subject: How to Optimize Product Feeds [print this page] How to Optimize Product Feeds How to Optimize Product Feeds
With the advent of the Internet, the growing tendency amongst the buying community is to shop online for product purchases. For the sake of convenience, the prospective buyers look to Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE) to compare prices, study reviews, obtain information about products and make decisions what to buy and from whom.
But remember CSEs are dispassionate impartial bodies as they do not sell any of the products featured on their sites. They restrict themselves to merely advertising the products from supliers for viewing by a diverse online buying community. It is the manufacturers or sellers who are using CSEs to capture the attention and educate the prospective shoppers about their products.
To fully exploit this opportunity and outbeat competitors, you obviously need a product data feed. Further, it is essential that you optimize the feed to gain maximum exposure in CSE search results.
People are today fond of searching the Internet for buying whatever products they need and they scan a product page for knowing the best price, to identify a brand they trust, and check for shipping details, pricing and availability of seasonal discounts and special packages.
In view of this, the clickthrough rates (CTR) and conversions are bound to increase particularly when the titles are apt and relevant, the product details are informative and the temptation to buy is not resistable. It is therefore worthwhile to consider some useful tips for optimizing feeds to maximize your exposure in shopping engine results.
On search engines, it is the online shoppers who decide what they wish to see or what to ignore. They will obviously search for brand, model, product details, price etc. Apt keywords using bold letters in the product title will increase the click possibilities of your listing and also qualify your lead so search engine optimization is necessary.
Please know that vague classifications/categorizations can result in scanty and poor quality clicks. Your campaign will lose the opportunity of luring qualified shopping traffic. For instance, if you are selling mobile phones and classify them as electronics in your product feed, your competitors will score and you will positively lose.
To really come good, you wuill have to incorporate elaborately the specifications, attributes and features of each of your product. This will facilitate frequent surfacing of your listing for targeted keywords resulting higher conversions.
Yet another secret success formula is to cross-relate your products for instance, you can choose to say "can be used with," "best suited for," and the like, so thast your product may be displayed as a related product thereby increasing visibility to the prospective buyers.
Human psychology is such that people are more drawn towards bigger images and they love close-up pictures that show multiple angles of the product. Even if CSEs display a thumbnail image on the search results, you can provide shoppers the feasibility of clicking through to obtain full size image of your product. To further inspire customer confidence, you can incorporate your company logo and CSE will allow this if you pay extra charges.
Most buyers are passionately fond of discounts and are always searching for bargain offers, discounts, free shipping etc. You must seriously think of providing some such promotion scheme in the feed to CSEs to motivate buyers.
Needless to say, you should strive to get into the top three listings in the leading search engines like Google or a CSE. It is common knowledge that the top three results always grab the lion's share of qualified leads and the conversion rate for the top three listings are always disproportionately high.
It may be concluded that manufacturers/ suppliers who focus on optimizing their feeds and exploit the new opportunities provided by the CSEs will attract increased traffic and commensurate conversions.
