eCommerce product feeds are jam-packed with information advertisers can use to refine and enhance their campaigns. And not only that—advertisers can add information from a huge range of sources to build data-rich feeds. Despite this, many advertisers continue to underutilize the information in their eCommerce feeds.
In this article, we take a look at ways advertisers can use product feed data to optimize ad spend.
Inventory Levels
Inventory level is a required field for nearly all publishers and a standard metric in most product feeds. Once inventory levels hit zero, most publishers stop showing ads for those products. It makes perfect sense to stop paying to advertise products that are currently out of stock.
However, there are many more ways to use this data. An advertiser may want stop bidding on a product if they have less than five in stock or to increase bids when stock is readily available. For example, with Marin, advertisers can dynamically integrate inventory data into the platform and then leverage this data to automate optimization for keywords or product groups with high or low inventory.
Product Titles
Product titles are one of the most important factors that can influence the performance of your shopping ad campaigns—and a vital part of your feed. A shopper will scan through pages of results in search of the right item, and the title is one of the first things they see when they come across your ad.
It’s at this critical point that a person determines whether they’ll click through to find out more. These few words are your opportunity to stop them in their tracks and convince them not to go any further. You don’t want wasted clicks, after all! To get the shopper as qualified as possible before they click your ad, it’s important to highlight the most important information right away. Your product title provides this opportunity. This also prevents shoppers from being disappointed or frustrated when they click through.
Make sure your titles are unique enough. If they’re not, it could affect your visibility. Customize them with important, distinguishing attributes such as size, color, gender, etc., to more accurately describe and differentiate each product.
How do you know the best optimizations to make to your product titles? The answer is to run statically significant tests. Using feed optimization techniques, you can optimize your product titles using different logic (such as including different types of information or changing the order it appears in) and then run a test to see which one performs best.
Price Competitiveness
Price competitiveness is an important ranking factor for the Google Shopping algorithm and for many other publishers. This is because Shopping ads display the price and therefore impact click-through rate.
Price competitiveness also has a significant impact on the conversion rate. Competitor price tracking in Google Shopping results ensures that retail advertisers can track their competitors’ strategic price moves across their entire SKU portfolio. Once this data has been added to a product feed, you can use it to adjust strategies based on the price competitiveness of each product.
Performance Data
Adding performance data to your feed allows you to group products together based on their marketing performance. This data also allows you to optimize campaign structure. You can automatically separate individual products into their own product groups when they hit specific volume thresholds and products can be automatically split to segregate top performing SKUs.
Feed-Based Ad Formats Are on the Rise
The tips above are just four ways advertisers can use the information in their product feeds to optimize ad spend. The good news—since you can add custom data to a product feed, you have a huge range of other tactics at your disposal.
The market share of feed-based advertising formats for eCommerce advertisers is increasing on both Google and Bing. Combined with the fact that many advertisers are exploring newer publishers such as Amazon, it’s increasingly important to explore new ways to optimize shopping spend and increase efficiency.
