When you correctly update products with new data, it passes to your feed for your campaigns to take notice.
But update product data incorrectly… and you’ll confuse the data feed.
Data feed errors can tank your campaign performance and raise costs.
For example, simply excluding out-of-stock items from Google search campaigns increased ROAS for retailers by 181%, according to a new DataFeedWatch report.
The study also reveals the most common problems retailers encounter in their data feed:
- Shipping issues (23.5% of all product disapprovals). Common errors include too-high values and unspecified shipping attributes – e.g. missing shipping countries.
- Title issues (25.9%). Titles that go over 70 characters reduce visibility, which can cause disapprovals.
- Image attribute issues (20.3%). Top errors include promotional overlays on images, images that are too small, missing or invalid images, and generic visuals.
- Global trade item number (GTIN) value issues (19.2%). Make sure you submit the correct GTIN or skip it altogether if you don’t want Google to flag your items.
- Price issues (13.2%). Wrong or non-updated prices and other price mismatches will make Google disapprove of your product quickly.
Additional issues include availability, link issues, item group ID, and others. Paying attention to these can greatly improve your performance.
Here are the feed tactics that seasoned advertisers use to extract better value from their campaigns:
- Optimize product titles. 14% advertisers overwrite their product titles, either by changing some keywords or rewriting the title from scratch.
- Use custom_labels. 13% created a product group for a product featured in an ongoing sale. Segmenting feeds based on margins can improve your ROAS by 96%.
- Filter less profitable products. 64% of merchants drop products from their campaigns due to prices being below a certain margin.
- Provide additional images. 25% of merchants provide more visual assets, which also gives shoppers more options to examine the product.
The key is checking and optimizing your product data so it can pass through the feed smoothly.
Simply updating your product data correctly can turn campaigns around… and it takes less time than brewing a French press of coffee!
Seems worth it, right?