Most eCommerce businesses are trying to grow their revenue, improve ROI and CTR, or reduce manual labour – and some are trying to do all of these at once!
It can be difficult to know where to start, but product data and product feeds are a great starting point because they are the foundation of all your digital marketing and sales channels. Data feed quality directly affects your conversion rates and sales from all online channels, therefore, it is crucial to ensure that your feed is in the best possible shape.
In our experience, there is always room for improvement. Which is why we have made a checklist that will help you create a high-quality product feed:
Every channel has its own product data requirements. Check your preferred channel’s requirements and make sure that there are no missing fields. For example, some channels require attributes like a unique product ID, title, description, price, images and availability. Submitting an incomplete feed can cause all your products to be rejected. To avoid this problem, always provide the required data.
Using a predefined channel template via your feed management platforms, makes your job much easier.
We have previously written articles regarding the different channels’ requirements such as Facebook and Google Shopping. Are you missing data in your source feed? We can help you out with setting up a web scrape or merge.
Customers like to be well-informed when looking for products, so provide as much information as possible. Including additional information that customers might look for – but is not required – can improve your conversion. Optional fields that could enrich your feed include brand, additional images, sale price, material, colour and unit price. Or go even further with product highlights and product details.
A high-quality product feed must be up to date. This is important for both you and your customers. Continuously updating your stock levels and prices, guarantees that your customers will find correct information (i.e. not products that are not actually available or have different prices than in the ad) and that you avoid spending money on advertising products that have been out of stock for a while.
A good product feed management tool will enable you to increase the frequency with which your feed is updated. The WakeupData platform can provide your channels with near real-time data through hourly feed imports. It is important to align the schedule of updates on the webshop with the updates in WakeupData and respectively the channel, in order to decrease the chances of confusion among customers.
Merchants often advertise products that they have little chance of selling because they are not aware that a competitor has reduced their prices on key products.
A competitor monitoring tool is a great way to stay on top of the competitive pricing game. These tools allow you to find out which of your products have the most and least competitive prices and how they stack up against your competitors. Monitoring your competitors’ pricing strategies gives you an edge in creating an efficient strategy that will help you reduce ad spend on super-competitive products with low profit margins.
The product image is one of the most important factors in drawing customers' attention. Increase brand awareness, social proof or highlight campaigns by adding product specific elements to your product images.
Doing so manually has normally been a very time consuming task, but with an image transformation tool you can automate the process. With labels you can even automate the process of adding and removing image templates to and from products based on a range of criteria (e.g.seasonality, discounts, “new products” or more).
Try WakeupData’s Dynamic Image Transformation tool to create engaging and creative images that will catch shoppers’ attention.
Please note that Google does not allow creative overlays, prices or discounts on product images so this tool is best to use for platforms such as Facebook.
Perform even better across all your channels with the help of WakeupData by means of filtering, merging and optimising your product data. Use these functionalities to add value to your business by making sure that you provide complete and optimised data that is most beneficial to your customers in a transparent way.
Ensuring that your product feed adheres to all the above principles should help direct customers your way.
As mentioned above, you can increase CTR, conversions and ROI by improving your titles and descriptions by adding relevant keywords, missing product information and effective structuring.
Providing as much information as possible is crucial because it can create a smoother customer experience. This can increase your chances of making a sale and make your customers happier.
It’s not just the quantity of your data that matters, but also the quality of it. Don’t forget that up-to-date data is a must if you want to satisfy customers and also not risk your products getting rejected by the channel for inaccurate values.
By monitoring your competitors’ prices you will be able to create a strategy that will give you an advantage over them. For that, you can use a competitor monitoring tool that will save you much time and effort.
Improve engagement with your paid social ads. To ensure that your ads are efficient try adding captive, engaging product images which can be done with an Image Transformation tool.
And the last thing on our checklist is cleaning up your data feed: merging, scraping and optimising them will help improve performance and ROI.
If you are unsure whether your data is sufficiently optimised, you can request a free product feed audit in which one of our feed experts will go through your product feed and suggest changes and improvements to help you grow your business even faster. You can also schedule a demo of the WakeupData platform to learn more about boosting your sales using optimised product feeds.