Drive and Convert (Ep. 066): The Importance of Feeds

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About This Episode:

Feeds are everywhere: Google, Bing, Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram. Anytime you see a product image and a price on some sort of app, it’s probably coming from a feed. And even though they’ve been around for a while, it’s more important than ever to understand how you can use them to your advantage.

With so much automation in the marketing world, some campaign details are out of our control. But, you can still optimize the inputs to a feed and that can be the difference between a shopper clicking on your product over a competitors. 

In this episode, Ryan and Jon talk about the importance of feeds for ecommerce brands. They discuss why feeds are so important and how to optimize yours for more traffic. 

Listen to the full episode if you want to learn:

1. Why feeds are so important right now
2. Where feeds begin and how they work
3. How you can optimize your feeds for more traffic

If you have questions, ideas, or feedback to share, hit us up on Twitter. We’re @jonmacdonald and @ryangarrow.

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Episode Transcript:

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow.

Jon:
So, Ryan, today’s topic is all about feeds. I’ll be the first to admit, I know nothing about this, so this is going to be fun for you because you get to fully educate me on something. So, treat me like I’m five. I have a five year old right now and I can tell you, treating him like he’s five doesn’t work, but do it to me. We’ll see what happens.

Ryan:
I have that as well. And there’s very few things in the eCommerce world that Jon doesn’t know a lot about. So, this is very unique and a special event.

Jon:
Well, what I do know is that feeds are everywhere. I hear about them. I’ve just never, I’ve been like, “Ah, feeds. I don’t have to mess with them.” There’s very little I can optimize from a convergence standpoint and effect in my role anyways, in the goods role around feeds. That is full square in your camp. So look, I know there’s feeds on Google. Bing, I assume, right? They copy Google, so you would think that they’d have them. Amazon, I know there’s aggregators and tools for Amazon to help you with your feed. Facebook, Instagram, am I missing any?

Ryan:
I mean, they’re just literally everywhere and I think they’re the thing that powers a lot of stuff, but that people don’t pay enough attention to. Which is why I really wanted to bring this topic up, so we have to dive into it to just kind of set a foundation, I think, for everybody in the space, and feeds and what we need to be doing or thinking about them right now.

Jon:
Well, I’m excited to learn about it, but tell me first, why is this important? Why should we be talking about it?

Ryan:
Well, feeds have been around for a very long time, longer than I’ve been in eCommerce, probably longer than you. There’s been feeds, you’re sending data places in certain formats to populate something on the other end, essentially. And we’re in a situation now where we’re experiencing, for example, on Google, less search volume, but the competition is staying the same. And so if you’re trying to capture eyeballs through shopping on Google, the competition’s ratcheted up. So brands are having to take every advantage they possibly can. And for a lot of brands, they’re ignoring a very simple way to get ahead of the game or ahead of your competitors, which is in a feed. If your feed is better, you’re probably going to succeed. You’re going to have some wins that are pretty easy to accomplish, with just a quality feed.

Jon:
Okay. So if they’ve always been around, we’re talking about them now because everyone’s doing it. And if you’re not, you’re going to get left behind?

Ryan:
To a degree. Feeds, at least on Google, where the majority of traffic comes from for eCommerce brands selling on their website, the feed’s been pretty consistent and the same. And we’ve gone through multiple iterations of shopping from Frugal, which was the free Google. If you know that you’re automatically old. But I was involved in Frugal, and then the iterations around just shopping have been there and they’ve added some fields and things to get the feeds more complicated. But essentially, you’re just sending product data to Google and they’re putting it in Google shopping.
But what is changing now is the amount of places you can send, essentially that same Google feed. Walmart for example, uses the Google feed Schema. A lot of people are just adopting that Google feed Schema saying, “Hey, if you’re sending a feed to Google, we’re just going to build our system to accept it, because you’re probably already sending it there.” And if you’re sending a feed to Google, you’re probably spending money, which all these other advertising platforms want that money. So they’re making it as easy as possible, just to get your feed from Google to be like, “Start spending money with us.”

Jon:
And that’s where Amazon, one of their biggest revenue streams now is advertising.

Ryan:
Yeah. I mean, Amazon advertising right now is huge. I think they quoted me on a call recently that they’re approaching 40 billion this year, in revenue from ads, which is, that’s a lot of just profit. That’s crazy to me, that amount of money, and they’ve done it relatively quickly because it’s working. You can go on a lot of platforms by the way, and build your products manually. I did that originally, going on to Walmart with Joyful Dirt, just essentially to see what it was. I wanted to go through the process. So if we’re advising clients to be on there, some of them can just go put a few of their SKUs up without a tremendous amount of difficulty. But if you’ve got 10,000 SKUs you’re moving on your website, and you want to put them all in Walmart, you’re not going to build that manually. No way. You’re just going to send the feed into Walmart, let it populate, have your products there.
You were probably sending feeds around different places, and some of you do it through the Shopify integration to Google, where it automatically spits your product data into Google. That is a feed and it’s just not being manipulated, it’s just going right there, and Shopify’s taking care of that for you.

Jon:
So is there anything that’s really causing this to be more important now? I mean, why are we talking about it now, 60 some odd episodes into Drive and Convert?

Ryan:
Well, for a lot of brands, it’s becoming more important. Not only for the competition ratcheting up as volume generally goes down, in whether we’re not in a recession or not, I don’t know, but I know that volume and transactions are down across a lot, most industries. Whatever that’s called, that’s what we’re in. Your competition hasn’t evaporated overnight, so they’re trying to capture the same amount with a smaller pie. And so, you’re having to be more aggressive in certain areas and if you can lower CPCs by higher quality feed, do it. But also with, I think a couple episodes ago, we talked about Performance Max, and so there’s more and more automation coming into marketing channels, that you can’t see search queries at the granular level you’re used to. You can’t get all these individual little levers we used to have within Google Shopping, that allowed us to be really successful, pushing and pulling and growing brands.
So inputs going into these platforms become more and more important, because that’s where all the AI within Google’s system is pulling from. Yeah, it pays attention to searches and click rates and all that. But if your titles on Google Shopping are better at getting a click than your competitors for the same product, because you’ve created a better title, Google’s going to like you better because you’re giving them the ability to get more clicks, which you’re getting charged for, so they like it.

Jon:
So there is such a thing as feed optimization?

Ryan:
Yes. So, that’s one reason it does kind of play into your role. It’s optimizing. You can optimize your feed, but it’s optimizing for traffic, because the feed is not going to be essentially what converts it, once it gets to the destination, or it gets to the product page. But with a really bad feed, it’s going to be almost impossible to optimize for conversions, because you won’t have any traffic. Feeds are important and all important in slightly different reasons, in different places that they’re going. I mean at the core, feeds are essentially just a CSV or at Excel file, sent out from a central hub to some place that accepts that. You’ve got to have the right columns in place for that receiving end.
If you’re sending a feed to Amazon, they’ll tell you, “Here’s the columns you have to have, and here’s all the data you have to have, and it has to be in a consistent manner or we won’t accept it.” Because Amazon or any platform receiving a feed has built their system to say, “All of our products need to look this way. Therefore, we need this data in this column so that we just automatically populate it.” Humans aren’t involved. It’s just a feed coming through the API that says, “Boom, you now have a product live here, because your feed sent this data to us.”

Jon:
So, are all feeds created equal then?

Ryan:
I mean essentially, feeds are just that file. So yeah, if you’re sending a feed somewhere, it’s just the physical feed going there, but it’s really where they differ is, what’s the information you’re putting into that feed before it gets there? I’ve mentioned the Shopify integration to Google. Very simple, easy way to get a feed from your Shopify store to Google. The problem or the difference will be, you’re not manipulating that data before it gets to Google or the merchant center. And so, if you labeled your product White Coffee Cup and it goes from Shopify to Google, that’s your title. White Coffee Cup, and it’s going to get truncated to white coffee, CU maybe if they truncate the P off, depending on how many characters are there. But if you had the ability to manipulate your feed before it got there, you might say it’s a 12-ounce white coffee cup, because 12-ounce is more important, to get the click as they’re searching.
Because, recently having gone into or looked at the ads for a coffee or a packaging company, so many people were searching for the ounces. That if I’m looking for a 12-ounce coffee cup and you’re showing me 12 ounces, that’s great. Because the one next to you just says coffee cup and I don’t know the size, I’m going to probably click on the one that’s exactly what I want. Again, but that’s testing and measuring and so you have to be able to say, “Does it make sense to test and measure titles, and optimize them to get that traffic?” Because, it could be good to not have ounces there. I was just making that up, but we would test and find out.

Jon:
So, like most things in e-commerce, hitting that easy button isn’t necessarily, I mean it’s better than nothing. But you really do need to spend some effort optimizing them, and thinking about that?

Ryan:
Yeah, I think almost down across the board, if you’re doing the easy button, that’s a good thing to get you in motion, and I would almost always advocate to just rather than be perfect to start, just go.

Jon:
Done is better than perfect.

Ryan:
Just once you’re in motion, then you can start thinking about, all right, as I’m seeing searches on Google for example, how am I different or what do I see there that might make sense for me to click on? I don’t ever assume that competitors know what they’re doing, but I like to look at them to say, how can I brainstorm what may be better or an idea that would cause me to think about something? You’ll find that putting effort in is almost always going to lead to better results.

Announcer:
You’re listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands, to help convert more of their visitors into buyers. And, Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, the digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you.

Jon:
In terms of, again, like I’m five, so apologies for the basic questions. But I guess, what I’m wondering, is a feed in terms of Google is just what shows up in Google shopping. Right? This isn’t search engine result pages in terms of the SERPs from on site PDPs, right? That’s a different type of feed. Your site map essentially is a feed. You’re giving Google, if I’m understanding this correctly, that is, the site map is a type of feed. It’s structured data that you’re sending Google, but it appears in the page search. The feeds we’re talking about today are more around shopping. They’re the product feeds that would go in Google shopping with the tiles at the top of the page. Is that correct?

Ryan:
Yes. And if you click on the shopping tab, I mean, it’s almost anytime you’re seeing a product image with a price, around the internet or on an app, it’s probably a feed that’s populating that, for that company that’s showing them. Whether it’s a marketplace or the big marketplaces, eBay, Walmart, Target, Amazon, they all take feeds. Yes, you can go in and I’m going to sell one thing on Amazon. You probably don’t need a feed to send one thing to Amazon. You can go build it in there and do it. But just being able to understand conceptually that people are going to need to see different types of data, based on where you’re sending the product, is helpful. Amazon, their titles may be, again, I’m just making this up for example, like 40 characters, where Googles are 35 and Walmarts are 57.

Jon:
So, you’re optimizing all of these things, and now I’m starting to wonder where does a feed begin? If I’m running a Shopify store and I have my products and I want to send a feed to Google, how do I alter that content to that feed before it ends up there?

Ryan:
Yeah. So the vast majority of eComm brands listening to this, should be using a feed management system. And whether you’re going to go search for feed management or just doesn’t matter, there’s a system that can intercept that, suck the feed out of your website. That is usually going to be the hub or the home for most eComm brands. Now some brands have started on Amazon and are now moving to a website, and so Amazon has been the source of your truth. So if you’ve sucked that out or you have a feed going into that system already, that you’re manipulating the inventory, you’re manipulating the price points, there’s a feed going into Google, you can also populate a website with that feed.

Jon:
Okay.

Ryan:
You’ve got a core hub of truth. Where’s your source of truth living? If it’s your website, BigCommerce, Shopify, Magento, whatever it happens to be, a feed system will suck out that product data and then allow you to manipulate it and send it out to a marketplace in the format they want. Every marketplace has a format. Again, a lot of them kind of have a core on Google Schema that they’re building off of. Target, for example, generally falls in line with what Google wants, but there’s a few extra fields and they have weird return rules and stuff like that. So you have to manipulate the feed a little bit differently for Target or Target Plus. But I tell most brands this, you’ve for example, if you started on your website, you’ve probably built your website for people that are coming to the site that have already known you or know the products.
Working with a tonneau cover company that had never advertised on Google, but they were doing 70 million on Amazon. They knew data, they had great information, but when we sent out their product feed to Google, it’s like “Hey, we’re just going to get you going, and we’re just going to get your data into Google, and then we can look at what’s happening and then manipulate it.” Okay, great, moved quick. Got it in there. Started advertising, had difficulty for them even showing in certain really low bottom of funnel searches. And we looked at their feed and we’re like, “You’re selling tonneau covers and you don’t even have tonneau covers as a title on your product. We’ve got to manipulate the feed to get tonneau cover in there.” Because if you went to their site, they didn’t need tonneau cover because you were staring at it, and they have their name, they were already a large brand of these. So it was like, “Oh yeah, I’m getting this product, I know what it is.”
So, dumb things like that, that as a brand, when you’re in the brand so deep, you’re not able to see the label from, Inside the Jar, to coin Jon MacDonald terms. You’ve got to step out of that feed for a second and be like, oh. If I’m trying to find traffic on Google that’s never heard of my brand before, I might have to have a different title on that product than if they’re already on my site. And that’s where feed management comes into play where you’re like, “Okay, let’s manipulate the title, make sure that the right things are showing.” And because Google truncates it to be shorter than yours, the title that makes sense on your site, if it’s half of what it is, it might make no sense to somebody searching for your product on Google, that has never seen you before.

Jon:
That’s fair. Okay.

Ryan:
Manipulating feed is going to be an advantage for most brands. And not only the titles, but that same company for example on the tonneau covers, we found out that their shipping system, they ship through UPS and they’re shipping all over the country, fairly quick shipping times. I think they arrive anywhere in the country three to five days, including processing. Google was showing them as a two week delivery and we’re like, “That doesn’t make any sense,” because that is one of the ranking algorithms within Google shopping. If everything’s the same and you’re two weeks out, guess who Google’s going to show? They’re going to show them what’s going to get them quicker.
And so we are like, “Okay, that’s not even what we’re sending in the feed.” There were some settings in the merchant center that were impacting it. And then if you have a range of dates for everywhere in the country and having given them granular data on different zones, we’re actually testing getting UPS integrated into their system, so that UPS is feeding Google that data directly. They have a feed that says, “Hey this product, this dimension, this shipping, this is when it’ll arrive in this zip code,” where they’re searching from. So many different things can impact how you compete for that traffic, that a solid feed will beat basic feed almost every single time for that traffic. And so, constantly be looking at that, I guess would be the punchline.

Jon:
This seems like a low dollar investment, high return activity. Is that fair? It sounds like there’s a lot of effort, some time, but I’m not hearing that you need to spend a lot to be able to have a good feed.

Ryan:
No, you don’t. Now for some companies that are small, paying for a feed management tool can be expensive, depending on where you’re at in the volume game. But you can also manipulate your own feeds through Google Sheets. That’s free. It’s an FTP pickup. You can use that for Google Merchant Center and say, “Hey, I’m going to export all my data into Google Sheets.” And if you don’t change prices, or shipping time, or inventory a lot and you don’t have a ton of SKUs, Google Sheets can be a great feed management system for Google at least. And a lot of other companies can use that as well in the marketplaces. But I don’t think it has to be expensive, but it should be providing value quickly. It doesn’t take a lot of time to say, “All right, if I’m going to spend, let’s play it out.”
Say, a thousand dollars a month for a feed system and some experts. At a thousand dollars a month, should have some people doing work for you, essentially. It’s not, shouldn’t be like, “Oh yeah, send it to us. It’s in there, it’s just submitted.” So that’s going to require some work. You should be requiring some testing from that group of people to say, “Okay, great, you got my feed. I want to know how you’re going to improve my results just on the feed, and what does that look like?” And have them commit to like, “Okay, well we’re going to test titles this month.” Because what you don’t want to do, just like an optimizing for conversion, test everything in the feed all at once.

Jon:
Yeah, you have no idea.

Ryan:
Because, you won’t know what actually caused success or failure. So, you have to work through a process, and anybody managing feeds should tell you the same. Step one, get it quality, make sure that all the data is correct and it’s being reflected correctly. Just like with that tonneau company, if you could be sending it the right shipping data, but if it’s reflecting it wrong, you need to be able to diagnose that and solve for that problem.
And interesting point, I bring up a lot, but Google has been against keyword stuffing for as long as I can remember, back to when Britney Spears was big and you could put everything white, and match the background keyword stuff for Britney Spears on your site, and rank for weird terms of Britney Spears. It’s never been a good idea for long term with Google, but right now it’s been legal for a long time to keyword stuff the description of your feed.
So you have a product description that if on your site, again that Shopify example, if your product description is very short and just says, “Yep, this is a white coffee cup, have fun.” You might want to keyword stuff that for, it could be a teacup as well, right? People drink tea and coffee out of the same cup sometimes. So maybe you want tea in there, maybe you want some competitors’ names in there. That’s not a bad thing. If your competitors get a lot of search volume, you might want to have that in there. It can give more ranking. It’s less important than other aspects of the feed, but it can’t hurt to have more data being given to the systems, to see what’s in your feed and what your product is, or what it could be ranking for or showing for.

Jon:
That’s awesome advice. This is way more complex than I ever envisioned feeds being. Is there anything else that we should leave people with, because my head’s swirling. I feel like I have more information here than, and I now know about feeds. Is there anything else that we haven’t discussed, that you feel like I should know about feeds?

Ryan:
I think that if you are managing an e-commerce brand or owning an e-commerce brand, the vast majority of you out there are not going to be experts in feeds. And that’s fine.

Jon:
You’ve made me feel better. Thank you.

Ryan:
And I’m not either, I own brands. I work in digital ads. I am by no means of feed expert. I know enough to be dangerous, but you would not want me doing an audit of your feed. And I think that’s where we’re actually moving into in digital ads, is you’re going to be auditing feeds. Feeds are having so much impact on the AI, and the results you’re getting from a lot of these new systems that are do-it-all-for-you systems, that having somebody that understands feeds, getting in there saying, “Ah, I can see why this isn’t working well. I mean, you’ve got this saying this in this column, and that’s not what this needs. So you got to change that to this.” And I’m like, “I would never have caught that.”
So I’m glad there’s people smarter than me and feeds, that can help me look at my feeds and tell me where I’m going wrong. So I think everyone out there, make that a thing. We’re getting pretty close to holiday at this point, so I don’t know if there’s going to be a lot of changes done in feeds that are going to move the needle for this season. But if you’re in the automotive and your holiday season kind of comes in January, February, March, April, you should probably be getting feed audits right now. If you’re going into holiday season where your big sales are now, maybe you wait till January, but get a feed audit shouldn’t be complicated. Anybody managing feeds, should be willing to audit your feed for free. It shouldn’t cost anything, because they’re going to use it as a sales tool and try to sell you on their management. But at least you’re going to come away with good data on, what’s going on with my feed?
And if you’re just using the Shopify plugins or any product that just sends your feed, and it’s free or let’s just say less than 10 bucks or 15 bucks, there’s no optimization being done likely in that system. You might want to look at upgrading that in 2023.

Jon:
Okay. All right. That’s awesome. Thank you so much, Ryan. As I said before, I feel so much smarter about feeds. I can now, at least if I’m at a really nerdy cocktail party where they’re talking about feeds, I now feel like I could at least hold my own in the conversation.

Ryan:
Heck, yeah. That’s the goal. At least we can say enough to be dangerous, and look like we’re in e-commerce and know what we’re doing to them.

Jon:
There you go.

Ryan:
Have people smarter than us back us up.

Jon:
Awesome. Well, Ryan, you can come to my nerdy cocktail party anytime.

Ryan:
I’m in, I’m in for sure.

Jon:
Have a wonderful day. Thank you.

Ryan:
Thanks, Jon.

Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.