Product Feed Management Series: 3 Advanced Data Strategies

Proper management of your product data and feeds is essential for e-commerce success, regardless of your business size, product category or technical background. We created this blog series to help you understand the current processes related to feed management, along with detailed and practical recommendations to help you improve them. (Read Part I, Part II and Part III)

1. Leverage Custom Labels to Run Campaigns for Business Objectives

It’s no secret in the e-commerce industry that ad margins have been trending downward over the last decade. And it makes sense. There are more products, more advertisers and more advanced strategies than ever before.

This means that you need to have an approach that enables you to only grow, but to be profitable.

You might use, like many other marketers, custom labels for search engines and social platforms to segment your campaigns for easier reporting, investment or bidding decisions. 

Labels are a strong lever that you can use to drive profitability. They can help you decide which products are best to put up for auction and then help you automate that process. Using labels can help optimise your campaigns to specific commercial goals — such as increasing profit, managing inventory or acquiring new customers.

If return on ad spend (ROAS) is the main performance indicator that populates your custom labels, that’s a great start. But be sure to add more business intelligence data to help you better automate and optimise your campaigns.

For a broad search like “mens clothing,” you obviously get multiple results. If the only indicator you’re looking at is ROAS, you might lose sight of other important metrics — such as profitability, inventory level and lifetime value. These metrics will give you insight into other, crucial business objectives.

2. Use Google Merchant Center Promotions

Even though Google Merchant Centre Promotions have been around for a while, they still seem to be the best-kept secret and remain heavily under-utilized by many advertisers. If this is not the case for you, feel free to jump to the next section. But if you aren’t using them, here’s how they look:

And when they’re clicked on, you’re led to a pop-up image with more details about the offer:

Google enables you to communicate any discounts, free gifts or offers around delivery for free. These ad extensions allow consumers to see these offerings before they even get to your website.

Using promotions can boost your click-through rate, attract shoppers that are enticed by your offer and give your listings an edge over competitors.

3. A/B Test Your Imagery

Chances are that you have more than one image in your portfolio, so make use of them. Just make sure your images fit the guidelines of the channel you are targeting. 

As a consumer, I will look at both the price and image. And if both are attractive, the chances are good that I’m going to click through to the website. So make sure you are putting your best images in front of potential clients. You can do this manually by changing the image after a set amount of time, or you can leverage a tool to automatically test the best image for your targeted channels.

Bonus Tip: Benefits of Using GTINs

Google uses the Global Trade Item Number (or GTIN) to place your ad into an auction with the other resellers of the same product. The ads default to the attributes of the supplier’s catalog and will override optimizations made in the feed.

GTINs also get you placements with consumer searches for “best” and “top”. These kinds of searches also reference customer reviews to determine the position of your ad. The better the reviews, the higher your chances are to show in the first position. (Note: Google uses third-party review companies, such as Trustpilot, Yotpo, Verified Reviews, etc.).

This concludes our fourth article in the series. The next blog in our product feed management series will walk you through the key elements to assess when considering a feed management partner or solution. 

If you require further support in auditing your data or assessing your processes around feed management, contact your ChannelAdvisor representative. If you’re not a ChannelAdvisor client, fill out this quick form and one of our e-commerce consultants will be in touch soon.