With the rise of Shopping ads campaigns and other dynamic ad formats, feed automation is now a crucial aspect of maximizing performance on search marketing programs.
Once you've prepped your product feed and inserted all the right keywords, there's an important next step: making sure your feed is optimized for peak performance.
Here, we discuss a few common optimization issues and how you can tackle them.
Common Optimization Issues
Before you start digging deeper into your product feed concerns, it’s important to identify problems and answer a few common questions from the get-go:
- Is there rogue HTML in your title or description fields?
- Are there titles that don’t contain important keywords like brand, color, or size?
- Do you have duplicate product titles?
- Do you have duplicate IDs?
By resolving these types of issues, you can make sure your product data—especially your titles—are as optimized as possible to run clean feed-based ad campaigns.
Optimization Tips and Tricks
Next, let’s dive into taking your high-quality product feed and building it into conversion-friendly ad campaigns.
First, a general rule of thumb is to apply the 80/20 rule:
- 20 percent: Break out item ID product groups for your highest-performing products.
- 60 percent: Use broader groupings like brand, category, and custom labels.
- 20 percent: Build an “All products” or “Auto campaign” to use as a catch-all or for exploratory purposes
Once you've set up this system, it'll be much easier to manage your product feed. The workflow becomes simple to extract or segment from the 60 percent into the top 20 percent, as you’re constantly finding high-performing products and breaking them out individually.
Also, your 20 percent catch-all allows you to maintain a good level of coverage for every product that’s shown in your catalog. (This is similar to keyword-based campaigns that have keyword and match-type combinations like broad, phrase, and exact.)
This structure is simple to use and supports smooth, clean product management for your feed-based ad campaigns.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to automating and optimizing your product feed. For other great tips, tricks, and information—including establishing the right bidding model, addressing data issues, handling cross-channel product feed challenges, and more—download our guide, Product Feeds Unleashed: Automating Your Ad Campaigns.
________________________________
Feeling overwhelmed by your advertising campaigns? Donate 15 minutes of your time and we’ll show you how MarinOne allows you to easily manage, measure, and optimize all of your ad campaigns from a single location. Request a demo today.
