How to make the best use of product feeds in retail?

September 22, 2009
by Mark Johnson

Often managing large inventory retail clients can be both difficult and time consuming because of the sheer volume of daily changes to stock levels and price changes. If products come in or out of stock it means that ad groups related to that product will need pausing/unpausing. If there are changes to prices then ad texts referencing those prices will need to be changed and updated. A few tools can help you make the best use of your product feeds:

Kenshoo

We constantly seek out the best technology for our clients. When it comes to dealing with retail clients who have a large inventory of products then Kenshoo’s SEM (Search Engine Marketing) platform has many functions that enable effective and efficient campaign management, one of which being its product feed upload function.

By uploading a product feed into Kenshoo, it is possible to use it as a source for generating keywords and ad texts that are focused on the products and long tail. We therefore recommend having as much information as possible present in the feed, such as specific prices and discounts, so that more compelling ads can be created. The product feed function also enables us to pause/unpaused product ad groups depending on stock levels. Time savings made on these often arduous tasks are great which means we have even more time to analyse and optimise the account for a greater ROI (Return On Investment).

Google Base

Another way we utilise a product feed from our clients is by reformatting it to be uploaded onto Google Base. For products to appear in the shopping results on Google’s SERP (Search Engine Result Pages), the relevancy of the product title and description is very important.

Therefore whilst most product titles in the feeds need only slight tweaks, the product descriptions are often either duplicated content of the product titles (and Google doesn’t like duplicate content) or are a list of all the product’s specifications which are phrases hardly anyone searches on. So by making the product descriptions as unique as possible and ensuring a good keyword density we have been able to rank well in the shopping results for many more product related searches.

A couple of months ago I posted a blog post on Google Plusbox. Once again by ensuring that a product feed has up to date prices, inventory but also product images the feed can be uploaded to Google Base to make use of this feature too.

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