Supporting Dell’s global marketing campaigns with a platform built for complexity and scale

Since its inception 40 years ago, Dell has taken numerous steps to grow its worldwide presence, such as opening manufacturing centers on multiple continents and establishing an ecommerce presence early to increase product exposure in different markets.

In 2020, the global leader in computer, IT, and technology solutions saw another opportunity to expand its global footprint, this time on the paid search side of the business. But to fully unlock its advertising campaigns, Dell had to find a partner with the power to do more.

“We needed enterprise-level support, a platform that can manage the complexity of our product feeds, and a partner that can manage the fast-paced and transactional nature of our business,” said Paul Mansour, the Global Marketing Director at Dell. “It’s a global, 24-hours-a-day business with a major ecommerce site, so we needed someone that can step in at any time of the day and help us rectify issues, provide support, and manage the complexities there.”

Dell’s performance marketing team tried other major service providers over the years, including its most-recent vendor, a boutique European firm. While the team didn’t have any major issues with its latest feed partner, the company’s needs and appetite for ecommerce expansion simply outgrew the support it could provide.

“Before, we were working with a small team in a different time zone, which made resolving feed errors globally rather difficult,” said Matthew Lee, the Digital Shopping Lead at EssenceMediacom—an agency partner Feedonomics works closely with to support Dell’s advertising initiatives.

After researching different options, Dell’s performance marketing team opted for the market-leading service and channel expertise from Feedonomics to support the company’s advertising initiatives across 17 countries.

Since it started working with Feedonomics in December 2020, the team has felt the impact of having a full-service feed management partner in many ways. Not only has Feedonomics helped Dell improve its performance and save time, but the hands-on support it provides has also allowed EssenceMediacom to focus on long-term strategies for sustained growth.

“Feedonomics is a terrific partner,” Mansour said. “The team has done a fantastic job organizing and optimizing our complex data while providing the global, always-available service we need for our business.”

A platform built for complexity and scale

Navigating the complexity of Dell’s data was the starting point when onboarding began in December 2020. The company had its product data spread across multiple locations, including numerous store API endpoints, two websites, and some third-party ratings API.

Feedonomics leaned on the flexibility of its product feed management platform and the support of a full-service team to aid the migration, leveraging custom API connections and web crawls to import Dell’s data from multiple sources and combine it within the platform.

The efficient migration enabled Dell and EssenceMediacom to get a head start on other areas of the transition, such as channel and language support. The tech giant advertises on 18 channels, in nine languages, and across 17 countries.

“Having the Feedonomics team go through Dell’s schema, its website, and find solutions for how to create every title, every description, figure out where all the URLs are coming from,” Lee said, “that level of detail, drilling down into all of those for 15-plus countries in a matter of months, was pretty impressive.”

With so many moving parts, transparency has been key for Dell’s performance marketing team and EssenceMediacom. Because the company’s product data is centralized within Feedonomics’ platform—which all parties have access to—each team has full visibility into processes like data sourcing, optimizations, and import and export schedules.

Full-service support and large-scale optimizations

Once Dell’s data was centralized in the platform, Feedonomics’ dedicated feed specialists started optimizing the company’s product catalog. Lee said Dell dealt with Google Merchant Center errors in the past, and Feedonomics’ ability to reverse engineer complex data setups helped the team implement large-scale transformer rules globally to improve Dell’s data quality.

“There are a lot of rules in place, especially since we have different business units all under one roof for this account,” Lee said. “For the Feedonomics onboarding, we had more than 15 countries in play at once—with live media—so we had to make sure we had exact replicas for every attribute for 37,000 products in the exports that Feedonomics was able to create by country. Having zero effect on live media across regions while onboarding and building hundreds of transformers on the backend was huge, and it put us on the path to success.”

Global support was another important piece of the puzzle for Dell because the performance marketing team supports multiple regions. Making large-scale feed optimizations and applying them across all of Dell’s feeds efficiently was a luxury the team just didn’t have in the past, said Mark Reimold, Dell’s Senior Manager of Digital Marketing.

“[Once all of the feeds were live] we quickly switched to run-the-business mode with a focus on optimization at scale so that we weren’t just enjoying best practices in pockets where we have special expertise, like the U.S. market,” he said. “We made enhancements for the U.S.-based feeds—like for Google, we made nice enhancements for title and product type—but then we used the Feedonomics team to scale out those changes across many countries. That just wasn’t feasible before, to scale best practices and optimizations with the small vendor that we had, and now we can.”

Product feed optimizations were only part of the feed support Dell required on a regular basis. Because the company has such a robust advertising operation, relying on a limited provider to troubleshoot every problem wasn’t a sustainable process.

With Feedonomics, Dell and EssenceMediacom are not only able to make changes faster, but Lee said there are also safeguards in place to ensure error detection and resolution go smoothly.

“Our data governance is almost foolproof now with so many different alerts set up across the board,” he said. “Previously, we would have to have people [across different organizations] reach out, ‘Hey, this is not live. This isn’t working.’ We have alerts set up at every single touchpoint across the board where we can quickly flag this ourselves and go in and fix it before the teams even notice.”

More time to focus on long-term strategy

With Feedonomics on board, the word “fix” has taken on new meaning for Lee and others. Instead of just bandaging situations, which he said was the case before, the processes in place to support Dell have allowed everyone to think long-term.

“We’re much more nimble in fixing things,” Lee said. “Now, we have a large team, including [two dedicated feed managers at Feedonomics] that we work with very closely, and then a bunch of engineers. I think we’ve gotten maybe three or four times faster in the turnaround time of fixing things…

“And while we’re fixing things extremely quickly, we also understand the process, the source, the data accuracy. That’s gotten so much better, so we don’t have to fix things as often. We’re catching these problems, we’re finding the root issue, we’re coming together as a team, and then developing a kind of process and a syntax to not only fix this issue, but to fix it forever.”

High-quality data drives successful ad campaigns, and it didn’t take long for Dell and EssenceMediacom to see the benefits of working with Feedonomics.

Following the partnership, the tech giant’s click-through rate (15%) and return on ad spend (16%) increased year-over-year, and Lee largely attributes this improvement to a refined approach to product data accuracy.

Prior to Feedonomics, teams at Dell and EssenceMediacom often had to scramble to remedy whatever issue was right in front of them, taking their focus away from long-term strategy enhancements. They now have that time back, giving them the freedom and peace and mind to pursue growth initiatives.

“I definitely rest a little bit easier at night knowing that we have a global, 24/7 partner on board,” Mansour said. “Other feed providers have always been able to eventually wrap their head around our logic, but with Feedonomics, we have those enterprise support capabilities.”