Product feeds will take your e-commerce new customer acquisition onto a new level

More and more of the advertising forms in different advertising channels use product feeds in their advertising mechanisms, but less attention is placed on the execution of product feed management and optimization. Advertising formats based on purchase signals, and good performance in these advertising formats require focus on product feeds, which then consequently enables competitive and automated advertising. The first step towards this is the channel-wise, technical optimization of the product feed. After this, the consideration should shift on multichannel tools, which can help simplify bulk work, improve multichannel marketing, and develop international sales.

Prior to making any larger investments, the diagnostics and quality of the product feed is checked. Did you know that Google Smart Shopping campaign type - which also contains remarketing - allows focusing on new customer acquisition within the one and the same campaign? You can reach better results from product-based advertising for example on Facebook, when you integrate the Commerce API e-commerce platform.

One natural characteristic of e-commerce is customer churn. Current customer base is best looked after by marketing automation, and by bringing added customer value in the form of a loyalty program.

Growth requires new website visitors, and e-commerce can best generate new website traffic by reacting to the changes in demand on a daily and weekly basis. You can follow searches on specific product categories and products, and emphasize the advertising budgets based on this data. Google artificial intelligence produces demand change forecasts on both Google Ads and Google Merchant Center accounts.

There are product feed management and optimization tools outside Google. Before you consider these, it is vital to understand which products should be in the focus:

• If the offer of your e-commerce is more that 10 000 articles: do you want to advertise all the articles, or maybe for example only those with a higher margin, which are discounted, or which have excess stock?
• Do you know the demand in different countries, across municipalities or states, across different age groups or for example between genders? For example, perfumes designed for women might not need to be advertised to everyone.
• Shouldn’t advertising targeted at current customers differ from the generic advertising that you carry for all potential audiences?
• Do you know which product performs best during different seasons? Is your e-commerce advertising partner aware of when your webshop inventory and offering are updated, or new product categories are introduced?
• Did you know that Google will keep on advertising your products, even if only one size of the product in question is available? Naturally this is not profitable.

It is not always profitable to advertise the entire inventory. Creating impact is more efficient when focused on a smaller sample of products. This also enables remarketing to the consumers currently interested and considering a purchase.

Invite an external e-commerce specialist to consult you when setting the right questions and driving the strategic decision-making.

Product feeds service many purposes. The product feeds to support Google advertising require special attention, since Google advertising - as opposed to other advertising management systems - is more reliant on search word optimization due to Google’s search engine background. The product feed optimization is recommended for two key reasons:

1. The product feed produces the advertisement. The contents of the advertisement depend on different attributes sourced from the product feed. This information and values enable higher Google quality points, which consequently improve the performance of your advertisement in the auction and in organic search results.
2. Google Shopping advertisements are prioritized in the search results, and consequently the consumers will start making considerations and comparisons based on the image results. Competitors are allowed to have many advertisements together in the same view. Securing visibility is extremely important during the campaign.

Google Merchant Center has functionality for product feed management and diagnosis, as well as for campaign performance boosting and product data analysis as the basis for growth. This data is useful primarily in continuous optimization, and can also be used to trigger quick reactions on the changes in the market.

Google Merchant Center Growth Page produces proposals and recommendations based on product data and demand. You can, for example, receive information of the products most likely to sell well at the moment, which product feed attributes would give your offer wider visibility, and which campaigns to focus on.

The Price Competitiveness Report helps you to compare your pricing with popular other products, brands and product categories. This enables you to stay on top of the competitiveness of your pricing both locally and internationally. You can also analyze the offers on competitive products.

The Best Sellers Report allows you to make justified decisions regarding your product offering, and reach a larger potential customership within the product categories important to your e-commerce. The report also allows you to see the most popular products and brands, their ranking, relative demand level, and changes on a weekly and monthly basis.

Advertisers currently relying on technology and artificial intelligence will benefit from a higher e-commerce sales potential in the future. Remarketing is becoming increasingly challenging: the death of cookies has been forecasted for a couple of years now, and the third party cookies are becoming more rare.

The long-term marketing activities that have required large efforts might not turn out as efficient as before, because it will be simply impossible to reach all target consumers digitally despite segmented targeting. Also, the branded and product-specific searches are nowadays equally influenced on the actions by your competition, as they are of your own.

Sources: Google; Hubspot; DataFeedWatcher