Fantastic Feeds &

How to Mind Them

El izabeth Marsten @ebkendo

Sen io r D i rec to r, e -Commerce Growth Serv i ces Image source: iStock

Elizabeth Marsten@ebkendo

• Senior Director, E-Commerce Growth Services

• Seattle, WA• 10 years in the search industry• PPC, Social, SEO, Analytics, Content• Speaker: SMX Adv/East/West, Mozcon,

Searchfest, State of Search, HeroCon• Author: Lynda.com, All in One Web

Marketing for Dummies

NORTH AMERICA’S LARGEST RETAILERS,

MARKETPLACES AND SEARCH ENGINES

DEMAND GENERATION

ASSORTMENT EXPANSIONWAREHOUSES, STORES, DROP-SHIPPERS,

BRAND MANUFACTURERS

DELIVERYNATIONAL CARRIERS, REGIONAL

CARRIERS, LOCAL CARRIERS

Hatching Your Beast

Image source: iStock

Getting Your Beast Out of the Nest

Solution Best For Product Catalog Size Guideline

Google Spreadsheet SMBs, small catalogs, static products offered, infrequent promotions, stable inventory

Small (3k or less)

Excel – manual upload SMBs, small catalogs, static products offered, infrequent promotions, stable inventory

Small (3k or less) or Medium (50k or less)

@ebkendo

Getting Your Beast Out of the Nest

Solution Best For Catalog Size

Tool provider (FTP, API) • Static or constantlyrotating inventory

• Fast changing inventory and prices/promotions

• Need to isolate groups of products quickly, at scale

• Poor quality product information

Medium (50k), Large (100-500k) or X-Large (500k+)

@ebkendo

Additional Care & Feeding

• Technical difficulties – ability to get a feed out of the site in the first place

• Inventory levels – if you only have a handful of each of the items and sell out often, sending incremental feeds

• Promotions – do you have a lot that only affect certain products? Or are complex (like buy one, get one) or even just want to show off in the SERP all your different offers?

@ebkendo

When You Really Need Backup

• You need connections beyond search and social• Retailers• Marketplaces• Site content widgets (ex: Fit Analytics)

• Data transformation – product information coming out of the site or from the client is missing information, formatted funny or needs considerable work to be compliant or even legible

• Business rules – compliance, validation (especially at scale)

What You Send Out Matters

• Product Data• Missing information • Formatted poorly (we love to insert ™ or HTML characters)• Incomplete info (two words is often not enough for a product title)• “Uh?” information (is the color “Kiss Me Kate” pink, red, white, green

or blue?!)

• Is the info being used in other places?

@ebkendo

Pay Special Attention To

• Product Titles• It’s the name of the product after all• It’s also heavily used by all channels in determining what the item is• Incomplete info (two words is often not enough for a product title)

• Product Category

• GTIN, UPC, UPI – required most of the time

What Shiny Things Can You Lift?

• Other channel feeds• Categories are different, could be more detailed• Search terms (Amazon)• Pinterest (old feed uses hex color)• Video, apps (Google Manufacturer Center)

• Keywords (Amazon sponsored products, negative keywords too)• Schedules (when other feeds get sent or to find new products)• Bundles (popular SKUs being combined to create new “products”)• Promotions (Best Offer on eBay)• Product descriptions (augment or even have site content)

@ebkendo

When Something Escapes

• Changing or Poorly Named Categories• What’s Hot• Deal of the Day!• Hidden

• Inventory Updates• Out of Stock

Someone decides it’s a good idea to “clean up” pixels, tags and codes on a site on Black Friday.

@ebkendoImage source: iStock

A Master CatalogYour own version of care of magical creatures

Image source: iStock

A Master Catalog – Why?

• Still need a list of the “things”• Google Product Type taxonomy- over 5,400 categories/subcategories

• Product Types even more and more unique

@ebkendoImage source: Google

Amazon Brand Registry - ASIN

• 55% of online product searches start on Amazon.com*• All products on Amazon have an ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number)• Amazon’s Brand Registry for manufacturers/brand owners and have authority

over those items• Information that can power SERPs on Amazon, recommended products, paid ad

units

@ebkendo

Source:

https://www.recode.net/2016/9/27/13078526/am

azon-online-shopping-product-search-engine

Image source: iStock

Google Manufacturer Center

• Ownership and authoritative information from the brand

• Info is used and seen in organic results (Knowledge Panel), Google Now cards, Google Shopping

• Additional information can be submitted, like video, apps, additional images, product specs like battery sizes, cordless

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More GMC. More Beasts.

@ebkendo

• Free to submit the feed, which has fewer fields than the Google Shopping feed, recently rolled out a self-service sign up to get started

• Will not override product titles submitted through Google Merchant Center on PLAs

• Google study: Bosch, 4% lift in conversion rate

Source: https://adwords.googleblog.com/2016/04/google-manufacturer-center-helps-brands.html

GMC. Last One.

@ebkendoImage source: Google

Catching Your Beast

If you don’t have that UPI…

• Search for the product- Google, Bing or Amazon

• Check a retailer or brand website (hint: sometimes you have to add the item to cart to get the item ID to show)

• Ask for it

@ebkendoImage source: iStock

The Google Shopping FeedSetting out to obliviate all other feeds

• More and more, we hear “just send us the Google feed”• Pinterest (new, can still use the old one but bulk actions are more manual)• Yahoo Product Ads (R.I.P.)• Bing Product Ads• Criteo (predictive search)

@ebkendo

The

Dark Arts

Image source: iStock

Content Rules & FiltersThis is where it really gets dark

• A filter is applied to a product catalog to find products that meet specific criteria that you’ve defined. For example:

• Products that are below a certain price• Products in a certain category that you want to promote or exclude

• A content rule can be applied to a filtered group of products or an entire catalog. For example:

• Change the title in all products going to Google Shopping to remove special characters

• Change the color attribute “water” to “blue”

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Waving the Wand

• Not unheard of to have hundreds of rules • This can be strenuous in terms of data processing load• Clean out old promotions or expired rules

• Can be really simple, setting price floors –for example don’t send items under $5 to Google for PLAs or…

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Product TitlesTurns out, really important

• Consistently the attribute that most often that needs to be adjusted• Two words for a product is often not enough• Sometimes multiple rule or augmentations need to be applied either

by hand or via tool• Fixing truncation

• One of the most mentioned attribute as a major contributor on determining “relevance” across search, comparison shopping, social and marketplaces

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Testing with FeedsThere are easier things

• Images- segmenting specific products to have a different image type• Example: a shirt that is on a model vs. on a white background• Difficult to do via feeds

• Automated content updates for common issues• Normalizing colors – common color on your site/feed is “tortoise” -

set up rule or function to always change that to “green”• Could find a 3rd party tool or service to help with this

@ebkendo

Some Title Tests

• Removing gender, “men’s” or “women’s” on products that are predominately known, for example dresses or ties

• Allowed for additional information to populate into the product title

• Adding a brand name at the beginning of a title, rather than the end• Adding a feature like “strapless” or “full length”• Normalizing features like cttw to ct. tw.

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Promotions & Price

• Google Retail Promotions• Clicks on the PLA or the Code?

• Shop the Look• Google, Pinterest, Polyvore

• Showcase Shopping Ads• Google

@ebkendoImage source: iStock

What Works?That depends…

• It’s often hard to draw direct effects due to the known and unknown factors that go into a result

• Search query (branded or non), bid, product title, product category, popularity, user search history and so on

• Keep track of content edits and date• [Brand -Item Type –Feature] is a title format we keep returning to• Remembering that humans read and click• Enabling special anything, like promotions/offers, badges to stand out• Resolve as many errors as you can, get more products listed

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Thank You!

@ebkendo Image source: Etsy