The State of eCommerce Advertising 2022 [Feed Marketing Report]

Millions of online retailers worldwide advertise their products on channels like Google, Facebook, and Amazon, generating billions in revenue. We’ve all read reports analyzing the cost of advertising, the conversion rates, and the ROAS, but never before have we seen a detailed insight into how retailers organize their campaigns and catalogs, across which advertising channels, and what they do to be successful. 

Never, until today.

Today, our DataFeedWatch Team is extremely excited to be releasing the industry’s first-ever - Feed Marketing Report 2022 - uncovering the deeper layer of eCommerce advertising success for every online merchant and PPC professional working with retail campaigns.

What’s the data coverage of the report?

The Feed Marketing Report 2022 has been created with one goal in mind: to provide every eCommerce marketer - a marketing agency professional, an in-house PPC specialist, an online store owner - with actionable insight into the very foundations of eCommerce campaigns.

In pursuit of this goal, we’ve analyzed data samples covering 15,000+ online stores worldwide across over 20 eCommerce sectors, and broke it down into 4 angles:

The Products

An up-close look at the contents of 15,000+ product catalogs used for paid campaigns...and what it reveals about today's eCommerce advertising market.

The Channels

Multichannel trends, prevalent ad platforms across sectors & countries, and benchmarks for your sector and location.

The Errors

The most common data roadblocks that stand in the way of better PPC performance. Plus, step-by-step solutions to help eliminate  existing product feed errors.

The Tactics

The top data feed tactics used by PPC professionals to improve & scale campaign results, helping you to plan your next data feed optimization with confidence.

By answering some of the most burning questions, like...

• Is a fashion retailer competitive enough with 20% of inventory on sale? 
• Is it normal for an automotive business to have a 50% shortage of stock? 
• What are the top advertising channels chosen by Home furnishings retailers?
• What is the top reason to modify bids in PPC campaigns?

…the report will help you understand how your advertising strategy stacks up against that of competing retailers and industry benchmarks.

Download the full Feed Marketing Report 2022 here.

So, how’s eCommerce advertising doing in 2022?

The economic challenges have influenced supply chain and retail strategies

The Covid-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the e-commerce industry. After a difficult few years, economic challenges continue to affect advertisers and their strategies. Online retailers are still experiencing supply chain disruptions which are reflected in commodity shortages. Overall, 16.66% of all products in advertising catalogs are not available for purchase at this time in 2022. However, it appears that some EU markets, as well as the UK and US, have already overcome the problem and had above-average stock levels at the end of March.

Some sectors have been hit harder than others. The most affected businesses are those selling vehicles & parts (57.46% of products out of stock) and sporting goods (40.09% out-of-stock items). The apparel sector was one of the most impacted in 2021, but now seems to have regained its supply management balance with an average of 84.56% of products being in stock.

Very high inflation, which affects most countries in the world in 2022, is resulting in consumers being much more price-sensitive than before. From January 2021 to January 2022, prices in the U.S. have risen by 7,51%. This is prompting online retailers to offer discounts on many of their products, especially in Apparel, Health & Beauty, and Furniture sectors. Merchants operating in these areas offer over 30% of their product catalogs at a promotional price.

Multichannel sales are widespread among online retailers

We have seen an increase in user consumption of products in certain categories, which started during the pandemic and continues today. These categories are Home & Garden, Electronics, and Furniture. This in turn has contributed to the fact that the aforementioned sectors are leading the way with multichannel strategies to make the most out of their opportunities. An online retailer in the Home & Garden sector sells on average on 3.9 channels, in the Electronics sector 3.6 channels, and in the Furniture sector 3.4 channels. For comparison, stores in the automotive sector are present on only 2.4 ad platforms on average.

Multichannel presence also depends on how many SKUs a specific online store has. Stores with more than 200,000 SKUs promote their products on 50% more channels than stores that have between 50,000 and 200,000 SKUs.

The vast majority of online retailers (92%) choose Paid Search channels as their preferred way to promote and sell products online. Social channels are less popular, but 54% of sellers consider them a useful medium to promote their products.

Overall, more than 44% of online retailers advertise their product catalogs on both Google Shopping and Facebook. At the same time, 68% of retailers selling on 2 or more marketplaces choose to use a combination of Amazon and eBay.

Affiliate channels like AWIN, Criteo, or CJ Affiliate seem to be undervalued by online retailers. Only 11% invest in this way of promoting their products. However, these platforms have great potential, as for example in Canada affiliate marketing accounts for 16% of their eCommerce sales.

Online retailers use feed tactics to improve their PPC results

The attribute that online retailers pay the most attention to when optimizing their product feed is the product title, which can be easily explained by the important role this attribute plays in product ad visibility. Many also focus on optimizing custom labels and descriptions. 

At the same time, 27,47% of online advertisers provide their chosen ad channel with additional images to increase the appeal of the product listing.

The majority, at 87.68%, use a single data source, which means a single product feed, while only about 1 in 10 advertisers supply additional product information through secondary data sources, such as inventory management systems, analytics, Google sheets, and others.

To improve the ROI across PPC campaigns, 65% of all marketers exclude some of the items from their feeds, especially those they consider to be less profitable. Price is one of the top factors taken into account when deciding which products to cut.

Speaking of campaign optimization, about 2 out of 5 advertisers create custom labels to create strategic product groupings and differentiate their bidding per each.

Feed health depends on various factors

7% of all items in the Google Shopping feed get rejected due to data errors. The most common feed errors are related to shipping settings and images - they stand for 44% of all product ad disapprovals. 

Zooming in on the errors, we also discover that almost 6% of all submitted GTINs are invalid, causing product disapprovals, even though retailers have an option to skip over the GTIN attribute and get products up and running without GTINs.

Shopify sellers achieve the best results in terms of feed health (only 5,47% disapproved listings), while almost 10% of Magento sellers' ads are affected by feed errors - which may speak to the complexity of the backend system management across different platforms.

Curious to find out more?

Get your free copy of The Feed Marketing Report 2022 now and power up your eCommerce advertising strategy.