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BEWARE: Pricegrabber looking like a SCAM

by consultant1027
1 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Been with Pricegrabber over 5 years. We had tweaked our feed to send very little product to them, conversion rate just wasn't there. We reset our filter a couple weeks back as an experiment and let more product flow through and just now I started looking closely at our in-house tracking log.

I see strange bursts of traffic on various items, a lot of it originating from a facebook URL that was not a proper referrer and the IP address was always the same. This seems strange since the end-user's browser, in most, not all cases, should reflect the user's IP. Facebook isn't functioning as an ISP and proxying the end-users connection, unless something funky is going on with frames, etc.?

Also seeing lots of clicks from sources where there is NO referrer info, and IP address repeats. Yes, I know not all clients will properly send that info, but in my 15+ years experience on the net, it has always been a very very small minority of clients.

No way to tell if Pricegrabber is doing any funny business to increase sales but I think in most these situations it is affliliates playing games to make more money and sites like Pricegrabber don't care as it makes them money. At least they don't care until someone blows the horn on them sort of like the Google Adwords Class Action Lawsuit.

The data is looking VERY fishy to me. Not sure if it is a coincidence with the Facebook IPO but I wouldn't rule out the possibility of Facebook trying to pad their ad revenues so the figures look better when they try to report them to the public for the first time.

We have the same products advertised on Google Shopping and the overall conversion rate is about 20+ times higher than Pricegrabber. Even Nextag has significantly higher conversion than Pricegrabber although much lower than Google. We dumped Shopzilla a long time ago due to declining ROI. Are these price comparison engines trying to get "creative" to stay alive considering most people use Google Shopping for comparison and with algo changes on Google burying these guys, they have lost a lot of exposure in recent months/years?

Who knows what is going on behind close doors in the name of greed?
#beware #pricegrabber #scam
  • Profile picture of the author pavkey88
    Consultant,

    You're not alone in this. I was recently tasked with identifying and stopping the bleed in pricegrabber spend at my company, as our monthly spend had nearly tripled since 4th Quarter 2011.

    After reviewing the pricegrabber reports and the data in analytics, I saw some huge discrepencies between the two. The first issue was with the products being recorded in pricegrabber not matching up with the transaction data from our site. If someone clicked on an item in pricegrabber that was selling for $2k, then purchased an item that was only $10 - pricegrabber was recording a $2,010 sale on their side. This led our company to believe we had a huge ROAS with them, which was totally misleading. We fixed that issue immediately by updating the tracking snippet, and watched the ROAS drop from $16.00 to around $5.00 in less than 30 days.

    The next battle involved trying to get them to stop sending traffic from one of their affiliate sites - specifically soebay.pgpartner.com. Over the course of a just a few months, this site had racked up over 3,000 visits to our site. This would be great except not one of those visitors proceeded to add an item to the cart, let alone make a purchase. In fact, the overall bounce rate for these visitors was 99.89%.

    What did pricegrabber do? Absolutely nothing. They stated that THEIR records showed that this site did, in fact, send qualified visitors and that those visitors were making purchases. After going back and forth with my rep on this, he explained that many of their partner sites use affiliate sites to promote products, and that those affiliate sites may be getting the credit for soebay in analytics. Which affiliate sites would that by I asked - we don't have that information, was their response.

    We also have a shopping feed submission service we use and I spoke to that rep about the pricegrabber issue to see if she had any bright ideas. Apparently, this is a very common complaint and there's not much you can do about it other than be ultra-conservative on your bids to avoid having them drain your account. We've dropped 60% of our products to bids around $0.05 or less. I definitely think something sneaky is going on over there.
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