How to Stop the Silent Campaign Killer Lurking in Your Product Data

As an ecommerce store owner, you’ve probably wondered why some of your competitors experience brisk sales and consistent growth, while others struggle to break even. Maybe you’ve had your own successes, but you’ve never been able to “decode” the formula for consistent sales and impressive profits for yourself.

Although there’s no single answer that can fix every ecommerce seller’s problems, there’s one that can improve every seller’s ability to attract targeted, engaged traffic and generate sales: Ensure that your product data feed is complete.

Missing product data quietly kills your campaign's reach

It’s tempting to enter only the bare amount of information necessary to launch each item in your store. After all, shouldn’t your products speak for themselves?

It turns out, though, that there are several reasons a complete product data feed can help you grow ecommerce sales:

More information can lead to improved algorithmic matching.

In other words, the more information you provide in your feed, the more data Google and other search engines must determine who is most likely to be interested in your product.

A complete product profile wins clicks over competitors who don’t take the time to complete their product listings.

Google’s Shopping SERPs are data-driven, which means that what is shown is largely dependent on the data available. That data can change by product type and category templates (what data Google accepts for that type of product), as well as individual merchant feeds. If your products are missing data sets that others are not, your listings will immediately be at a disadvantage from a browsing standpoint, but it gets worse. Google Shopping’s filters are also dependent on data availability. If your product lacks the features shoppers are looking for when toggling filters, your listings will be filtered out of view.

Complete information helps avoid data errors that repel potential buyers.

When a buyer sees mismatched pricing or missing data in a product search result, they look elsewhere.

How to protect your campaigns from incomplete product data

Fortunately, if you’ve been neglecting your product feed, there’s still plenty of time to fix this revenue-stealing problem. Here are a few tips to help you ensure that your feed content is working as hard for you as possible:

Review your channel’s product listing specifications.

Google and other major channels have long lists of product listing specifications that can be confusing for newer ecommerce sellers. Even worse, the type of data and the format they require varies from product to product. This can lead to seemingly simple errors that can cost millions of dollars in lost sales.

Make sure you thoroughly review listing specifications and follow them exactly. This will help ensure that your products show up just when your customers are ready to buy.

Review and reconcile your pricing and inventory.

Pricing discrepancies can leave would-be buyers feeling like they have been misled. Similarly, customers can become quite disappointed when they learn that the item they just ordered is out of stock.

The problem can become even bigger, though - unhappy buyers are far more likely to leave negative reviews than happy customers. Just a few discrepancies can set off a chain of negative reviews that dissuade others from doing business with you.

Take the time to audit and reconcile this data across all channels involved in your ecommerce business  - this can help you avoid lost sales, upset customers, and business-threatening negative reviews. 

Automate steps 1 and 2 (above).

Reviewing your channel’s product listing specifications, and reviewing and reconcile your pricing and inventory is tedious and time-consuming. If you find yourself constantly updating and integrating product feeds manually, how will you find the time to scale your ecommerce business? These tasks take precious hours out of your day, leaving you less time to strategize, take care of customers, and lead the growth of your own online empire.

Fortunately, there’s no need to spend hours updating and maintaining your product feeds on your own.

A product feed optimization app can take the guesswork, stress, and errors out of optimizing ecommerce product feeds across all your channels, including Google Shopping, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, and Walmart. Seamless data handling eliminates errors and leaves your customers happy with their shopping experiences.

For example, our product feed app gives ecommerce sellers the leverage they need without all the tech headaches they’d rather not take on. Instead of wrestling with expensive integrations and endlessly waiting on developers, you get a streamlined, cloud-based platform that makes it easy to maintain attractive listings across more than 200 channels.

Check out GoDataFeed to learn more about how you can maximize your sales with easy, done-for-you product feed automation.