For successful eCommerce businesses, product feed management tools are an essential component in ensuring that your product data is accurately represented across multiple online sales channels. After all, accurate product data is the key to product visibility and CTR (click-through rate).
In this article, we’ll cover what product feed management is, popular feed management tools and mistakes to avoid with feed management to get the best results.
What Is A Product Data Feed?
To fully understand product feed management, we first need to explain what a product data feed is. In short, a product data feed is a digital database of products and product attributes required to accurately advertise and promote products across multiple online sales channels.
A product feed can include elements like product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability and other relevant attributes.
Ensuring that your product data is accurate and optimised will help your products get maximum exposure for relevant searches across product listings.
Note: It’s important to remember that every shopping platform has its own data requirements and recommendations which need to be respected.
What Is Product Feed Management?
Product feed management is the process of organising and optimising product data in a centralised feed management system. These systems allow you to efficiently structure your data, and update product attributes, without affecting the product details on the website itself. This allows you to test different parameters to improve conversion rates.
Even if you have a small selection of products, we recommend using feed management tools – more on this later – to ensure that your data is as accurate as possible.
Benefits Of Feed Management
If implemented correctly, feed management tools can be extremely beneficial for your eCommerce business. Here are just some of the many benefits of effective feed management:
Centralised admin of all feeds across multiple channels and marketplaces.
Intuitive interface for product inventory management.
Allows you to amend, update or expand product details (individually or as a group) without affecting the website entry.
Utilise rules to group products and apply rules and attributes to multiple products to increase your customer reach.
Use feed management machine learning to identify issues and optimisation opportunities within the feed.
Link directly to channels such as Google Ads and Meta Ads Manager and use performance data to target groups of products and deploy dynamic ad content.
Ultimately, product feed management systems allow you to easily manage and update product information in one centralised platform. Without feed management, it would be extremely difficult to manage product data without updating website content or adding complex rules directly to Google Merchant Center.
Mistakes To Avoid With Product Feed Management
Effective feed management ensures that Google has a better understanding of your product, its use and its relevance to the user. However, we often comeacross a list of missing fields that are detrimental to effective feed management. Below, we have added a list of missing fields that we come across and what you can do to avoid these mistakes:
Product Name – Include key information such as brand, size, colour etc.
Custom Labels – Create bespoke groupings and utilise in segments within Google Ads Listing Groups.
Google Product Categories – Ensure that correct and detailed category entries are added to products, rather than accepting Google’s general top-level categorisation.
Additional Product Types – Add further product categorisation based on site structure.
How To Manage Product Feeds
As previously mentioned, managing your product feed is extremely important to ensure that your product data is accurate. Here are some best practices to manage your product feed:
Regularly update your product information.
Optimise your product titles and descriptions.
Categorise your products.
Enhance product images and videos.
Provide detailed product information.
Feed Management Tools
While there are many tools that can be used to manage your product feed, here are some of the most common feed management tools that our clients use:
Shoptimised– A user-friendly platform that provides comprehensive tools and insights to improve product visibility, increase sales and save time and resources with automated features.
Feedonomics– A comprehensive platform that helps you optimise your product feeds for various online channels. Feedonomics also provides valuable insights and analytics to help you understand and improve your online marketing efforts.
Channable– Allows you to easily optimise and distribute product data across multiple online channels and marketplaces to reach a wider audience, increase online visibility and drive more sales. Channable also offers automation features, customisation options and performance-tracking tools to manage and optimise your product feeds.
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Simon Jones
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