Sure, you know a product feed is important. How many times have you already heard that this year? Well, let’s emphasize its importance once more, so it might make it to the top of your list of pre-holiday priorities…
Having a product feed opens up so many possibilities to drive traffic and revenue!
So, Step 1: Create a feed that meets the required specs as defined by Google. Don’t worry, you can leverage this new feed asset in other channels like affiliate, display, and social display.
Now you have a feed and you can make it available to your Google Shopping campaigns, your affiliate program, your dynamic display partner, and your social display platform. Great!
…But, did you know that just having a product feed isn’t enough?
Step 2 (this is a biggie): Optimize the feed. The health and optimization of the feed are critical to your success. If you don’t optimize the feed, Google, for example, will do its best (which isn’t going to be great) to pull a product from the feed that is relevant to the consumer’s search, convincing them to click on your Product Listing Ad.
Having a well optimized feed will keep Google from guessing which will maximize your click-through rate as well as your conversion rate. And, did you know it will also get you more impression volume? Yes, impression volume which of course will increase opportunities for site traffic and sales. But how does that work exactly?
Think of the optimization of your feed as you would SEO – to increase visibility of your pages by targeting keywords that consumers actual search on. You wouldn’t optimize your Window Cleaning service with keywords like “window conditioning”, would you? No one searches that way. There is little available impression volume on that term. Don’t settle for a product feed with descriptions like “aqua dress” when people actually search for “light blue dress”. Colors are only as useful as the ones consumers search on the most. Replace your website colors with color names that have higher search volume.
Traffic (click-through rate) is largely influenced by what the product title contains. Consider this before and after:
- Title before: “Sally’s Striped Blouse”. This tells you roughly what it is – we know it’s a striped blouse, but it includes none of the recommended descriptors.
- Title after: “Americana Brand Women’s Shirt Blue/White Stripe Button Down Plus Size 1x”
Product types are the backbone for how Google Shopping campaigns, specifically, are structured in AdWords and directly impact performance.
Think of walking into a department store…What if all departments were labeled “Apparel”? Shoppers would have a heck of a time knowing where to find “Women’s Special Occasion Dresses”, versus “Kid’s Shoes”, versus “Men’s Casual Apparel”, and so on. This is where ‘product types’ come in. Follow the logic of your site bread crumbs, and this should give you great ‘product types’ to leverage in your campaign structure.
In summary…. Build a feed, give it the care and feeding it deserves, put it to work, and watch the sales roll in!
