Feed management, solutions, guidelines, testing ideas and optimization tactics and tips for search, social and marketplace channels. Given on April 19, 2017 at HeroCon Los Angeles.

1. Fantastic Feeds &
How to Mind Them
Elizabeth Marsten @ebkendo
Senior Director, e-Commerce Growth Services Image source: iStock

2. 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

3. NORTH AMERICA’S LARGEST RETAILERS,
MARKETPLACES AND SEARCH ENGINES
DEMAND GENERATION
ASSORTMENT EXPANSION
WAREHOUSES, STORES, DROP-SHIPPERS,
BRAND MANUFACTURERS
DELIVERY
NATIONAL CARRIERS, REGIONAL
CARRIERS, LOCAL CARRIERS

4. Hatching Your Beast
Image source: iStock

5. 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

6. Getting Your Beast Out of the Nest
Solution Best For Catalog Size
Tool provider (FTP, API) • Static or constantly
rotating 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

7. 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

8. 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)

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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.
@ebkendo Image source: iStock

13. A Master Catalog
Your own version of care of magical creatures
Image source: iStock

14. 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
@ebkendo Image source: Google

15. 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

16. 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
@ebkendo

17. 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

18. GMC. Last One.
@ebkendo Image source: Google

19. 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
@ebkendo Image source: iStock

20. The Google Shopping Feed
Setting 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

21. The
Dark Arts
Image source: iStock

22. Content Rules & Filters
This 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”
@ebkendo

23. 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…
@ebkendo

24. Product Titles
Turns 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
@ebkendo

25. Testing with Feeds
There 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

26. 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.
@ebkendo

27. Promotions & Price
• Google Retail Promotions
• Clicks on the PLA or the Code?
• Shop the Look
• Google, Pinterest, Polyvore
• Showcase Shopping Ads
• Google
@ebkendo Image source: iStock

28. 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
@ebkendo

29. Thank You!
@ebkendo Image source: Etsy