Taking Control of Paid Media Feeds with Shoptimised - An Overview

With the sharp uptake of Smart Shopping and automation across most paid media accounts, our time as paid media specialists has been freed up to look beyond manual bid adjustments to more impactful optimisation projects - including the highly important job of feed management.

Why Is Feed Management So Important?

The performance of Shopping campaigns relies on a fully optimised feed. If we neglect this, our brands miss out on acquiring valuable customers. As advertisers, it’s essential that we:

• Maximise ad visibility to make sure our products are being seen when people are searching for them

• Show the most relevant products to potential customers for stronger engagement and conversion rates

• Stand out from the crowd in a heavily saturated space, so that people click through to the website to buy

In order to maximise performance, we need to make sure we’re optimising titles, descriptions, imagery, and attributes, whilst utilising advanced features like Performance Rules and Dynamic Custom Labels to inform our strategy.

Viewing Product Feeds with Shoptimised

The Product Feed tab allows users to view every product in the feed, including all attributes and product information.

This information is broken up into the below core areas:

• Product information (title, description, category)

• Images

• Links

• Pricing

• Shipping

• Product Identifiers (GTIN, brand)

• Product Status (stock, quality)

• Product Attributes (colour, gender, size)

• Custom Labels

• Other (tax, loyalty points)

From here, we can identify gaps at a granular level, and make changes directly within this tab. The Product Feed tab is also crucial in determining opportunities for product feed rules to make changes in bulk.

There’s also an option to export the whole (or parts of the) feed, allowing us to make changes away from the interface and seamlessly reupload the data.

Utilising Product Feed Audits

The Product Feed Audit highlights any issues that require immediate attention or areas that could be better optimised.

These issues fall into 9 core areas, split across the audit. Below are some common issues that can be diagnosed:

Issues with Product Titles

• Duplicate titles present

  • Duplicating titles is against best practice and also indicates a lack of information being shown to potential customers as no two products are exactly the same.

• Titles with too few (or too many) characters

  • The optimal length for product titles is between 75 and 150 characters. Too few indicates a lack of product information which could jeopardise visibility and engagement; too many most likely means unnecessary information is being included.

• Missing information like brand, colour, size

  • We want to be telling people as much as we can about the product to pull them in and increase their chances of converting.

Issues with Product Descriptions

• Duplicate descriptions present

  • As is the same for titles, duplicate descriptions indicate a lack of information being shown to potential customers as no two products are exactly the same, so descriptions should vary.

• Descriptions with too few characters

  • The optimal length for product descriptions is between 500 and 1000 characters - with the same logic applied as with titles.

Issues with Google Product Categories

• Products without GPC

  • It’s crucial we add in GPCs as Google’s algorithm uses these to help display the most relevant products to consumers.

Issues with Product Types

• Product type missing

  • Like Google Product Categories, product type information is crucial as Google‘s algorithm uses this to decide which ads get shown.

• Product type depth too weak

  • We want to be adding at least five relevant product attributes like Product > Brand > Size > Technology > Colour to help ads to surface for long-tail searches which are highly likely to convert

Issues with Images

• Images missing

  • Images are a Google requirement. Without these, our ads don’t get served.

Issues with GTINs

• GTINs missing

  • Although this won’t cause a disapproval, missing GTINs result in limited impressions.

Issues with Item Group IDs

• Item Group IDs missing

  • Including this enables multiple variants of a product to be served - increasing CTR and CR.

You can’t make changes directly within this tab, but it is really useful for informing optimisations in the Product Feed and Product Feed Rules tabs.

Shoptimised’s Suggested Optimisations

Shoptimised’s Suggested Optimisations feature is perfect for quick wins. Here, Shoptimised outlines opportunities across Attributes, Custom Labels, Identifiers, and Product Information.

Examples of typical suggested optimisations would be:

• Add missing colour attribute (red)

• Add brand name to product title

• Bulk up product descriptions where they’re too short

• Connect the Google Ads API (to pull in data)

• Create Google Product Categories

• Improve Product Type depth (add brand/size/colour)

• Add Item Group IDs (colour or size variants)

You can then click onto the suggestion and choose whether to apply or delete the rule, based on how relevant it is.

Adding Product Feed Rules

Product Feed Rules enables users to make changes to product information in bulk, depending on specified criteria. Standard rules could include:

• Updating the Title

  • Prepending the Brand name

  • Appending Size

  • Adding or removing punctuation

  • Adding any other product information, using other attributes

• Deleting products

  • Availability (out of stock)

  • Less relevant (based on link, title, product type)

• Creating custom labels based on other attributes (title, product type)

• Updating missing attributes, using information across other attributes

• Creating Item Group IDs

• Changing all titles/descriptions to lower or title case

There is also the opportunity to implement more advanced rules based on performance data. This requires a connection being set up to the Google Ads account via the Google Ads API. Following this, users can create rules to set up dynamic custom labels based on one specified metric:

• Spend

• Revenue

• Conversions

• ROI

• CPA

• CPC

• CTR

Some examples of performance rules in action would be:

• Set custom label 0 to ROAS>4 where product ROI is greater than 400

• Set custom label 1 to Low vis products where product spend is less than £20

• Set custom label 2 to Poor CTR where product CTR is below 0.5%

There’s also an option to create dynamic custom labels for “Trending” products, based on a % uplift in either sales or ROI vs the typical trend.

For example:

• Set custom label 3 to Trending where a product’s conversions have lifted 10% in the last 4 days vs the avg. over the last 30 days

• Set custom label 4 to Trending where a product’s ROI has lifted 15% in the last 7 days vs the avg. over the last 60 days

When it comes to our Shopping activity, Performance Rules enable us to segment products based on their value to allow for more tailored targets and budget allocation. As a result of this, we’re able to unlock the potential for more sophisticated campaign management.

Conclusion

Feed management is crucial to the performance of our Paid Shopping campaigns. We need to make sure we’re pushing ad visibility to the max, getting the right products in front of potential customers, and standing out from the crowd in order to acquire valuable customers for our businesses. There are so many aspects of the feed that need to be optimised and managed in order to get our products seen in a highly saturated space. Feed management platforms like Shoptimised enable us to have full control over this.

If you need any help with your shopping feeds and want to discuss your strategy with our team, feel free to get in touch at [email protected].