Product feed management (data feed management) is the strategic distribution and organization of your online product catalog. It involves activities such as optimizing product feeds in an effort to improve shopping campaign results across various shopping platforms like eCommerce websites or marketplaces, ensuring precise data exchange with each channel, and keeping inventory information up to date.
The proper data feed management also makes it easier for you to expand to multiple channels.
Product feed optimization as part of data feed management usually includes meeting data feed requirements, ensuring the data is accurate and comprehensive, and improving ROI. It mostly focuses on two areas:
- Feed quality
- Source quality
Product Feed Quality
A product feed is a structured file containing a collection of products and their characteristics arranged to be displayed and advertised online.
Feeds are usually CSV, TXT, or XML files and are often used on various platforms such as websites, Google, Facebook, and Amazon to showcase products and run ads.
A product feed usually consists of essential elements like a product image, title, unique product ID, and other specific product attributes like color or description.
Optimizing feed quality is literally what it says on the tin. It's the process of improving all the information in your shopping feed to help show your products to the right people when they search and shop.
The first thing to look at when optimizing a product feed is whether or not it meets all the requirements. You can check out the requirements here. Getting this right is the primary step to optimization. When you have done this, you can then look to further optimize in other ways.
Try looking at optimizing your product titles. Adding a little detail and ensuring you are putting your most important information at the start of the title is a great place to start, as it’s one of the most important things shoppers look at. Also, bear in mind that your title may only have 25 characters displayed, so consider your title structures thoroughly. There are many other feed optimization tips you can use.
Don’t forget to check out tips provided by your Google Merchant Center. Often, these can help improve shopping campaign ROI.
Source Feed Quality
The source usually refers to the product data in your online store. It's crucial that the quality of the source is good, otherwise there's a high probability that the shopping feed won't be good either.
In the source, there is plenty of basic product information. They may sometimes seem irrelevant, but leaving them out can hurt your feed and the user experience of the person buying your product.
It's also important to consider the images. They are one of the primary things a buyer looks at before making a purchasing decision. Make sure you have the right resolution and that the images are visually appealing. The right image can often make a difference in the decision of a person considering a purchase and make them buy a product from you or from another store.
Product Feed Management Tools
An effective way to help you manage your product feeds in a resource- and cost-efficient way is to implement the right 3rd-party tools. Many businesses implement a product feed management tool to gain the best possible competitive advantage.
A product feed management tool is a software app designed to assist you in efficiently sourcing, organizing, and optimizing product data for distribution across various eCommerce channels. It allows you to streamline and enhance this data to ensure accurate and effective product listings on different platforms.
These tools help with many data management tasks, such as:
- easy feed creation,
- structuring data according to channel requirements,
- customizing data for different audiences,
- enriching data with extra information to improve the overall quality,
- organizing data into specific categories,
- synchronizing inventory information between different platforms,
- and much more.
Feed management tools offer you improved visibility into the product data for quick detection of missing information, enhanced efficiency in optimizing data feeds, reduced time spent on manual tasks, and reduced dependence on IT assistance.
