One of the most important (and often overlooked) aspects of successful ecommerce sales and revenue is good quality product data. Plenty of businesses pay attention to the appearance of their online store and focus on driving traffic there.
However, if a store owner is also selling across multiple platforms like Amazon, Google Shopping or Facebook Ads, then the product information you are sending also needs plenty of attention.
Fortunately, there are a few rules and tips which you can follow to optimize your data and increase conversions to improve your ecommerce sales.
Check the requirements of your sales channel
Before you can optimize your data, you need to understand the requirements of the channel(s) you want to sell on. This will include data categories like the id, title, description, url and image. Keep an eye out for where channels’ rules differ from each other.
Some sites, like Facebook and Instagram, give you a lot of freedom in how you want your product ads to appear. For example, you can choose if you want to add factors like logos, promotions or sales text to your images. Meanwhile Google Shopping has very different rules for the data you can and can’t include in your feed.
Clean your data
No matter which platform you’re selling on, it’s important that your data looks good to the user. For online consumers, this is the only means of understanding your product and what you’re offering.
Make sure you remove unwanted HTML text which is often left in product descriptions and title copy. Be consistent in your copy, too—for example, are you selling a product from ‘Dolce & Gabbana’, ‘D&G’ or ‘D and G’? Decide beforehand and make sure it is the same across all your listings.
Optimize your titles and descriptions
The text of your product listings is crucial to determining the success of your ecommerce sales. While it may seem smart to , cram your text full of keywords, this is not the case. Selecting a collection of relevant, SEO keywords will help your customers find what they are searching for.
Remember that the best sales copy doesn’t promote your product. Instead, it provides a detailed and engaging description of what it does. Again, different channels will have different rules on the length and layout of your text. Approach your copy from this angle first, and then begin to optimize it.
Optimize your product images
Product images have never been more important to the success of an ecommerce business than they are now. On average, viewers are spending, just 1.6 seconds viewing ads on Facebook, and 80% of the social media platform’s real estate is dominated by images. These statistics aren’t unique to Facebook. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your images are telling the story of your product straight away.
If the image regulations on one of your channels allow you some freedom,take that opportunity to optimize. Logos and promotional text (“best seller” or “limited offer”) draw the viewer’s eye and increase the chance of ecommerce conversions.
If you’re running dynamic retargeting campaigns, people who left your store without purchasing will be reminded of your products in their social media newsfeeds. Use your brand’s logo and color scheme to increase brand awareness and bring customers back to complete their purchase.
Set up custom labels
Custom labels are really useful tools for ecommerce merchants selling their products on Facebook, Google Shopping or affiliate networks.
They let you segment the products in your feed depending on a value of your choosing. Instead of just pushing your products based on standard categories like product type, size or color, you get to choose. You could use custom labels to indicate best sellers or only sell during seasonal periods (like Christmas sweaters or Halloween masks). You can then increase your bids, pushing these custom labels to the right audience at the opportune moment.
Regularly update your feed
Online stores need to keep their customers updated with new products, sales items and stock levels. This goes for the feeds you are sending to sales channels too.
Advertising products which are out of stock or incorrectly priced will not only lead to unhappy customers, but can also result in your ecommerce store getting temporarily banned from selling on certain channels like Google or Amazon. Luckily, data feed management tools let your update your optimized feed every few hours (or more often!) so you will never face out-of-date listings.
A few final thoughts
Alongside optimizing your online store and improving your SEO rankings, it may seem that your data feeds are less important. However, conversion rates will fall if ecommerce stores are not focusing on their product feeds too.
Select a feed management tool which lets you easily connect your online store, clean and optimize every aspect of your product data feed and export to any channel you want to sell on.
