After you are done with the basic feed optimization and you have all the product attributes sorted out, you can move to the next level. This requires you to look outside of the product feed, and look at the bigger picture.
When you do this, you will find improvement points for your ecommerce business which you can achieve through feed optimization.
This article is not supposed to be a list of things you need to implement. The examples I provide are meant to help you think creatively about your advertising tactics.
You will need to look at your business from different angles. Then, ask why something is happening, connect some dots, and see what opportunities you have.
How fashion retailers can reduce returned orders
If you are selling apparel, you know how expensive returns are. And luckily, there are a few ways of minimizing them.
One option would be to have the size chart on each product page right below the ‘add to cart’ button. This way, customers can easily check their size.
An even better option for this would be to have a size calculator where customers can input their measurements. And with that information, you can calculate the best size for them.
Another way of doing this is to stop advertising the entire product once you have sold out the main sizes. This saves you money on the cost of product returns, but also on advertising,
This idea is based on the normal distribution of sizes and consumer behavior. If we plot the customers’ size fit in a normal distribution we get a chart like the one below.
And you can also expect the sales volumes to align with this distribution. So most sales will be from small, large, and medium sizes.
However, if these 3 sizes are sold out, you will not only see lower sales volumes. But you might even see greater rates of returned orders. This could be caused by customers who really want the item. If they don’t find the right size, they could choose to order a bigger or smaller size hoping it will fit well.
This causes a lot of headaches for you because the probability of that item being returned is higher. And, if that customer landed on the product page through an ad, you lost even more money.
To prevent this, you can mark all the product variants as ‘out of stock’ in your product feed when the main sizes are out of stock.
This will save you money and increase your profits until you restock. And if you don’t plan on restocking, you can stop advertising the remaining variants and wait for them to sell organically.
Customize your feed for each channel
If you have optimized your product data for one channel and see great results, don’t expect it to perform the same on other channels. The audiences might be different.
This is where you will have to look at your competitors, see how they are performing, and try to see what tactics they’re using.
Let’s take a hobby shop as an example. You want to sell on Google Shopping and on Etsy.
For Google Shopping you can look at what information the competitors are including in their ads. Check how they structure the product titles and the descriptions, if they include the unit pricing measure, the color names they use, etc.
You want to improve your product data and do better than them. If they are doing great, be at the same level. This will improve your chances of getting more sales.
When looking to optimize the data for Etsy, the same changes might not work as well. You will have to adapt the data for a different audience. Maybe people looking for your products on Etsy are more creative, more responsive to emotion, or have different unique selling points (USPs).
So maybe you could test a lifestyle image, change the angle, and mention in your description that the product could be a great gift. You should see what exactly makes this new audience tick.
In the end, you will see that the tactics you use and the data you are sending will differ between platforms.
Keep the ‘entry products’ online
This tactic involves a little bit more work, but it can prevent you from losing sales in the long run.
When looking to optimize your Shopping Ads, you might tend to look at the individual products’ performance. And this is not necessarily a bad thing.
If a product gets a lot of clicks and has no sales, excluding it from the product feed might seem like a logical step. You want to stop wasting money on it.
But before you do that, zoom out a little bit and look at the bigger picture. Spend a little bit of time to deep dive into the data. It might be the case that such a product is only the way customers find your shop online.
When you analyze the conversion paths, you might see that a product is generating a lot of traffic, gets no sales, but helps you sell other products.
This might happen because people are looking for something, discover your product offer, and realize that they were looking for the wrong thing. The solution to the problem they had was something else. Something they didn’t even think about.
Henry Ford once said that the customers don’t know what they want by stating: “If I would have asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
And if you keep advertising these high traffic, no sales products it is the equivalent of putting a fast horse in front of your car showroom. In the end, you will still sell the cars.
Conclusion
If you want to go beyond the basic feed optimization, increase your sales, and scale your business, you will need to look outside the product feed file itself.
You need to zoom out, see the bigger picture, and put the ideas into context. Look at who your customers are, how they browse your store, and which products are they buying.
Then, you can come up with creative ideas and link them to the product data you are using on your sales channels.
