Product or data feed management is supposed to streamline product listings across multiple ad platforms, channels or marketplaces. But doing it manually is time-consuming and inefficient, especially as your business expands to more channels. It also takes focus away from other important program management factors and considerations like:
- Ad strategy
- Content creation
- Compliance
- Program growth
Feed management software lets automation bear the burden of listing and advertising across channels. What’s more, it’s become an absolute imperative for staying relevant, profitable and standing out against the competition in the e-commerce industry.
How Does Product Feed Management Software Work?
Product feed management allows you to easily transform your product content to meet the requirements of merchandising, marketing and advertising platforms; deliver that data in a variety of formats and track the success of feed delivery. Basically, you can collect your product content once, then optimize it for every destination.
A data or product feed is a digital file (typically .XML, .CSV or .TXT) that includes product titles, descriptions, pricing, images, URLs and more while filtering for inventory levels. Feed management even allows you to enrich your ads with more detailed descriptions and employ rules to easily filter content.
Automated product management software typically uses an application programming interface (API) to integrate and communicate directly with an ad platform, marketplace or channel like Amazon, Google or Meta (Facebook & Instagram). Any changes you make are quick, accurate and updated in real time.
As a result of using feed management software, you benefit from:
- Increased product visibility
- More informed and satisfied customers
- Improved ROI, ROAS and impression share
- Saved time
- Increased control and error awareness
- More competitive listings
- Informed, data-driven decision making
Equally important, product content feeds ensure your listings are approved so your products actually sell. They ensure your product content stays visible to the most relevant audiences and search terms that consumers are using. That way, you never waste time or money on your sales or ad tactics. You can send product advertising content across search, shopping, social and retail media sites for promotion. Not only does this alleviate strain on your technical resources, but it increases the likelihood of conversion with cleaner, more accurate product content.
Product feed management can support e-commerce merchandising and consolidate your marketing needs as well. With data feeds in one place, you also have greater agility to expand to more channels, grow your business and mitigate risk.
What Are Common Pitfalls of Feed Management?
Proper product content and feed management is critical for e-commerce success. Yet, many businesses, regardless of size or vertical, fall prey to the same common pitfalls. Some come from the lack of resources and expertise available to these companies, while others emerge from a siloed approach to product content syndication.
Manual feed management pitfalls typically include:
- Settling for “good enough” — Simply meeting channel requirements instead of fully optimizing for high performance
- Using a “set it and forget it” mentality for listing titles — Using the same structure for all product titles or failing to update based on performance
- Not accounting for channel variations — Using your Google Shopping feed for everything instead of tailoring content and imagery to the channel (e.g., striking photography for Instagram)
- Failing to showcase discounts — Not highlighting promotions, thus forfeiting higher click-through rates
- Isolating feed and advertising teams — Prohibiting collaboration between data and ad teams, leading to delays and misunderstanding
- Wasting time and money — Failing to automate feed delivery for much-needed agility and accuracy
Automated feed management software is the answer to all of these problems because it helps you manage, monitor and optimize feeds across channels without sacrificing time or accuracy.
How Do You Choose the Best Feed Management Software?
Not all feed management software is created equal. Here’s what to look for as you evaluate.
Usability
Product content feed software should make your job easier, not harder. Look for digital feed management tools with a clean, intuitive user interface and workflow automation that’s easy to use.
Channel Integrations
Does the solution export product feeds to the channels and ad platforms that make the most sense for your brand? Look for platforms that not only integrate with giants like Google and Amazon, but niche and international channels that enable your future growth.
Beyond technical requirements, the best feed management services also have deep relationships with their channel partners. By choosing a well-established platform, you benefit from channel-specific knowledge and guidance.
Features
Look beyond basic feed management and channel integration. Does the tool allow you to optimize your feeds to meet the requirements of each platform while improving performance over time? Choose a solution with features like product content feed optimization, easy exporting, personalization tools and automation capabilities.
Services and Support
Don’t get left in the lurch when the market vastly changes or you need help managing your feeds. Look for a provider that offers helpful support, an extensive knowledge base and strategic guidance from industry experts when you’re ready to grow.
Which type of feed management solution is best for your organization? Take the questionnaire to find out.
Transform Your Product Feed Management with ChannelAdvisor
For over 20 years, ChannelAdvisor, an CommerceHub company, has been transforming product content with automation, seamless integrations and channel-specific attention to detail. We help you optimize your product content at scale so you can move faster, sell smarter and expand further.
Here’s how we do it:
- Data integration. Your product content is integrated into ChannelAdvisor or accessed remotely.
- Delivery strategy. We work with your team to ensure the data is in the right format for the targeted destinations and create the delivery strategy.
- Data processing. Your optimized product data is evaluated to ensure richness of content and compliance.
- Processing. Once verified, content is delivered to the defined destinations.
- Delivery audit. An audit of delivery is performed to prevent any errors.
Plus, our integrations and deep partnerships with hundreds of global channels means you have the compliance and know-how to win everywhere you sell. Need help? Our Managed Services team helps you improve your performance and grow your business with industry expertise.
Contact us today for a demo of the ChannelAdvisor platform.
