GoDataFeed (GDF) is a powerful product feed submission tool which allows you to syndicate and list your products across tens of shopping comparison engine websites and merchants. This means that not only are you listing your products on your own website, but you’re leveraging vast, prexisting networks such as Amazon, Google Shopping, Rakuten, Shopping.com and many more.
Setting up a GoDataFeed account is a relatively painless process, just be sure that GoDataFeed has an integration with your eCommerce platform before starting. Consider their pricing plans and choose the one that’s best for you. One alternative to GoDataFeed is DataFeedWatch Consider how many shopping platforms you want to list your products on and which platforms might work best for the products you sell.
Once you’re done with the initial set up, here’s a few key tip on how to optimize the product feeds you’ve submitted to shopping comparison engines via GoDataFeed.
Tracking Performance
It’s hard to know where your campaigns stand if you don’t have a way to accurately measure how it’s performing. We recommend a multi-pronged approach to measurement and tracking the products you are submitting to shopping comparison engines.
First, tag your URLs. Use Google’s URL builder to create a set of tracking tag parameters that will be added to each of your GoDataFeed product feeds. Make sure the tracking parameters vary depending on which feed your applying them to.
For example, a Google Shopping feed would have different parameters than an Ebay Commerce Network feed so you could differentiate the traffic in analytics.
Second, install the platform-specific ROI tags. Almost every shopping comparison engine platform will have its own specific ROI code that you’ll need to install on the order confirmation page in order to accurately measure campaign performance. Ensure you install this tag as necessary.
While you will be managing your product feeds via GoDataFeed, you’ll still need accounts on each of the shopping comparison engine websites you submit your product feeds to. There you’ll be able to install the platform-specific ROI tags and view performance reports.
Third, implement GoDataFeed’s analytics/ROI code on your order confirmation page and product pages. This is separate from the platform-specific ROI tags. You can find detailed instructions on how to implement GDF’s analytics and ROI code here.
This three pronged tracking approach may seem like overkill, but it’s the best way to crosscheck performance data and ensure you’re not being duped by any of the shopping comparison engine websites. It also enhances your ability to optimize your campaigns where necessary.
Product Import Filters
Configuring the product import filters allows you to determine which products from your store will be submitted in the product feeds for the various eCommerce platforms you’ve chosen to sell on. It’s a great way to eliminate the products you don’t want to sell or are not worth selling on shopping comparison sites.
A common use for the product important filter is to restrict items that are priced below a certain threshold from being sold on a shopping comparison engine because their ROI is too low to be worth listing.
You can also use the import product filters to exclude seasonal items that may not be relevant to sell at specific times of the year.
Generally, you’ll want to focus on selling your best-selling items first while taking into consideration the products that give you the best ROI. It may not be worth listing that dog collar that sells for $4.99 on Google Shopping after taking CPC and shipping costs into consideration.
How you use the product import filters will depend on your shopping cart platform. Some shopping carts automatically push ALL the products you have to GDF with no other option, while others may only push the products you conditionally set to be pushed.
Fill in Missing Data
GoDataFeed is powerful because it makes the time-consuming and laborious process of formatting product feeds for each platform more efficient. By mapping fields accurately each time you set up a new feed, you can eliminate much of this strenuous setup process and also automate it so that new products are automatically added to shopping comparison site product feeds as they are added to your eCommerce store.
Nonetheless, sometimes the data just isn’t there for a specific shopping comparison platform which results in feed errors and warnings. Often times these errors and warnings will not allow those specific products to be submitted and in some rare cases the shopping comparison platforms may suspend your account for having too many problems.
With GoDataFeed, you can filling in the missing data on the fly without having to modify any of the product data in your store’s backend.
Rules can be set based on a variety of criteria. For example, if all of your products contain their size in the product name field of your store, but not in another size field, you can create a rule that looks for the product sizes in the product names and then uses it to fill a size field that is required but empty.
Sometimes on top of just fixing feed errors and warnings you need to submit optional data that is not required but is recommended by the shopping platform that you are listing your products on.
You can also set up rules under these circumstances to automatically fill in these recommended optional fields. For insta, when submitting a feed to Google Shopping the product_type field is recommended but not required. If you don’t have a product type specified in your store’s backend for each product, you can create a rule that assigns a value for the product_type field on a particular set of criteria.
Example of a rule:
If a product name contains “t-shirt”, then fill in the product type field with “T-Shirt”.
Even though GDF offers tremendous power in fixing a lot of bad or incomplete data from your shoppIng cart platform, you should still strive to have the best quality, most complete data there so you don’t have to set up a million rules in GDF to compensate for it.
Scheduling
One of the big reasons people use GoDataFeed is due to the automation it provides. Rather than manually creating, uploading and updating product feeds for various shopping comparison engines, GoDataFeed can create and submit these product feeds automatically on a schedule once set up. This avoids the problem of having to manually update product feeds every x amount of dates when they’re due to expire or if there are price and item changes for products on your shopping cart platform.
Make sure you set up GoDataFeed to do an automatic import of all of the items on your store on a set schedule. You can set this up to be daily, weekly or monthly as well as specify the times. The schedule you choose would depend on how often changes are made to the products you sell on your store, whether they be price updates or new product additions.
Also ensure you have properly integrated your GoDataFeed account with the shopping comparison engine that you want to sell your products on. Sometimes further setup is not necessary once you create a feed, but in some cases you need to specify FTP upload credentials in order to have GoDataFeed automatically submit your product feeds to the shopping comparison engines.
If left on the default setting, GoDataFeed will not efficiently import new data from you store, nor will it update product feeds for shopping comparison engines. This is by design to give you the most control over your data, but the benefits of using GoDataFeed’s automation capabilities are clear and obvious. It’s why people use GDF in the first place.
Conclusion
GoDataFeed presents a powerful way to get more of your products to sell on various shopping comparison engines. It helps to automate a laborious and labor intensive feed creation and management process. Once optimally set up, GoDataFeed handles almost all of the work autonomously.
Nonetheless, you should log-in on a weekly basis to ensure the health of your account and product feeds. It’s easy to forget in the face of all the automation that GoDataFeed provides, but it pays to ensure everything is running as smoothly as it should.
This means that the right products are being imported from your eCommerce platform and are being submitted successfully to your chosen shopping comparison websites.
This also means staying up to date with the policies, regulations and specifications that various shopping comparison engines have. You don’t want to have an underperforming campaign or an account that is suspended on a shopping comparison platform because you failed to update your data to be in accordance with a policy or specification update.
Happy selling!
