Feed management: what is it and why you need it in your eCommerce strategy

Product visibility is the key to success in today’s super-competitive eCommerce world. That’s why experienced digital marketers and advertising agencies are turning to product feed management and automation tools.

They’re a simple, time-saving solution for making sure your products get seen, while also delivering better ROI and ROAS, and ensuring data accuracy across all your sales channels.

This quick guide walks you through everything you need to know about feed management: What is it? How can it help eCommerce brands to grow their business? And why should it be a part of every digital advertising campaign?

What is feed management?

Feed management (also known as product feed management) is the process of filtering, enriching, optimizing, and automating product data flows to make it easier to promote and sell across multiple platforms.

With the right feed management tool, you can add additional data and attributes to your product descriptions so you can enrich product information. Feed management solutions like Channable also give you a rule-based system to easily and automatically filter your content.

Plus, they ensure product data synchronization across multiple feeds, so you don’t have to manually adjust product data to match each ad platform’s data formatting rules.

Major benefits of feed management tools

Feed management tools deliver many benefits for eCommerce businesses and marketers. They use data-driven methods and feed automation to significantly increase product visibility and ensure relevant content is displayed to the right audience at the right time.

As a result, they boost your ROI and ROAS.

They also deliver major time savings and better accuracy. Smart automation features and custom rules make it easier than ever to manage even huge product portfolios across multiple channels, all from a single dashboard.

Plus, the best feed management solutions are built for scalability, so you can add additional products and channels as the business expands.

In short, with the right feed management solution, you benefit from:

• Increased product visibility
• Stronger ROI & ROAS
• Greater accuracy and better product-market match
• Feed automation
• Significant time savings
• Greater efficiency, even with large product ranges and multiple channels
• Simple scalability

Why feed management is so important

Digital marketing is, on paper, a simple process: a user searches for a product or service, sees your ad or product listing, clicks on it, and becomes a customer.
That's the theory, but it doesn’t always work out like that in practice.

"When you dig into the data and start running experiments, you quickly learn that effects of online ads are not what you might expect.," says Sinan Aral in theHarvard Business Review

We're becoming conditioned to hate ads, warns Tiffany Hsu in theNew York TimesIt's not because we don't want to buy more stuff. We do. It's because some ads are poorly targeted, full of inaccurate information, incorrectly formatted, or just plain bad.

Every marketer must spend time ensuring each ad is as effective as possible. But when advertising on multiple channels, this can be a huge challenge.

“I see a lot of brands running standard campaigns without much thought and usually with a limited budget on each channel, reducing the reach and impact they can have,” says digital marketing expert Kevin Wiles. “They’re often working with a limited budget on each channel, reducing the reach and impact they can have.” This principle is also true for non-PPC product listings.

That's just the start. If you don't follow the strict rules set out by channel owners, such as Google, they'll pull your ads – creating a huge amount of work to get things right.

“It’s worth spending the time going through your merchant feed to fix any violations, any warnings (such as missing GTINs), or anything holding your traffic back,” says ​​Tom Jenane, a digital marketer at ethical start-upNatures Health Box

That’s not all. If your ads are deemed misleading or fraudulent, they can damage your reputation and even result in legal challenges.

Feed management simplifies the digital marketing process, so you can concentrate on your core business without having to constantly update your ads manually.

Feed management basics

When you advertise through comparison sites, marketplaces, affiliate networks, or other third parties, they ask for product information in a specific format.

Let’s go back to basics and list some of the essential parts of any digital ad:
Title: Product name

• Description: What the product or service is and what it does
• Price: How much does it cost?
• Category: The department or category of the product
• Availability: Whether it's in stock or not
• Quantity: How many units come with each order
• Extra information in bullet points: Any key features or selling points for the product or service
• Other key attributes: Material, size, color, EAN/GTIN number, and basically any information you want to communicate to the customer about the product

Your product feed (or product data feed) is a digital file containing an overview of the products or items you want to advertise online. If you already manage an online shop built on an eCommerce platform like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce, it's easy to extract this data file as an XML, CSV, or text file.

In an ideal world, you'd just copy the data across channels. However, in most cases, your product feed won't precisely match what the channel provider wants.

So what do you do? You can manually export your product catalog to various channels, but you'll soon find this becomes impossible to manage. The task gets bigger and more complex the more channels you have.

“Staying true to your brand, maintaining its authority, and keeping your messaging consistent while developing channel-specific creatives that tap into the conventions that drive performance in each channel is a challenge,” says Samuli Pehkonen, co-founder of ethical clothing brandNew Standard.“It takes deep knowledge of each channel and a lot of resources for creative development to drive cross-channel performance.”

Product data synchronization and feed automation across multiple ad networks

When preparing ads for different channels, each channel (Google Shopping, Facebook, TikTok, etc.) has unique requirements for product feed information.

“Managing large amounts of products over several advertising channels is a huge challenge,” says digital marketing expert Ian Spencer. Working with healthcare disruptorStronger Bones, he’s faced with difficult decisions on optimizing ads to compete with some of the UK’s largest spenders.

“I’m always searching for solutions like feed management that can save time and money while improving ROI and ROAS.”

Don't worry; you've already done the hard work when creating your product descriptions and store listings. The key here is to optimize the product information to ensure it meets each channel's precise requirements.

Why? Firstly, doing so will ensure your store listing is displayed correctly and doesn't break any rules. Secondly, the better and more relevant your product listing, the higher your CTR.

Three different types of fields for each product feed listing:

1. Required fields– Mandatory fields you'll need to complete for every listing
2. Optional fields– Additional information that helps customers understand your product better, including product type, price, delivery information, etc.
3. Custom fields– Some channels enable you to add custom data fields to provide extra information on your product

Here are some quick links to popular advertising channels. You’ll find details on the ad specs they need. Dig into the details and you’ll see how different each one is.

• Facebook advertising specs
• Google display ad specs
• TikTok Video ad specs
• Twitter ad specs
• Microsoft ad specs

If you’re used to managing ad campaigns across multiple channels, you know how complex this task can be. Now let’s look at how you can simplify and automate product listings with the help of smart feed management tools.

What is a feed management tool, and how can it help me optimize my product feed?

Feed management tools take all the hard work out of optimizing and automating product feed data.

These tools are cloud-based for easy deployment and scalability, and the best ones are very easy to use. Simply upload your original product data file, and the tool optimizes your descriptions to meet each different channel’s requirements.

But a good feed management tool does a lot more than just copy-paste data from one feed into another. It actually improves your feeds throughfeed optimization.

The more data you provide, the better the channel can understand what you're selling and match your products with visitors' search queries.

“When the number of SKUs is going up, I see a clear need to be able to optimize and administer our product feeds,” says Pehkonen. “I'm especially interested in solutions with great data optimization potential when we get there.”

Do I really need a feed management tool?

If you've got the time to manually manage, edit, and update every product listing to meet each ad platform’s requirements, then no. For everyone else – especially retailers with a large number of SKUs – the answer is yes.

“Usually, different campaigns are put together and rolled out across various channels without a proper strategy,” warns Princely Bibi, Senior PPC Specialist at Coast Digital. “Customers usually don't have the right kind of assets required across various channels.”

Feed management tools with feed automation help fill this gap. The tool automates all the boring and time-consuming parts of digital marketing. It saves time while also reducing manual errors.

As a result, each product listing is active immediately, and the data is accurate, so you don’t have to worry about damaging trust or running into legal issues.

5 reasons why you need feed management

1. Failing with formats:Every channel has its requirements and policies, and you must meet them all to sell or list your products. If you use your product data feed, listings could be poorly formatted, badly displayed, and inaccurate.

2. Time and money troubles: Without an automated products list, you'll have to list your products one by one, which can take a massive amount of time and resources. Do you have the staff or the budget?

3. Stock availability struggles: If your inventory isn't accurately displayed on each channel, you could oversell products. This can lead to disappointed customers and damaging reviews.

4. Problems with portals:You'll need to log in to several seller portals, which can take significant time. The bigger your business and the more products you sell, the greater the resource requirement.

5. Data disasters: Manual mistakes in raw data can lead to product listings being rejected, resulting in no sales.

Can Channable simplify my feed management?

Yes! Channable is built to make feed management easy, so you can leave the repetitive product data management to us, while you focus on your core business.

Thousands of eCommerce retailers and digital agencies use Channable to optimize product listings, stay compliant with channel requirements, and keep product data accurate and up to date, all while improving efficiency and customer experience.

Here are just a few key areas where Channable can improve your feed management:

Feed automation: Smarter listings with less effort

Channable’s feed automation tools help you easily organize product listings for any export channel. Thanks to smart categorization, Channable can automatically match your products to the right categories on each platform, saving time and boosting visibility.

You can also set up custom “if-then” rules to automate updates across your entire catalog with no coding required. These rules apply automatically to new SKUs and provide instant feedback, so you have full control over which products are sent where, and how they appear.

High-quality feeds that stay up to date

To perform well on sales channels, your product feeds need to be clean, complete, and compliant. Channable helps ensure your feeds always meet the latest specifications, automatically adapting to any channel updates and resubmitting product data to prevent downtime or errors.

Product data synchronization in real time

Managing inventory manually can lead to overselling or outdated listings. Channable solves this with real-time product data synchronization through API connections.

These APIs create a constant flow of information between your online store and marketplaces, so stock levels are always accurate across all channels. Whether you choose scheduled feed updates or sync data instantly via API, your customers always see the right availability.

Optimize your feed (before your competitors do)

Feed management tools are a proven solution for boosting ROI and ROAS. That’s why they’re becoming vital to remaining competitive in the eCommerce market today.

Channable can help you optimize your product feeds for your targeted channels, so you’re connecting with the right audiences and increasing conversion.

Want to see how Channable can help optimize and automate your feed? Get hands-on with our feed management tool for free.