For e-commerce stores, a shopping feed provides a revolutionary way to advertise your product catalogue online. Despite removing the limits of a physical storefront and enabling you to list thousands of products and their variants, the crucial detail isn’t just listing your products, it’s optimising them.
Whether it’s Google’s free shopping listings or other paid advertising channels, the sales that come through your website are highly influenced by the output of your feed. Rather than competing for footfall on a high street, you’re competing for visibility on the virtual carousel, as shown below.
Introduction: what is a shopping feed?
Shopping feeds, also known as product feeds, are files containing information about your products: such as titles, descriptions, prices, and images. These feeds are submitted to various shopping channels like Google Shopping, Amazon, and eBay, allowing your products to appear in relevant search results when potential customers are looking to make a purchase. Importantly, the output is under your control, and the changes you make can heavily influence performance.
Why optimise your shopping feed?
Improved visibility: you can generate more relevant ads that appeal to your customer needs. A well-optimised feed increases the chances of your products being displayed in relevant search results, leading to greater visibility among potential customers. The reverse is also true; discouraging your products from being shown for irrelevant search terms that are unlikely to lead to a sale.
Better click through rates: by optimising product titles, descriptions and images, you can attract more clicks from users who are actively searching for products like yours.
More conversions: optimised product information, promotions and images also provide users with accurate and compelling details, increasing the likelihood of a sale.
Improved ROI: an optimised feed can lead to lower cost per clicks and serve products to more relevant customers. It almost goes without saying that an increased conversion rate has a hugely positive impact on your profitability. There are thousands of other advertisers online and the battle for customers isn’t simply a bidding war; an optimised feed can give you a competitive edge.
How do I optimise my shopping feed?
Provide Fresh Data: include up to date stock information, prices and landing pages by ensuring the data refreshes daily (at a minimum). An outdated price, image or description will certainly deter customers. Consistent and accurate information builds trust with customers and prevents potential infringement issues with your listings.
Keyword Experimentation: by incorporating relevant keywords in your product titles and descriptions, you can improve their discoverability. Conduct keyword research to identify high-volume, relevant terms that potential customers are likely to use when searching for products. This may even come from your own organic data or Google Ads data. Your search term reports can be insightful towards customer behaviour. Descriptive titles also need to be compelling, as conversion rate can also be impacted here.
Often a longer title length is encouraged, as more features and attributes will help the reach of your product. However, the titles are commonly truncated by Google when served, so be aware of having the most impactful words towards the beginning. We have specific examples of this to illustrate our recommendations.
Engaging Product Descriptions: highlight the features and benefits of each product that will engage the customer. Bullet points can make information easier to break down, as you want the information to be easily digested.
Image Impact: product images are the first thing your customer will see and can encourage them to explore further. High quality, representative images will influence click through and conversion. Consider the angle of your photograph, resolution and content. Also, with the AI functionality of Google Lens and its shopping functionality, images are more influential than ever.
Detailed Product Attributes: Aside from ensuring your data is fresh; the more product attributes the better. Identifiers such as Google Product Categories, brands, colours, & GTINs can be difficult to acquire in some cases. But including them at every opportunity gives your feed more identifiers for shopping services to find.
Action these changes via a CSS partner
Using a CSS (comparison shopping service) partner affords retailers a 20% bid reduction compared to advertising directly with Google. In reality, this 20% is spent acquiring more impressions or an improved ad position. The majority of advertisers will be using these partners, so that is to say, it puts you at a disadvantage by going direct.
Some CSS partners can also audit your data feed for potential improvements and provide tools for experimentation. This health check can highlight issues such as title duplication, insufficient description length and missing identifiers. You can often make bulk updates and rules to correct common trends, or individually alter products if you prefer.
Cloning products for A/B testing is another popular feature that provides tailored empirical data. If you have a unique theory, it can be split-tested, rather than going by industry rules of thumb. Finally, the ‘custom label’ feature allows you to categorise products according to performance metrics or item IDs, so that you can customise your categorisation within services like Google Ads. You will find unique use-cases for this: whether it be high margin products, best sellers, or promotional and seasonal goods.
Conclusion:
Shopping feed optimisation is a fundamental aspect of e-commerce retailing. By maximising your visibility to attract relevant customers, you can improve click through to your site and the resulting profitability. There are key aspects to consider when optimising your feed, but the process is iterative. Optimising titles, prices, images and descriptions is an ongoing process that may continue to develop through experimentation. A CSS partner can streamline this process to make it quicker to implement changes and easier to analyse results. For more information on how Ascendancy can assist your e-commerce product feed optimisation, visit our contact page to call or email the team.
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