Product feeds have become the backbone of the online world. They are a must for any online shop which sells on marketplaces, any hotel or restaurant pushing their offers to third party platforms, or even HR agencies posting job openings on recruitment websites.
So let’s see what exactly is a product feed, and how you can tweak it to get the most out of it to grow your business.
What is a product feed?
Simply put, a product feed is a text file with a special type of formatting. You can also refer to them as data feeds or product data feeds, but they are the same thing and they can have different formats.
They can be a:
- simple spreadsheet
- Comma Separated Value or CSV file
- Tab Separated Value or TSV file
- JavaScript Object Notation or JSON file
- Extensible Markup Language or XML file
The difference between them is the formatting of the file, so it doesn’t really matter which option you choose to go for.
Now, let’s have a look at what a product feed looks like and how it works.
How is the product data feed structured?
For an ecommerce business, the product data will contain the data for all the products in your shop, such as the title, description, price, inventory level, images, etc.
This is how the data is structured for the computer to read
And this is how the data is displayed to users.
For each platform you want to use, there will be a set of required attributes and a set of optional ones.
Let’s take Google Shopping as an example. This is the bare minimum information Google needs in your product data feed to create the ads:
Product ID: this can be anything you want, but it is recommended that you use the product SKU if possible
Title: this will be the text displayed in the ad. So make sure to optimize it properly to increase the ad’s performance.
Description: describe the product as best as possible. You can include features, benefits, or any other relevant information about your product.
Link: the link to the product page
Image link: we are not directly uploading any images to Google. To pass this information to Google, we need to include the link where the product image is stored.
Availability: this field will let Google know if the product you are selling is in stock, out of stock, in preorder, or backorder. (note that if you choose preorder, you will also need to have a ‘availability_date’ field)
Price: make sure that this field accurately reflects both the price and currency displayed on your product page.
Brand, GTIN, and MPN: I’m putting these together because you will need to have at least 2 out of 3 fields filled in. It is important to have these filled in correctly. Otherwise, Google will not show your products alongside products that do have these attributes.
Condition: you have 3 values you can pass here: new, refurbished, used. You need to fill this in if you sell used or refurbished products. If you leave it empty, Google will consider your products ‘new’ by default
Shipping: this field will pass the shipping cost information. You can set a global value in Google Merchant, but if you have some items with different shipping costs, you can override that with this field.
However, the time when you only had to do the bare minimum and get great results is long gone. Nowadays, if you want to stand out and have performing ads, you will need to include as many details as possible in your product feed.
How to optimize your product feed
Product feed optimization is an umbrella term for a lot of different actions you can take to improve your product data and increase the ads’ relevancy.
Go beyond the bare minimum
Include as many attributes as it makes sense for your products. If you can fill in attributes such as material, gender (if it’s not required for your products), pattern, and product dimensions, go for it. The more information you give Google about your products, the better the algorithm will understand what you’re selling.
However, don’t go overboard with this, as you can easily over optimize. For example, you don’t need to fill in the unit pricing measure if you’re selling footwear. It just looks silly because everyone knows that you are selling only one pair of shoes.
Make use of the customizable attributes
The three important customizable attributes in a product data feed are the title, description, and image links.
Titles
In the titles, try to include the most important information up front, in case your title gets truncated. Also, include as much relevant info as possible. Some good template examples are:
Apparel: Brand + Gender + Product Type + Attributes (e.g., color, material, size)
Books: Title + Type + Format (e.g., paperback, eBook) + Author
Electronics: Brand + Attributes + Product Type + Model
Hard Goods: Brand + Product Type + Attributes (e.g., size, quantity, weight)
Seasonal items: Occasion + Product Type + Attributes
Here’s an example of this. Which ad would you click on?
Descriptions
The product descriptions allow you to test additional ideas and include more attributes to complement your titles. Here are some ideas you can test for your products:
- After you have run Shopping ads for a while, extract the best search terms and include them in the product descriptions to improve ad ranks and ad relevance.
- Also include synonyms of the main keywords you are targeting. But do this tactically – you don’t want to keyword spam.
- Include use cases for your products
- Include sizing and product dimensions
- Include material or design specific information
Image links
For the image links, you can try to include different types of product images to stand out. Look at what your competitors are using and go with something else. For example, if the majority is using a white background product image, you can go for a lifestyle image.
I always encourage people to test these ideas on a small scale. Take a few products, or a single product category, and use different images. Let the ads run for a while and check whether they perform better or worse.
Avoid Google’s currency conversion
Showing your prices in the local currency in both your ads and your website is an overlooked optimization. I see a lot of merchants using Google’s currency conversion thinking that it will do the trick and then asking themselves why they don’t get any conversions.
However using this feature will damage your conversion rate and, in some cases, the click-through rate. Let’s have a look at each one and see why this might happen.
Conversion rate
When sellers are advertising their products internationally, the ads will display the price in the local currency along with the price in the original currency. This is not an issue and it would attract clicks.
However, when shoppers land on the product page, they will see the original currency price, and this is also the currency they will have to check out with. Not ideal.
The shoppers might be skeptical of doing so for various reasons, such as not knowing exactly how much it will be deducted from their bank accounts, foreign currency exchange fees, etc.
This kind of situation could lead to an increase in abandoned carts and lower ROAS.
Click-through rate
However, there is an even worse case when Google’s currency conversion might work against you. Take a look at the example below.
The shoppers are instantly hit with the question: How much tax do I have to pay for this? And with this in mind, they might not even click on the ad.
And even if they click on the ad, they will still have the same uncertainties as in the previous case.
To increase your chances of success when selling internationally, you will need to localize your store.
Use common color names
When filling in the product’s color, it is best to stick with the most common and basic names. This is because the color filters on Google Shopping and marketplaces only have a few options. It would get pretty messy if they included all the color names stores use and it wouldn’t help anyone.
So what if your products have with unique color names such as ‘rose’, ‘mint’, or ‘scarlet’? If that’s the case, you have 2 options:
Change the unique color name to a standard color name
Specifically for Google Merchant, to avoid any issues with your products getting disapproved, change the color names on both your landing page and in your product feed.
An example of this would be:
- For rose, use pink
- For mint, use green
- For scarlet, use red
You can then use an additional image to include a color swatch to showcase the actual product color. Also, you can include the custom color name in your description to give shoppers additional information about your product.
Leave the unique color name
If you can’t or don’t want to change the unique color name of the product, you can still have a workaround.
You can just change the product title and description to add the standard color name. This may not help when shoppers are using the color filter, but your products will show whenever someone is using standard color names in their search query.
Frequent product feed updates
Updating your product feed daily is mostly common practice nowadays, but there is a way of improving that: hourly product data updates.
This is most likely an overkill for smaller shops, but for bigger sellers, this could save thousands of dollars in ad spend.
Why is this important anyway?
Well, think about sales volumes and product availability. What would happen if you sell limited stock products or unique products or just have high traffic levels?
Let’s take the case of a large ecommerce store that is getting thousands of clicks from Google Ads on a daily basis. When a few products run out of stock they will be having ads for products people can’t buy anymore.
This not only affects the customer experience and brand reputation, but it is also wasting ad spend. But this problem goes away if you push your data to Google more often.
Usually, companies offer the more frequent feed updates feature as an add-on or part of a larger service tier. To find out if it makes sense for your business, try to compare the potential ad spend savings with the cost of the service.
If the potential savings are higher than the cost of the service, you are in the green. But if they are lower, you shouldn’t worry about this yet. Opting in for something like this would increase your costs further.
Include discounts and promotions in your Google Merchant account
Whenever you are running discounts or promotions in your shop, don’t forget to update the sale_price field or add a promotion in your Merchant Center.
These will make your ads stand out in the Shopping results. And if you are a reseller, you know that your clients are weighing the price heavily in their buying decisions.
Conclusion
This article is not an exhaustive list of optimization tactics you can implement in your product feed. But it should kickstart your creativity and shift your way of thinking about product feeds to grow your ecommerce business.
You need to look at how your customers are finding your products, how your competitors are doing things, and what motivates the customers to buy from you.
And if you understand that you also need to look outside an xml file to optimize a product feed, my job here is done.
