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Manage Shopping Feeds Online with Feedoptimise
Contents:

Manage Shopping Feeds Online with Feedoptimise

By

DMT

DMT

We’re thrilled to share this guest post, written by Marcin Rosinski, CEO of Feedoptimise. We use Feedoptimise to manage all of our clients’ product/shopping feeds across Google and Facebook. This article helps to explain the benefits of using Feedoptimise to manage your data feeds.

“Data feeds are a very important aspect of today’s online advertising activities for most of the online shops wanting to attract more customers to their business.

They are required to enable Facebook Product Ads and Google Shopping campaigns, and most recently the latest addition to the Facebook advertising programs – Facebook Shops.

A good data feed is vital to the success of your campaigns as it can make you stand out from the crowd, as well as making sure that the products you advertise are actually optimised for each channel as well as being up to date and in stock.

How to manage a shopping feed with Feedoptimise

Below I’ll list the top 3 most common practices when it comes to making your shopping feeds work and how Feedoptimise can help to deliver them:

  1. Ensure your feeds are up to date and in the right specification –
  2. First and foremost your feed needs to adhere to each channel specs, it needs to provide the right attributes in the right places;
  3. Secondly, make sure your feed is being updated on a regular basis, if your products are selling out quick you don’t want to overspend nor promote items which customer can’t purchase – it just limits your campaign profitability as well as annoying potential buyers. Not having an up to date feed can even get you suspended when it comes to Google Shopping.


We recommend making sure that your feed is being refreshed at least once daily, but in some cases, you should ensure it is updated even more often in line with how often things change your end.

Facebook enables 1h fetches, while Google fetches can be set up to max once a day, but with Feedoptimise we can push it as often as needed via their APIs or SFTP uploads to make sure your feeds are always up to date. We can also tailor imports and export from and out of Feedoptimise in accordance with your website inventory updates cycle, which in turn maximises the ROI of your campaigns.

And in case you can’t create a feed at all, or the feed you have doesn’t conform to each channel requirements, we’ve got your back! Feedoptimise can create Facebook and Google compatible catalogs out of any website or feed source. We can restructure your feeds to meet each channel specs, and in case you have no feed, we can either install our plugins available for most popular shopping carts or, if you have some bespoke builds, we can simply crawl your website by sending robots to it on a regular basis and build master feeds that way.

  1. Images – both platforms are visual, potential buyers search/browse/see your ads, and images are the very first thing they notice, thus it’s important to make sure your images adhere to each platform’s requirements to deliver the best results.

    Depending on the program you might need slightly different requirements/sizing but generally, the following specs work on both: minimum size 600px x 600px, preferably squares on the white background.

    Now, Google is a bit more forgiving when it comes to your images not being squares, but Facebook really likes to see that aspect ratio (1:1) as in some cases cropping might go wrong and you might lose important aspects of your product details.

    In case that is not something you can provide, don’t worry, Feedoptimise has tools which can help you to scale images directly under our platform to deliver on those requirements. We can resize your images to make sure they fit required dimensions as well as the aspect ratio. We can also convert your background in case it’s transparent (both platforms will usually convert it to black in those cases) thus making sure your images look great.
  2. Titles – now this is where those two platforms might not overlap with their recommendations, thus I’ll describe it separately:
  3. Google – is a search engine first and foremost, thus the words you include in your titles will impact your reach, relevance and ad rank – factors which are not only deciding about how vast your audience is, but also how much you pay, yes, that too. Generally less relevant results will influence higher CPC costs than those which are matching closer to a user query.

    What does that mean to your titles in practice? – make them relevant, you have a limit of 150 characters (try putting the most important details first, users will usually see only the first 70 characters) thus try adding keywords which describe your product better and that people are likely to search for e.g. colours, product types, brand, model numbers, materials – depending on the sector you are in, just make sure you describe your items as accurately as possible, but making sure those titles are human-friendly and still look OK when read by people. At the end of the day you don’t want the title to be just a random list of keywords – they need to make sense and look nice, the general SEO rules apply here in that sense.

    Now, we understand you don’t always want to/are able to do it on your website, don’t worry, Feedoptimise can change titles inside the feed only, thus not requiring any website changes, and lots of those things we can automate meaning no extra editorial input will be required, saving you time and making your feeds work better.
  4. Facebook – this platform, on the other hand, is visual-first. Campaigns you run there are not driven by what people are searching for, but by what they have searched for before when visiting your website or by the demographics you target. Titles here should be short but descriptive, images are what will occupy most of the space and attract customers’ attention and as mentioned under point 2, Feedoptimise can make sure they are right in case your platform doesn’t provide any options.

So to sum up, having a data feed is one thing but having a good data feed is a completely different matter.

Feedoptimise works with lots of customers across lots of sectors keeping us on top of the latest requirements and best practices, thus helping our customers and DMT team to work with the best possible quality feeds, therefore, ensuring the success of your shopping campaigns.

If you have any queries, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us via our website – https://www.feedoptimise.com/

- Marcin, CEO of Feedoptimise