Datafeed optimization

How to improve my ranking with better data feeds for Google Shopping, AdWords and price search engines?

Datafeed optimization

What is a Datafeed?

In e-commerce, data feed or product data feed usually refers to a CSV or XML file that contains item data. These files are exported from one system (store or WaWi) and made available to another system (e.g. price search engines such as idealo, marketplaces such as Amazon or eBay or Google Shopping / Product Listing Ads) so that they can then display and sell the products.

Every store system has an export function to create such a file. But often the store owner has no influence on the generation and the data feed is difficult to customize. This makes it difficult to generate exactly the format as required. The result is that the feed is rejected by e.g. Google Shopping Merchant Center and in the worst case the account is suspended because the data feed contains too many errors. Errors can be the most different things, e.g. that certain column names are not included or comma instead of point is used as decimal separator for prices.

With Synesty Studio you can improve and optimize data feeds and automate the whole process.

Examples of data feed optimization

  • Enrich product title with keywords (to be found better)
  • Limit title to maximum length
  • Filter out articles without image URL
  • Remove articles with 0,00 EUR prices
  • Remove special characters or line breaks from description texts
  • Calculate prices and markups (e.g. per brand, manufacturer, sales channel) to compensate sales commissions (keyword: automatic repricing)
  • Apply IF-THEN logic to specific columns (similar to spreadsheet programs like Excel or OpenOffice)
  • Remove and filter products that contain certain prohibited words
  • Category mapping (e.g. translating your own store categories into those of Google Shopping)

These are just a few examples of how you can improve, clean and optimize data feeds to increase your chances of selling on the portals.

Keep data up to date

However, always make sure that prices and information on availability and delivery times match the information on the product page of your store. Google can read your store website and recognizes if data in the feed deviates. In the worst case, this can lead to the blocking of your Merchant Center account.

I would like to automatically optimize my data feed on a regular basis. Is that possible?

Yes. Automation is the core of Synesty Studio. How well the feed can be improved depends strongly on the data quality of the source data. You can implement the optimization yourself with a few simple tools. You should only think about what exactly should be improved. The Google Merchant Center gives good hints regarding errors and problems. These are exactly the problems you should address.

Once the process is set up (one-time effort) the optimized feed can be transferred to Google automatically (usually FTP or URL - adjustable in the Merchant Center).

Try to answer the following questions:

  1. what does my own data look like? (source format)
  2. what should the data feed look like in the end? (target format, e.g. feed specification from Google)
  3. what is currently wrong and what needs to be done to get from the source format to the target format? (how would you do it with Excel for example).

If you are able to describe this in your words like in a cooking recipe, then this process can be automated with Synesty Studio. Due to the direct access to the interfaces and APIs of store systems like Magento, Shopware or plentymarkets the creation of individual product data feeds for these systems is especially easy. For all other systems without direct connection you can also reach your goal with CSV and XML files via FTP.

Example template.

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Last updated May 27, 2017
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