Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
Welcome to the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we revisit the episode with Jacques van der Wilt, founder and CEO of Datafeedwatch.com, where we talked about feed optimization and why it increases your pay per click conversions. So let's dive right into it.
Voice over [00:00:16]:
This is the e commerce Coffee Break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host, Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google.
Voice over [00:00:41]:
Welcome to the hello and welcome to.
Claus Lauter [00:00:43]:
Another episode of e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to dive into a topic that should be very high on the list of every merchant. We want to talk about data feed optimization. Now, a lot of merchants do not even know what that is, but I'll just give you an example how important it is. There is more than 2000 search engines, social platforms, social channels, marketplaces, custom channels in more than 60 countries around the world. And most versions are only on Google and Facebook. And that's basically it. And they do it manually.
Claus Lauter [00:01:09]:
There's a better way to do that. And that's what we want to talk about today. With me on the show, I have Jacques van der Wilt. He's the founder and CEO of Data Feed Watch and he is a shopping feed industry leader, a startup mentor and entrepreneur, Chuck held leadership position in both the United States and Europe. And he's also a seasoned guest speaker at industry and mentors at startup Bootcamp. So Jacques, definitely the right person to talk to when it comes to data feeds. And I would like to welcome him to the show. Hi, Jacques.
Claus Lauter [00:01:35]:
How are you today?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:01:36]:
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, Claus. I'm good. How are you?
Claus Lauter [00:01:40]:
Very well, Jacques. Data feed, not everyone knows what that is, what that means, what it does. Maybe give a bit of an overview. And let's get started there.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:01:48]:
Let me start very basic. Virtually every retailer wants to advertise his products on advertising channels like Google, Facebook, comparison shopping sites, affiliate networks and what have you. And in order to even get started, you need to tell the channel. Let's continue to take Google as an example. You need to tell the channel what the products are that you're selling. And in order to do so, Google basically says, yo, send me an excel file with all the product data in it. So the first column is the unique id and then the title and the description and the price and the image link and everything else. And then I understand what you sell and then I will enable you to create an advertising campaign in Google Ads.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:02:34]:
So anyway, that's not too difficult. You just need to make sure that you're meeting the requirements that Google puts up. So the unique id goes in a field, a column called id, whereas next day you want to also send a data feed with your product data to, let's say price runner, and then say, well, the unique id needs to go in the field called skew. Right? And then the third general is going to want article number. And so they'll all have different requirements, not just for the field names, but also for the formats of the feed, the content of the feed and what have you. So if that isn't enough trouble to begin with, they want you, rightfully so, to update your product data every day. And that makes total sense, not just because you are discontinuing products and adding new ones, but also you're changing prices of, let's say 1020 percent of your products overnight. And most importantly, you run out of stock for some products, whereas you add new stock to other products that you used to be out of stock for.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:03:38]:
So, so much changes that you want to update that at least once a day. Okay, so far so good, but you want to do that manually, that's a disaster. So you need to take action at least once a day to get feeds up and running with three different formats and what have you. So anyway, life is too short. Especially merchants. They're juggling like 1020 balls from buying stuff to selling stuff to operations, warehousing and what have you. So they shouldn't be spending time on this. Hence, enter data feed watch.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:04:13]:
So, data feed Watch is a web based application that connects directly to your online store, whether that's a bespoke one or one on Shopify, woo, ecommerce, what have you, we're integrated with everything, and then we're downloading all of your product data automatically every night or 24 times a day if that's what you want. Subsequently, we enable and help you to create those data feeds to Google, to Facebook, to pricerunner, to anywhere you would like to go, including custom channels. And then when that's in place, you can still optimize and change everything. But at least you know that every day my data is taken from the store and updated on those channels. So I have fresh data. I will not be selling out of stock products. My prices will be updated, so will my sale price, et cetera. So first thing we help you with is meet those feed requirements.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:05:10]:
Subsequently, you find out if you send out those feeds to, for example, Google, Google will disapprove a number of products because you forgot to add color as a separate field, and some of the products do not have a description or a price. So next thing you want to do is fix those problems so that Google will approve all of your products, which means that you will get to advertise these products. Thirdly, now that we're at it, we might as well optimize the data. And you're thinking, well, my data is pretty good. Well, sure, but it may be optimized for your online store, which does not necessarily mean it is optimized for your advertising campaign. So let me give you a few examples. Let's say you sell jeans, right? So you have jeans. If a visitor goes there, you will go to the pants section and there who will find the 501, right? So the page will just show the image of the pair of jeans and 501.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:06:11]:
So 501 on the shops page is an excellent title. But if you want to advertise this very same pair of pants, you want the title to be, remember what a product listing ad on the Google shirt looks like. It's that big image and subsequently the title. And the title should be Levi's 501 men's blue jeans, size 32. Why is that so much better? Because this is how people search. Now, your consumer will either search for exactly that, or at least what the brand is, what the size is, what color he's after, and obviously they want spare jeans. If there's a big match between the search query of the consumer and the title in the product ad, Google is going to, hmm, this guy is looking very specifically for a pair of jeans. And I've got an ad here that has a title that's exactly that.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:07:09]:
So that must be a good match. So therefore, I should show this ad instead of other ads. So there you have it. An enriched title will get you more impressions, especially on the long tail searches. If your ads out there, the customer is more likely to click it because, hey, this is exactly what he was searching for, right? And after he clicks, he's just more likely to buy because after all, he's getting exactly what he was looking for. So Titanric print is my favorite example for how to optimize data for campaign performance because it gets you more impressions, a higher CTR and a higher conversion rate. And all of that by combining six fields for all of your products. So brand, product, type, color, size and what have you in an intuitive tool like ours to achieve that will take you 30 seconds.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:08:09]:
And that's it. So it can be this simple and can be that powerful.
Claus Lauter [00:08:14]:
I think using a data feed should be done by every merchant out there, and then some of them might use it already. And then you mentioned Google, obviously, Google Merchant center. And I think a lot of them, the first problem they have, they do not check on disapproved products, so they just connect it to the merchant center. And then I think it's fire and forget. And then they wonder that nothing's coming in. Now, one question I have. A lot of stores go to the direction of multilocation, multi language. So basically they want to have products in different countries announced.
Claus Lauter [00:08:50]:
Does Datafeedwatch support that as well? How does that work?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:08:53]:
Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of merchants that, for instance, have multilocations on Shopify or Magenta, which means that they're selling, let's say, the same 25,000 products in five different countries, and therefore in five different languages. So basically, they've already created five different stores in their shopping cart, whether it's like really physically five, or in a more harmonized way, like on Shopify and Magenta, they have five stores. That means that they will create five stores in daily feedboards and will download the appropriate data language data for each of the stores. And then your UK store. In your UK store, you will create a data feed for Google UK, Facebook UK price run the UK, whereas for the do something. You may do the same thing for the local Google and Facebook, but maybe also ads, Orlando or idialo or some other local language sites that require you to provide your data in the local language.
Claus Lauter [00:09:59]:
Hey Claus, here, just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, subscribe to the weekly newsletter at newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com. I score and create 50 news sources so you don't have to, saving your hours of research. Grow your revenue with ecommerce news, marketing strategies, tools, podcast interviews and more, all in a quick three minute read. So head over to newsletter ecommercecoffeebreak.com to subscribe, as said, 100% free. Also, you will find the link in the show notes. And now back to the show when you set up your product in Shopify, for instance, on Woocommerce, Magento, whatever it is, I think a lot of merchants do not really fill in the most crucial information. What are the most important fields that they definitely need to have on their product detail page when they feed in the data to make it really work?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:10:44]:
Well, the stuff you probably won't be able to forget anyway when you start entering data in your store is stuff like a title and the price, those are really indispensable. What people tend to forget is what Google would call optional fields. So for example, apparel, every apparel product requires you to enter color and size material and some other stuff as separate fields. So the retailer just enters the title, the price description, everything's in there. So he's happy and then he goes to David watch. And then David says, hey, you need to fill out the color field because it's apparel, right? We will not let you save this feed until you've mapped the color field because if you don't, we know it's going to be disapproved. We want to prevent that from happening and what have you. So the way to solve that outside id go back at your store and you fill out the color field for all of your 25,000 products.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:11:44]:
That's going to take you a couple of days, right? So just as an example, most retailers also mention the color of a product in their description, right? So that in David was you use an extract rule that will extract the colors from description or your title or from somewhere else and bang, within a minute you've created a color field or a size field that you didn't have in the first place. So whatever you forget now, 99% of the cases you can make up for it with an intelligent tool like that if you watch.
Claus Lauter [00:12:20]:
Okay, that's quite helpful. Now when it comes to these different channels that you can use. And we said there's more than 2000 in a ton of countries, so it's a lot people mainly think about Google, Google shopping. What would be the main ones that you would recommend to be also on beside of Google?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:12:37]:
Claus? We published a feed marketing report in the course of last year. As Datafeedwatch is a top five global player, we felt that whatever is happening at Datafeed Watch is representative of what's happening in the world of data feeds globally. So one of the things that came out that I thought was very interesting is like you say the number of people that is using Google is like 92% and people on social is like 54% and then the combination is 44%. So 44% of all retailers already do, let's say, Google and Facebook search and social, the next category is only 11% and that is affiliate networks. And I think that is the runner up. And I think that that is really the one that's easy to forget. People, they're also not doing price comparison sites on a large scale, but because they think, hey, I'm on Google, so I'm good. Comparison happens there as well.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:13:44]:
But affiliate networks basically is like a different type of advertising. It is CPA based, so cost per acquisition, cost per sale. It's therefore pretty risk free because, you know, I'm bidding you $5 for every time you sell something for me, and it is not that hard to do. And again, you just need to create a data feed to get there. So I would recommend every retailer to look into affiliate networks. It depends on your product. Maybe some products are less suited for it than others, but in many cases, it is a great type of advertising to add. Obviously, I only spoke about advertising channels right now, but the third biggest elephant in the room after Google and Facebook, or even before Google and Facebook, is Amazon.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:14:36]:
So whether you want to be on the marketplace or not is a very fundamental choice. On the one hand, you should be, because for at least half of the population in the western world, especially in the US, Amazon is the starting point for a product search for consumers, even more so than Google. On the other hand, retailers are sometimes afraid that if I start selling on Amazon, I will not be longer in control of the customer relationship. And if I'm going to be very successful at Amazon, maybe they're going to sell my stuff by themselves and then they're running me out of business. So those are things to consider. But in terms of where is your consumer? He's on Amazon. He is. So obviously the holy trinity of search, social and marketplaces.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:15:34]:
Google, Facebook, Amazon is the first thing to consider for every retailer.
Claus Lauter [00:15:38]:
Okay, yeah, I'm 100% with you on the same page when it comes to Amazon, it's a two sided sword there. Obviously, people go to Amazon with a buyer's intention, so out of the bat, they are already better customers if they buy it from you. But you're 100% right. Amazon keeps your data. Amazon can be a risk. And at the end, Amazon is also a very expensive channel if you sell over Amazon, because they take a ton of money from you, from immersion, to make it work, but nevertheless, you should be on Amazon 100% agree on that one. When immersion wants to start optimizing the data feeds, what kind of homework do they need to do before they can really get started?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:16:15]:
Before they get started? Well, if you sign up to data feed watch, there's not much homework to do because we have a template based system. So we're sort of forcing you into the right direction. And if you feel like doing something stupid, we won't let you. Right. We won't let you save a bad feed. We'll show you a feed review. If you do save it so you can see where you go wrong. Maybe homework is not the thing we should be looking for, but what can you do with daily feed optimization that will actually improve the results of your campaign? So fixing problems is fixing problems.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:16:53]:
It's not sexy. It has to be done. It's against disapprovals. Then again, mind you, if 20% of your products are being disapproved, for example, because you didn't add a color field, that also has a big impact on your sales because now you're selling only 80% of your products on Google instead of 100. So fixing problems, fixing disapproval is really super important. And then if you look into optimization, I already gave you the title example. That's number one. But let's not forget the images.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:17:24]:
Images are not necessarily something that you can optimize within a data feed tool. However, since the image comprises what would it be class 66% of the total space of a product ad. And since humans have become way more visual over time, the image is your killer ad. You do not have good images. Forget it. You will lose the battle from your competitors who did invest in good images. And good doesn't only mean that they are without text and they're on a white background and stuff like that. It means they need to be high quality with a lot of pixels.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:18:08]:
And don't put the article on your kitchen table and use your iPhone to take a picture. Go to a studio and make real beautiful pictures. They are compelling. So yeah, spend time on that. And in terms of optimizing your images for your feed, you probably have like an average of five images in your feed anyway. Then just make sure that you map your best image as the main image and the rest as additional images. A third one, I'm talking out of my own experience, but also by looking at what the dedicate words clientele actually does, right? So optimizing field title is number one, image is number two. Also because it gets you a lot of errors.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:18:56]:
But creating custom labels is the third one. So a custom label is something that is in Google and Facebook and some other channels like that. It enables you to put out a bid on something that's not like the id or the brand or the product type or something. So you want to bid on something else, you create a custom label for it. So we see that our customers are creating custom labels for products that are on sale or in a certain category, or making a custom label for their best sellers. Makes sense, right? You got your best sellers, you want to sell more, so you want to bid 10% more on that. Also, custom labels will help you to enhance your bidding, right? So you may be selling shoes. You're selling that at a CPA of, let's say, $15.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:19:44]:
Are you making profit? And you're a happy camper, right? But at some point you drill down in the data and then you actually see that among your shoes, 20% is like cheap shoes, right? And the gross margin after subtracting the $50 CPA is zero or even negative. So you're losing money on the cheap shoes, you're making lots of money on the medium priced shoes. And then the high end shoes, you're making a boatload of profit. However, you're not selling that many. So now you can introduce custom labels for, let's say, three price categories of all of your shoes. And then you get a bit less on the cheap shoes. So CPA goes down to $10, you're still making money. Medium price shoes, you're good.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:20:31]:
High price shoes, you're going to increase your bid, your profit is going to go down, but your sales is going to skyrocket. And altogether you're making even more money than you did. So drilling down in the data and using custom labels to optimize your bids, that's also a way to get really profitable.
Claus Lauter [00:20:53]:
Okay, I think there's a ton of golden nuggets that you just mentioned there to really make it work. Tell me a little bit about the pricing on the setup and the onboarding. How does that work?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:21:03]:
Pricing starts at $69 per month and it goes up via 89 to 239 to whatever you need. We have a modular pricing, so that means that we're already quite affordable for SMB retailers. But we also have a lot of very large and enterprise level customers like for example, Adidas, who get tailored pricing because they have tens of thousands of products in dozens and dozens of countries. So anything goes, but you only pay for what you need and you're not paying anything extra. The average customer signs up the daily feed watch and then connects a store. And then the first thing we ask, like not even in person, but on the screen. You want to set up your own feeds or you want us to do it? The majority of the customer says, no, I want to do it myself. But still there's a fetch.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:21:55]:
Customer says, yeah, you guys do it for me, right? So no worries about setup, no worries about needing to understand how to do it. We'll just do it for you and it will run. And you just need to copy the link of the feed into your Google Merchant center or Facebook business center and you're good to go. But for the ones that want to do it themselves, they can get an onboarding call. So that usually takes like half an hour, more or less. Delegate voice is very intuitive, so it's easy to explain what to do in order to optimize your feed. By the end of the call, we probably mapped your first feed. You can probably instantly copy it to the next channel and you're good to go as well.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:22:34]:
Lastly, since I use the word tool a lot, David Watch is a tool. You need to do it yourself. But like I said, we do onboarding. We'll do it for you, anything you want. Most importantly, I will say 50% of what we do is the tool. The other 50% is support. So we provide support almost around the clock. First response time is often like less than 30 seconds.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:23:00]:
So with a single click, you're talking to somebody who will instantly solve your problem, advise you how to create a custom label, discuss with you what to exclude in order to be more profitable and what have you. So even customers that have been with us for like years and know the tool better than I do, they will still hit the chat balloon every once in a while to get some help, to get some advice and what have you. Because after all, we have people that have been doing this for years on a daily basis. So daily feedborch is a service. It is not a tool.
Claus Lauter [00:23:37]:
Okay, that sounds great. Where can people find more about you guys?
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:23:40]:
Dailyfeedborch.com. You'll find everything there about the service. We have an incredibly large blog where you'll find basically articles on any possible way to optimize your product data and your campaign performance.
Claus Lauter [00:23:55]:
Okay, I will put the link in the show notes and you just one click away. Chuck, thanks so much for giving a very in depth overview of what data feed watch can do for merchants. I think having a good data feed is crucial for every business that wants to grow. So for the ones that are listening and don't have a data feed activated right now, definitely look into datafeedwatch. Thanks so much for the call today.
Jacques Van Der Wilt [00:24:16]:
All righty. Thanks a lot, Claus. Have a good one.
Claus Lauter [00:24:18]:
You too. Hey, Claus here. Thanks for joining me on another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply comment and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast, and even better if you could leave a rating. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode.
Claus Lauter [00:24:42]:
Have a good one.