Two and a half years ago, Fox Racing rebuilt its websites with the goal of making its global advertising strategies more scalable. This required a move away from point-to-point feeds, which weren’t able to support the company’s growing advertising needs.

Owen Spencer—now the Director of Digital Applications at Fox Racing—was part of the marketing agency leading the website project at the time, and he said everyone involved understood how cumbersome and error-prone building a separate feed for every channel was. That’s because each feed had underlying code, ran on its own schedule, and required product data to be formatted differently for each shopping destination.

“There were no [error monitoring systems] in place, so our feed was going out, but we wouldn’t realize that anything was wrong until our marketing team or retention team came back and said, ‘Something’s not looking right here,'” Spencer said.

“Also, when we wanted to extend an attribute or change something slightly, we had to go and update that in every single one of those feeds. They would have to go through an extensive QA process to be released, and they would have to get put out in the release cycle. So if we had something where we wanted a small enhancement that might be needed to support an upcoming campaign, you had to get really lucky that there was room to get that developed, there was room to get that tested, and that that release cycle aligned with your campaign timing.”

To free up Fox Racing’s developers and scale its advertising efforts, Spencer said the company and its agency partner started looking for ways to improve efficiency. Finding a full-service provider who could own product feed management was at the top of the list, especially when the current process was slowing down the time to market.

“Fox Racing is a large, multinational company with a complex web of operations,” Spencer said. “There are many different moving parts that need to be coordinated to keep the business running smoothly. Managing product feeds on a point-to-point basis would have been difficult and inefficient for Fox Racing. Our agency had worked with other product feed management services in the past, and Feedonomics was the top recommendation.”

Since adopting Feedonomics in March 2022, the racing gear and lifestyle-clothing giant has expanded into seven new markets in EMEA, accelerated its implementation of feed updates, and freed up more than 100 hours of development time annually for other initiatives.

“The authentic dedication to finding the solutions for the brand is something that is unique, I think, in the space,” Spencer said. “A lot of folks want to get you into the product and then it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, we’ve signed the contract, we’re off.’

“Whereas with Feedonomics, whether it’s through our regional reps, whether it’s through the sales team, whether it’s through enablement, everybody’s been so helpful in us finding solutions. And in some cases, finding the solutions where it’s actually less financially beneficial for Feedonomics, but it’s the right solution for us.”

Multi-country, multi-language, and multi-channel support

Fox Racing has direct-to-consumer websites for Canada, Europe, and the U.S., but Feedonomics only supported its North American business when the relationship first started.

Full-service support from Feedonomics includes a dedicated feed manager who optimizes Fox Racing’s product listings for each advertising channel and sets up custom alerts to catch any data inconsistencies. Spencer said the proactive approach Feedonomics takes to data quality and feed updates has made a noticeable impact on Fox Racing’s business.

“We saw the value not just from the optimization piece of here’s how we could be doing better with these specific outputs of these channels, but also when something goes wrong—a price book gets messed up as part of an import process—we get those alerts,” Spencer said, “And our [Feedonomics] team is able to proactively work with us and say, ‘Hey, red flag here. We’re seeing something wrong with this data,’ rather than it getting caught once it gets to Google Merchant Center and a bunch of products get flagged, or it gets sent out to Meta and they pull products from the shopping feed.”

Another benefit of having Feedonomics on board is Fox Racing’s ability to enable additional services and features with partners that wouldn’t have been possible with point-to-point feeds, according to Spencer. Things like back-in-stock notifications—which he said helps the company understand when to follow up with customers and which products are in higher demand—really stuck out.

“Being able to roll out tools like back-in-stock notifications really quickly, being able to do dynamic recommendations within our ratings and review platform, as well as our email service provider,” Spencer said. “All of those things were features that we were rolling out for the U.S. and Canada, and Europe was not able to leverage those features. Additionally, because of the way that was set up on their side, they were only servicing five of their markets … and just the amount of overhead it took to manage that piece was not feasible long-term.”

Fox Racing’s European team was using another service for feed aggregation prior to Feedonomics. While it was better than the point-to-point system the North American team previously had, Spencer said the European team didn’t get the level of service it needed to scale into new markets.

“What we weren’t seeing there was, [the other service] was purely a technical partner, right?” he said. “So they gave you a place [to send feeds out], but they weren’t working with us. They weren’t part of our optimization plans. We didn’t have the same alert structure in place.

“So as we had proved out the success with Feedonomics on our North America business, it was a really easy buy-in from the European team. We were able to get them up and running super quick and able to expand into new markets and enable new functionality that was previously not available to them.”

After the EMEA team migrated its feeds to Feedonomics in December 2022, Fox Racing was able to expand into seven new countries. In total, the company now advertises in 14 markets: Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the UK, and the U.S.

Fox Racing lists products on Genie Shopping, Google Shopping, Meta, Microsoft, Klaviyo, Partnerize, and Yotpo, and Feedonomics also supports translations in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish for those channels.

When he thinks about the scope of Fox Racing’s advertising operation, Spencer said he’s glad to have a partner like Feedonomics who’s willing to collaborate with multiple teams to keep things moving forward.

“We appreciate Feedonomics’ proactiveness and willingness to work directly with our team as an extension to provide strategic support,” Spencer said. “When we need to edit data, debug an issue, or come up with a creative solution for a problem, Feedonomics works with us to find a solution. This is in contrast to other product feed management providers we’ve worked with which only provided technical support.”

Reallocating in-house resources

Fox Racing has improved visibility across all of its advertising accounts since consolidating that side of the business. The company can analyze information quickly within the Feedonomics dashboard to compare product attributes and exports at the feed level.

“Feedonomics gives us a way as we’re querying products, we can look at either the raw data, we can look at the transformed data, we can look at export data,” Spencer said. “The ease of use for searching where you don’t have to be a programmer, you don’t have to understand how to write conditional statements. You can get down to the data that you need, see that in a way that makes sense, export that data and share it out with your team very quickly … And it allows us to be able to do that under one roof. So it saves a bunch of time, especially if we’re trying to track down issues.”

There are numerous examples Spencer can share to illustrate how Feedonomics has saved Fox Racing time on different feed management initiatives. For instance, he said the company recently updated some attributes in its Google Shopping feeds. Previously, that would have required a project manager or product owner to submit a ticket into the development queue, a developer to do the work, and extensive testing from the quality assurance team.

In all, he estimates it would take 10 to 12 hours for various resources to complete the work. With Feedonomics, it only took a little help from the team’s dedicated feed manager, who finished the update in five minutes.

For a company that previously dedicated significant development hours to feed management, saving time means preserving Fox Racing’s in-house resources for other business initiatives.

“Aside from needing raw data enhancements from time to time, we have completely removed the need to have our developers support the marketing team in regard to feed maintenance and updates,” Spencer said. “This has freed up well over 100 hours of development time every year.”