The ultimate guide to product feed optimization

How can you make sure your products are visible to your customers online? It all starts with a high-quality product feed.

By optimizing product information in your feed, you bring more visibility to your products, which also means more conversion and better ROAS. In this ultimate guide, we’re covering our top tips for optimizing your product feed as quickly and easily as possible.

What is product feed optimization?

Effective feed managementis essential for advertising and selling products on marketplaces, comparison websites, affiliate networks, or social media. Yet it’s not always as easy as it seems. Every channel has different requirements for your feed’s contents and format.

Google Shoppingfor instance has different requirements thanAmazon, which means you can’t just use copy your feed from one channel to the next. Sure, there are some mandatory specifications like product title, description, URL, price, product ID, and image description.

These mandatory attributes are enough to get started on most platforms, but they’re nowhere near enough to make your ads excel. For the best results, you’ll need to optimize your feeds.

Why is optimizing product information so important?

Competition on online marketplaces like Google Shopping and Facebook is tougher than ever. Amazon’s marketplace alone has over 9.7 million active users. The difference between success and failure on these platforms is product visibility.

So how can you ensure your product listings stand out? There are many things to consider, for instance, your bids or account history, but here we want to talk about the most important one: optimizing product information.

An optimized product feed gives your channels a detailed understanding of your catalog, so they can automatically match your products with shoppers’ search queries.

The more relevant your product is to a user’s search, the more likely the platform will show your product. If the information in your feed is incomplete or inaccurate, your competitors with more complete data will reach those shoppers before you even have a chance.

Optimizing product feeds also makes your product listings and ads more appealing, so they’re more likely to stand out and attract click-through and conversion.

5 tips for optimizing product information

Step 1 is always to make sure your product feed is fully compliant with each of your channels. That means having all the right information in the right format. After that, there are many ways you can optimize and enrich your product information for each channel.

The good news is: this doesn’t have to be a complicated process. With the right tools and a few best practices, you can quickly turn your product feeds into a conversion powerhouse. Below, we cover 5 of the most effective product feed optimization techniques that any eCommerce retailer can implement with very little effort.

1. Always use mandatory, recommended, and optional fields

The major platforms all distinguish between mandatory, recommended, and optional product attributes. These attributes are ordered in different fields of a product feed. Google Shopping for example makes it mandatory for all products to have a title.

The most successful product feeds go beyond the minimum requirements. Don’t just fill out the mandatory fields. Take advantage of recommended and optional attributes to create a much richer description of your products.

For example, remember to add additional images and information on your shipping options, sale price, and product sizes. The more detail you can give, the better your ads and product listings will perform, because customers can immediately see whether the product is right for them.


2. Always choose the right product categories

Product categorization is another essential step for optimizing your feeds. It’s also an easy way to stand out, because many channels (like Google Shopping) don’t require you to use it, so a lot of retailers won’t even bother. Take advantage of that to give your products extra appeal. Correct categorization gives shoppers more clarity about what your products are about. They also make your products more visible when users do broad searches based on categories rather than specific products.

3. Optimize product titles and descriptions

Titles can make or break your product listing’s performance. If a product title is vague, it won’t match as easily with customers who are searching with really specific terms. That’s why product title optimization is a must.

Always add relevant attributes right into the product title field. Include data like the brand, color, size, material, or gender in the title, so shoppers instantly understand what you’re offering. It’s also smart to include high-performing keywords.

Each platform has different rules on the length and layout of the title text. Let’s takeGoogle Shopping product titlesas an example:

• Max. length: Max 150 characters
• Distinguish between variants: Add the distinguishing details of each variant to the title.
• Don’t include promotional text (things like “buy one get one free”)
• Don’t use capital letters for emphasis.
• Put the most important details first: Users will usually see only the first 70 or fewer characters of your title
• Don’t use extra white spaces

The key is to make maximum use of the product title space, while also following the rules.

By the way, you can learn even more about creating the perfect Google Shopping feed in our article:How to successfully advertise on Google Shopping.

4. Keep product data clean and up to date

Another part of product feed optimization is to always use up-to-date data. Advertising items that are out of stock or incorrectly priced will cause customers to quickly look elsewhere. Even worse, platforms may temporarily ban your listing if it’s found to contain inaccurate or misleading data.

It’s always best to take a customer-centric approach. That means removing any unnecessary HTML code from your feed. While HTML is essential for your online shop, you don’t want it to clutter up your listings on platforms like Google Shopping or Facebook Ads.

5. Use performance data to exclude products and set up custom labels

Not all products perform the same. There are so many variables, like popularity, margins, profit, and seasonality. So why treat all your items the same way?

Data such as conversion rate, CTR, revenue/cost, or ROASis extremely useful in deciding which products to publish. For instance, you can choose to exclude products with a low profit because you want to allocate your ad spend to higher-profit items.

Using a rule-based feed management tool like Channable, you can also segment your products based on performance data (for example, top performance, medium performance, and low performance).

Once each product is assigned to a performance segment, you can increase or decrease bids more strategically to get the best possible ROI. Our client Rocket Digital used performance-based segmentation in Channable to boost ROAS by 30%.

Simplify product feed optimization with Channable

Every sales and advertising channel has its own rules and requirements for product feeds. Channable simplifies and optimizes feed management even further with smart rules and time-saving automation.

These help you keep your product feed updated, exclude products, modify prices, improve titles and descriptions, apply discounts, remove HTML text, use performance data to create custom fields, and much more.

Optimizing product information for omnichannel eCommerce doesn’t have to be complicated.