The trendsetting retailer

Services:

• Product feed optimization
• Customer segmentation
• Personalization at scale

Search engines are steadily evolving beyond the traditional keyword-based customer journey, wherein users search for a keyword, sort through text ad results, and click through to a website. With the emergence of more structured and segmented product feeds (also known as shopping feeds), SERPs are now far more personalized, localized, conversational, and actionable. Our client carried ambitious goals into this brave new world—but also had more than 300,000 SKUs in tow.

1. Advance in search results rankings
2. Increase search-driven sales
3. Find ecommerce cost efficiencies

Product feeds help streamline access to any retailer’s product data set and related information. They are generated and managed in standardized file formats, which allows platforms or comparison-shopping engines—such as Bing Shopping (Bing Product Ads), Google Shopping (Google Product Listing Ads), and Amazon Marketplace—to market products from multiple retailers by accessing and correctly understanding products in the context of user preferences, search history, demographics, location, and other qualifiers. The result: dynamic, personalized engagement in real time. But how, exactly, did we achieve that for our client?

LET’S PRACTICE BEST PRACTICE

Merchant Center is a tool that helps ecommerce players upload their store, brand, and product data and make it available to Shopping Ads and other Google services. To advertise these products on Google, we configured the Merchant Center account following the latest best practices.

• Link Google Merchant Center to Google Ads
• Assess the existing setup
• Catalogue and prioritize the observed challenges, such as disapprovals at different levels (Item, Feed, Account)
• Identify the root causes and address them via custom rules, then coordinate with Google Support for resolution

PLAY BY THE RULES

The product feed is essentially a list of products and their respective attributes, presented in a format that Google algorithms understand to display Shopping Ads in the search results. We set this list up looking for the highest impact on the search result rankings. Some of the activities performed:

• Data cleansing
• Data mapping
• Data standardization/normalization
• Data harvesting for missing feed attributes

ITERATE TO GENERATE

You can’t drive ecommerce growth if you simply set and forget your product feed. It has to be continually maintained, managed, and optimized. Our ongoing program includes:

• Optimized titles
• Standardized naming conventions
• Removing duplicate values
• Optimized Google Product Categories by making them more granular and/or accurate
• Other various and granular optimizations at the product attribute level

• Sometimes the way a business names or describes a product doesn’t line up to how potential customers are trying to discover it. Our strategic application of feed translation allowed this brand to use more standardized language to achieve better visibility for its unique looks