Intelligent Reach offers a free product data feed audit to identify issues that are affecting the performance of your product data feeds. There is no catch. After receiving your free report, there is no obligation to work with us (although we hope that you will).

What is included in a free product feed audit?

• What is a product data feed?
• Why would I need a product feed audit?
• What do you get in a free product data feed audit?
• Improve your product data feed management with Intelligent Reach

What is a product data feed?

A product data feed (sometimes called a ‘product feed’ or ‘data feed’) is a file full of product information. Many companies have a master feed, which forms the basis of all of the product data that they push to their website, 3P marketplaces, and other digital channels on which they sell.

The product data feed contains every piece of information a brand or retailer wants to use to sell their product online. Obvious attributes include product title, product type, price and product images. Less obvious, but no less important, attributes might include material, colour, size or even country of origin.A feed can also contain things not directly attributed to the physical product including product reviews and stock quantity.

What is the purpose of a product feed audit?

During our product data challenge survey, which we ran in conjunction with IMRG, we discovered that 1 in 8 companies check their product feeds yearly. Some even checked less frequently Many brands and retailers are happy to work with the feed they extract from their e-commerce platform and if products don't show on Google Shopping, or other key channels, they simply increase their bidding. Unfortunately, this doesn't really work.

Google selects which product ads to display in shopping search results listings based on two criteria: the first is budget but the second is product relevance. This means that a relevant product will show above a less relevant product that has a more aggressive bid strategy.

To ensure your product listings are always visible on shopping sites and marketplaces, it’s important to start with a high-quality feed, and to update it regularly. Making sure every product in the feed contains the mandatory fields specified by Google and other channels is particularly important. As is a regular programme of product feed optimisation, especially optimising product titles and types.

As you can see from the Google performance data below, by optimising, products that previously got zero impressions can quickly start making a contribution.

What is included in a product data feed audit?

When you sign up for a free product data feed audit one of our friendly team will review your visibility on key channels, like Google Shopping, and then reach out to you requesting your current product feed, which might be an output from an e-commerce platform like Shopify, or a feed that you are already using for a channel like Google Shopping or Facebook. All audits are confidential and we will not share our findings with anyone but you.

The first thing we look for is mandatory attributes. For example, there are 45 different fields available in the Google Product Listing Ads spec. You should use as many as possible to say everything about your products that the specification allows. For example, brand is important in most markets, but material is going to be especially important in fashion. Size and weight are important in other sectors e.g., furniture.

Try to populate all the attributes applicable to each product. Google uses all the attribute fields to decide if your products match a particular search. 

Note: Many Google attributes are mandatory. For example, every product in a Google feed, must include brand, shipping, product description and EAN (where an EAN or other unique identifier exists). Products missing these attributes will not be approved and therefore will not be displayed on Google Shopping, regardless of other optimisations.

For other categories of products, there are different mandatory fields. For example, in 'Clothing & Accessories', pattern and material are additional required fields. For fashion products, it’s also mandatory to use a Google product category. If you choose to work with us, we will check every one of these steps with you, to make sure your master feed is as good as it can be.

What are the key Google shopping attributes?

Your product data feed is a file that contains information about your catalogue of products. It is similar in structure to a spreadsheet, with each row representing an individual product, or variant, and each cell defining an attribute of the product (e.g., name, price, size, colour etc).

Before doing anything else you must ensure that your master product feed is in the best possible shape because it is the source and the centre of all your product marketing. A minimum viable master data feed is one where:

• The feed is fully populated with all the key product attributes, especially brand, name, colour, size and product type – see the full list below.
• Words and phrases are normalised around everyday words that people use when they search for products.

The minimum standard in a Google Shopping feed is to populate all key fields with normalised attributes. E.g., yellow is a more common search term than ‘daiquiri’.

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Your feed audit will highlight missing mandatory and recommended attributes, sub-optimal data in key fields (for example, unnormalised colours like sand or sienna), and product titles and types which do not reflect the way that most shoppers search. Our team will also demonstrate how to fix those problems live, in a real-world demo of the Intelligent Reach platform.

The team effectively creates a bespoke presentation for you, based on the status of your product feed.

By optimising your product feeds, it is possible to push your products to the top of the search results on Google Shopping.

Brands and retailers can use up to 150 characters in their product titles, but the first 75 are the most visible on Google Shopping results. So what is the best format to use? You can learn more in our articles on A/B testing product titles, testing product data attributes, Content Experimentation and Data Connector modules.

Possible Product Feed Enhancements

Below you can see how experimenting with different product titles, in this case for black shoes, can lead to surprising results.

Having the right product type can be an excellent way to gain impressions and clicks. Not sure how to choose the best product type? Check Google Trends to see what people are searching for in your sectors. Note the difference between searches in different countries. Men in the US are far more likely to search for work shoes while men in the UK tend to search for 'smart shoes'. Is your product data optimised for the country marketplaces in the US? Remember to change 'trainers' to 'sneakers'!

Improve Your Product Data Feed management with Intelligent Reach

The Intelligent Reach product data management platform is an award-winning system which is used by hundreds of leading brands, retailers and digital agencies to dramatically increase revenue through product data.

The platform has integrations with over 1,500 marketplaces and shopping channels, allowing digital e-commerce and marketing teams to quickly extend the reach of their marketing campaigns with curated, optimised product data. Our marketplaces module synchronises orders and inventory across multiple channels. while our Local module manages transactions across complex BOPIS/O2O/ Online to offline purchasing procedures.

Intelligent Reach has a global client base including hundreds of well-known brands and clients. Find out how we can help you launch on hundreds of new channels while increasing impressions, clicks, revenue and ROAS, on existing channels, as you grow.

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