Feed management is like meal prep for your digital dinner party. You wouldn’t invite guests over and start cooking without a plan – digging through the fridge, scrambling to chop veggies, and hoping it all comes together.
Just like thoughtful prep in the kitchen sets up a home cook for a smooth, stress-free dinner, prepping your product feed sets up your Shopping campaigns for success before the very first click.
I absolutely love food – it’s a beautiful sensory experience that takes you on a journey, at least when done correctly! When I first started cooking in college at age 21, I had no clue what I was doing. Like many young aspiring foodies, I turned to The Food Network for help (and entertainment).
As a dedicated viewer of Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen, I naturally gravitated towards Worst Cooks in America. In this show, two celebrity chefs teach struggling home cooks how to significantly improve their skills. Watching this, I discovered the most critical element of cooking: Mise en Place. This French culinary philosophy, meaning “everything in its place,” emphasizes thoughtful preparation – dicing onions, mincing garlic, pre-portioning spices, draining and rinsing canned beans, and having it all set to the side, ready to deploy when the time comes. Proper prep allows cooks to smoothly and confidently work through a recipe, ensuring a successful dish.
Cooking depends heavily on timing and organization. If you’re sautéing garlic and onions but need to pause to rinse and drain several cans of beans, you risk burning your garlic, making it unusable by the time you’re ready to continue.
Feed management within the digital marketing sphere operates similarly: without careful preparation of your product data, your campaigns can quickly turn into chaotic and ineffective wastes of spend. Let’s dive into how meticulous product data prep can make your Google and Microsoft Shopping ads run smoothly, efficiently, and profitably.
Step 1: Chop and Season Your Data – The Core of Shopping Success
If mise en place is what allows a cook to move with ease and confidence in the kitchen, clean and optimized product data is what allows Shopping campaigns to function with power and precision. Without it, everything else (optimization, budget allocation, scaling strategy) becomes a scramble.
Think of your product feed as your recipe card in a Shopping campaign. These types of campaigns within Google and Microsoft don’t rely on keywords the same way Search campaigns do. Instead, they use the information in your product feed to match your ads with the right searches. So, if your data isn’t prepped and polished, it’s like tossing unlabeled, half-chopped ingredients into a pot and hoping it turns out well.
Great mise en place for your feed includes the following required attributes:
- Product Titles: These are the names of your dishes in the recipe book. Include the most important ingredients – brand, product type, color, size, or gender. Make them clear, descriptive, and appetizing. Keep it under 150 characters, and make the first 70 characters the star of the plate. This is what helps platforms and shoppers alike know exactly what they’re about to enjoy.
- Product Descriptions: Think of this as the chef’s notes or flavor profile on a menu. Use persuasive but natural language that highlights features and benefits of your product. Don’t just keyword-stuff it, though; this isn’t a salt shaker, it’s a finishing touch! Keep descriptions under 5,000 characters, making sure to front-load them with the most important information in the first 150-500 characters.
- Pricing and Availability: Just like telling people what’s for dinner and when it’ll be ready, your feed needs to be clear about what’s in stock and what it costs. This allows shoppers to know what to expect – no surprises, no letdowns. Are you serving new, used, or refurbished? Is it ready to go or still in prep (for example, is it preordered or backordered)?
- Identifiers (GTIN, MPN, Brand): Think of these like checking the labels on your ingredients. You wouldn’t want to mix up baking soda with baking powder – small details make a big difference. When these identifiers are missing or wrong, your products can get miscategorized or even rejected, which means they never make it to the table.
- Link and Image Link: This is plating and presentation. Make sure your URLs are functioning and stable, and that your images are crisp while accurately displaying your product.
- Condition: This is your final check before serving your dish. Are the products you’re serving new, used, or refurbished?
And while they’re not a required attribute for every product, these supporting mise en place details can add important finishing touches that help your products show up in front of the right shoppers:
- Product Type: Think of these like how you organize your pantry shelves. Product Type is like organizing your pantry your own way – grouping items how it makes sense for your store and your shoppers. The more accurately you sort things, the easier it is for Google to find the right ingredients when it’s serving up your ads. (Product Type is one of the most important, non-required attributes there is, as Google relies heavily on this to understand what your item is.)
- Color, Age Group, and Gender: These are required attributes for apparel products, and are good to have for non-apparel items where it makes sense. Think of them as calling out the key ingredients on your recipe card. Is it a chocolate cake or a lemon cake? Is it a kids’ spaghetti or a family-size lasagna? The clearer and more specific you are, the easier it is for Google to match your product to shoppers who are looking for exactly what you’re offering.
When your feed prep is rushed or sloppy, the kitchen quickly goes into chaos:
- Ad disapprovals: Your products never make it to the table (in this case, the SERP), and they miss out on getting purchased.
- Low visibility: It’s like burying your best dish at the back of the fridge – no one sees it!
- Wasted spend: Irrelevant clicks are like spending all evening cooking, only to forget the key ingredient, and you end up tossing the whole dish – time and money gone, and no one’s getting fed.
- Lost shopper trust: Nothing sours a dining experience faster than a bait-and-switch menu.
While mise en place isn’t the most glamorous of tasks, this behind-the-scenes prep is paramount to the success of a meal (and a Shopping campaign). It clears the way for smart strategy, better testing, and campaigns that scale like a five-course tasting menu.
Step 2: From Prep to Plate – Putting Your Feed to Work
Even at home, prepping your ingredients is just the first step: you still need to time everything so it’s ready all at once. Timing and coordination are what transform your diligent prep into a great meal – no one wants cold garlic bread or undercooked pasta. Shopping campaigns work the same way: once your feed is clean and ready, the real magic is in how and when you serve it.
Here’s how to bring it all together like a well-timed dinner:
- Structure your campaigns around your feed: Separate top-performers, seasonal items, or high-margin products into their own campaigns. You don’t give the same attention to frozen peas as you do to your famous homemade lasagna, so focus your effort (and budget) on the products that are most likely to impress: your proven winners. This gives you tighter control over budgets, bids, and performance.
- Prioritize your bestsellers: You wouldn’t let that crowd-pleasing lasagna go by the wayside in the back of the fridge, would you? Treat your bestsellers with care – keep them visible, well-supported, and ready to shine.
- Use Custom Labels like sections in your recipe binder: They help you group products by what matters (seasonality, promotions, inventory levels) so you can easily serve up the right items, at the right time, to the right customer, without digging through the whole pantry.
- Use Supplemental Feeds like quick prep hacks: Sometimes you don’t need to remake the whole meal – just tweak a few ingredients on the fly. Supplemental feeds let you make targeted updates (like promotions, inventory, or custom labels, as mentioned above) without touching your main feed, helping you stay nimble and keep your campaigns running smoothly.
- Check in while it’s cooking: Keep an eye on the numbers. Are certain products overcooked (burning through spend with no return)? Are others under-seasoned (getting impressions but no clicks)? Make adjustments as you go, just like tweaking the heat or adding seasoning when something’s not turning out quite right.
Great Shopping campaigns, like great dinners, don’t have to be complicated to be effective. With the right prep and timing, you’ll end up with something satisfying, both for your audience and your bottom line.
Closing Thought: Success Starts with Preparation
At the end of the day, feed management is the unsung hero of successful Shopping campaigns. It’s not flashy, but it’s foundational. Clean, accurate product data gives your campaigns the best possible shot at driving real results on Google, Microsoft, and beyond. So if you’re ready to turn down the chaos and turn up performance, it all starts with a well-prepped feed.Is your feed in need of some mise en place? We’re here to help you prep smarter – let’s get cooking!
