The holidays come early: what a Google Shopping feed audit uncovers

Feedonomics is a Business Reporter client

An optimised product feed could be your secret to holiday success – and a feed audit is how you start.

The holidays will be here before you know it, and with them the opportunity to break sales records while also getting your brand in front of countless new eyes. But this will only happen if people can find your products in the first place.

When someone hops on Google and runs a search, your goal is to get your product to surface at the top of the list or along the side in an ad. Yet even if your product is visible, what happens if something isn’t accurate? What if the price is wrong or the item is already out of stock?

Without the right feed management practices and platform in place, consistent visibility and accuracy become an uphill battle, while your chances of delivering a lacklustre customer experience climb.

The biggest shopping season of the year is only months away, and ensuring your brand is shown in the best light, or at all, starts with a feed audit – today.

The importance of a feed audit

Feed management is a core piece of online business success, as it will influence whether your products show up on Google, how accurate information is when it populates ads or Google Shopping, and more.

Despite this, many companies have a number of both simple and complex issues with their product data that prevents them from showing up across Google and affiliated networks. The end result? A hit to conversions, sales and the customer experience.

A feed audit can help you identify issues that impact overall feed performance, from minor mistakes such as extra spaces in titles to major optimisation problems. Even better: an audit takes little time, meaning you can do it well in advance of the holidays.

How a feed audit from Feedonomics works

Product feeds might be data-driven, but your business is personal. So is a feed audit from Feedonomics.

A feed audit begins with a one-to-one call from an expert, who learns about your business, goals and challenges. Next, our proprietary FeedGrader tool analyses your complete product data across your shopping, social, remarketing and affiliate channels. Once it’s done this, it weighs your data’s performance against best practices and industry benchmarks.

To do this, the Feedonomics audit looks specifically for elements such as missing attributes, suppressed listings, outdated titles and more. Historically, these impact your Google Merchant performance, which can impact whether your products appear in Google searches, and ultimately impact conversion rates.

What a feed audit looks like

The FeedGrader can identify more than 50 feed health challenges, all of which impact your organisation’s visibility on Google Shopping, and across your various social channels.

Common challenges that surface during a feed audit can include:

Once the tool has identified issues and opportunities for growth, it provides strategic tips for tackling the most frequent challenges holding back your feed data and Google presence.

Not only will the audit yield granular advice such as that above, it will also give you overarching best practices you can apply now and in the future. For instance, it will break down the difference in optimised titles for social versus those optimised for shopping channels, or how you can better utilise product categories.

While the strategic and granular tips made possible by FeedGrader are invaluable, the biggest benefit from the feed audit is one that reveals itself over time.

When you run a feed audit, you open the door to an ongoing Feedonomics relationship and all the automation and optimisation that comes with it. This includes more accurate pricing and stock information across your adverts and an improved, more consistent customer experience that delivers ongoing benefits to your business.

The average Feedonomics customer realises:

Now, imagine these kinds of benefits in time for the holiday rush.

The holiday rush starts now

A properly optimised product feed will help you all year and beyond. However, no time illustrates the benefits of an optimised feed better than the holiday season.

And the time to optimise is now.

Feedonomics can help you fix feed issues and drive visibility across Google, and quickly. But, even after the right changes are made, it takes time for them to yield fruit, much like SEO and other digital marketing efforts.

You might have months until the songs on the radio change and customers start filling their carts, but the time to optimise your feeds is now.

Sign up for a free feed audit from Feedonomics and discover how you can get your brand the attention it deserves – across Google and beyond.

More than 50 issues are impacting your feed health today – learn about them today.