks from Become and had only 2 sales, resulting in about 0.2% conversion rate which is an extremely low conversion rate. We've contacted the become.com and received a free consultation from them on how we can improve our conversion. Here is the summary of the conference call.

1. Include the "MSRP" column in the feed file. By adding MSRP in the feed file, become.com displays strike-through MSRP with our sale price. This will make our ad stand out from the others.
2. In the "Stock Status" column, we can add the value "Hot" to indicate that the item is hot. Become allows up to 100 items to be marked as "Hot" status. This will boost the become.com ranking.
3. Add logo to the listing by raising the bid by $0.05 in the category you desire. Become discourages raising bids for products and recommends doing it by category. Become has had issues with product level bid hike.
4. Play with "Promotional Message". Promotional messages do not have any impact on the become.com ranking. Perhaps, this attribute shouldn't be used... per become.com consultant, but feel free to play with it.
5. Become.com is introducing "Deal Center" for an additional $0.10 per click. Having the Deal Center feature will provide additional "hover" text on hovering mouse over the advertisement.