What is feed management?
Feed management, is the process of organizing, managing and optimizing data feeds. A data feed is a structured file format that contains a list of products or services along with various attributes such as:
- price,
- description,
- product type,
- stock ,
- etc.
Feed management is also called data feed management. In e-commerce, we often talk about product feed management because products are the main focus in these feeds.
Product feed management
Product feeds are essential for e-commerce businesses because they contain crucial information for various advertising channels, such as Google Shopping, marketplaces, social media platforms and affiliate networks.
One of the biggest challenges in managing product feeds is dealing with large inventories. Managing feeds for thousands of products is complex and requires sophisticated tools and strategies.
In addition, ensuring consistency, accuracy and maximum visibility across multiple platforms is a major challenge. Here, it is crucial that the feed is always up-to-date on all platforms. For example, consider up-to-date stock and price information. This way, you avoid selling products that are no longer in stock, or that the platform shows prices that differ from your webshop. This causes frustration on the customer's side and results in a wasted click for you.
The value of feed management
The primary goal of feed management is to ensure that these data feeds are accurate, up-to-date and optimized for the intended platforms.
In the first place this is necessary because the platforms have requirements for the feeds. Thus, you prevent products, or the entire feed, from being rejected by the platform.
Second, it helps maximize the visibility and performance of products or services on these platforms.
Therefore, an important role of feed management is also to optimize and customize feeds for different platforms. Each marketing platform has its own unique requirements and preferences for structure, layout and content of the feed.
Requirements for effective product feed management
Effective product feed management means having the following points in order:
- Complete: the feed contains the complete range on which you want to advertise
- Rich in information: a good feed contains all the information relevant to your customers' ads and purchase considerations.
- Accurate: the product, price and inventory information in the feed should be as error-free as possible.
- Platform-optimized: The feeds meet the requirements of the platforms you advertise on and are optimized for their characteristics and features.
- Up-to-date: the feed is always up-to-date. This means that new products are added instantly and products you no longer sell are removed. In addition, it is crucial to always keep price and inventory information as current as possible across all platforms.
Feed management software helps you with all points above, more on this later in this article.
Why is feed management important? The benefits
Accurate data feeds are a crucial part of effective digital marketing. They allow you to accurately present your products on various online platforms. This accuracy is vital because it affects:
- Visibility
- Conversion
- Consumer trust
- Decision-making
Inaccurate or outdated information leads to a poor customer experience, resulting in lost sales and damaged brand reputation. It can also cause your products to be partially displayed - or not displayed at all - because the platform rejects the feed.
Feed management is not just about tracking data; it is about leveraging that data to achieve business goals. The value of feed management lies in its ability to increase product visibility and appeal, leading to increased sales and market reach.
Improved product visibility
Well-managed feeds ensure that your products are maximally displayed across all platforms and that product information is displayed correctly and attractively. This visibility is crucial in a crowded online world, where consumers are inundated with choices. A well-optimized feed can ensure that products stand out and grab the attention of potential buyers.
Improved conversion
A well-optimized feed leads to higher conversion: the more information available in the feed, the more specific and relevant the ads will be. This increases the CTR.
Furthermore, when you provide comprehensive and accurate product information, it helps consumers in their decision-making process, increasing the likelihood of a purchase.
Cost Efficiency
Effective feed management prevents unnecessary costs. When you optimize feeds, you minimize the chances of clicks on your ads being wasted, due to incorrect price or inventory information.
How does feed management for E-commerce work?
In e-commerce advertising, feed management plays a critical role in how you present products to potential customers. There are several key steps to the process:
1. Data collection and integration.
The first step in feed management is to collect and integrate data from various sources, such as:
- CMS systems, such as Magento or Shopify,
- ERP systems, such as as SAP or Oracle
This data should be accurate and complete to ensure that the final feed effectively represents the products.
2. Feed optimization
Once the data is collected, it is time for optimization. This process includes enriching the feed, cleaning it up and optimizing it for the different advertising channels.
- Enrich: with relevant keywords, high-quality images, detailed product descriptions and purchase prices.
- Cleaning up: consider removing or correcting incorrect, incomplete, inaccurate, inconsistent or irrelevant data. Think about adding the correct currency to prices, describing colors the same way, removing or replacing foreign characters and adjusting capitalization.
- Optimizing for advertising channels: different platforms have their own requirements for feeds. For example, Google Shopping has different requirements than an affiliate marketing platform.
- Exclude specific products: this excludes products that you don't want to advertise for some reason. Think of products that have little or no inventory (and therefore sell themselves), or products with trademark restrictions.
The goal is to make the feed as attractive and informative as possible for both the platform's algorithms and potential customers.
3. Monitoring and updating
The online market is dynamic, with constant changes in prices, availability and consumer preferences. Constantly monitoring and updating feeds is crucial to maintain accuracy and optimal relevance.
Feed management within your marketing strategy
Integrating feed management into the overall marketing strategy is essential for e-commerce companies. This integration ensures that feed and channel management is aligned with your marketing goals and target audience.
Alignment of advertising channels with marketing objectives
Whether increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, or entering new markets. Each advertising channel should be carefully tailored to these goals so that it can make its unique contribution to achieving them.
Next, it is essential to develop a specifically optimized feed for each of these channels. These feeds should be customized to the characteristics and requirements of each channel in order to maximize the impact and effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Target the right audience and increase visibility
Feed management can also help reach the right audience by including relevant product information and terminology that resonates with your target audience.
The value of feed management tools
Feed management tools are software solutions designed to simplify and improve the creation and management of data feeds.
The software allows you to manage your data in one place, from the master feed. From there, the software creates different feeds that are optimized for the specific requirements of the platforms you advertise on.
In addition, the tool ensures that your product data is always synchronized and up-to-date. This significantly improves product performance on these platforms and prevents rejection of your ads.
Benefits of using feed management software
Feed management tools offer multiple benefits:
- Time efficiency: automating repetitive and labor-intensive tasks related to feed updates and optimization.
- Data accuracy: feed management software helps display product data consistently and error-free across different advertising platforms.
- Independence from IT: with feed management software, feeds can be easily customized to meet specific requirements of different marketing channels, such as Google Shopping, social media platforms and different marketplaces. Whereas you used to need the IT department to make such adjustments, you can now do this yourself with the feed management tool.
- Performance tracking: feed management tools provide analytics to track the performance of product listings so that data-driven decisions can be made.
- Scalability: professional feed management tools support processing large product assortments, making them scalable for the growth of your business.
- Improved visibility: optimized feeds improve product visibility across platforms, which can increase traffic and sales.
- Cost-effective ads: by optimizing product feeds, your ad efforts are more cost-effective, so you waste less money.
- Improved customer experience: accurate and detailed product information enhances the customer buying experience, leading to greater satisfaction and loyalty.
Adchieve feed management software
With Adchieve feed management software, you are assured of a reliable foundation for successful ad campaigns.
With our user-friendly software, you manage your product feeds effortlessly, ensuring updates are processed quickly and efficiently. In this way, every advertising platform is always provided with the most up-to-date and reliable data.
Easily manage your ads across multiple platforms from one central master feed. Then distribute your data through our channel management tool to various ad channels such as Google Shopping, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, or Amazon.
AI driven feed optimization
With Adchieve, you optimize feeds efficiently and effectively using Artificial Intelligence and A/B testing. To do this, we follow the following steps:
- Determine the best titles and descriptions.
- Identify missing feed values that can be improved.
- Create examples to aid the AI algorithm's learning process (using few-shot prompting).
- Apply Large Language Models to optimize the feed.
- Optimize and validate results.
- Set up an A/B test within Adchieve.
- Execute the test by the Adchieve software.
- Draw conclusions once sufficient data have been collected.