The offsite product discovery journey is a vital part of ecommerce and something brands and retailers must not only track, but also optimise towards. Augmenting product content for offsite marketing channels is the main part of this and is the most important strategy to increase traffic and revenue. As an example, Intelligent Reach conducted testing with Lenovo, the world’s largest PC manufacturer, and was able to increase traffic 3X purely by optimising the product feed being sent to Google Shopping.

A survey conducted by Intelligent Reach on prospects and clients showed that only 30% of retailers had complete, accurate and attribute rich product data being transmitted to external channels, and the remaining 70% were missing out on a lot of traffic and sales because of poor quality product data.

Clothing retailers were most likely to have missing data considered vital by their consumers.

The survey demonstrated that almost all retailers who didn’t have a tool in place for managing offsite content were only sending across titles, categories and product information found on their website without any strategies in place to optimise that data for the channel consuming it.

The problem with this is that most retailers will create product titles that reflect their brand, or assume the consumer already has knowledge of the type of products they sell.

This example of Hurley shorts helps visualise the problem – it’s clear from the image that they are shorts, but just looking at the title (and because they are on Nike’s website) one would probably assume they are trainer shoes.

Channels like Google, unfortunately, don’t ingest information from images yet, so this product would perform worse than a title that contained information such as “shorts”. It’s important that product data is simplified, using terms that people use to search for products.

It’s also important not to optimise titles in this way for all channels. For marketing channels that don’t use titles and product content for SEO, i.e. retargeting ads, you can use more brand specific titles to better reflect who you are.