Saving time and reducing revenue risk on accounts with a million-plus SKUs

When Sam Dillon joined a leading industrial product and service solutions provider as a Martech Manager two years ago, he encountered a familiar problem. The global, UK-based company had data-quality issues that were impacting revenue, and its existing feed management platform wasn’t equipped to handle them.

Dillon had used Feedonomics to manage product feeds in his previous role, so he knew his new company could benefit from a platform that offered more visibility and control over large datasets.

“When I hired on, I saw the state of our feeds and the headaches they were causing, so to me it was obvious—this is a quick win to get Feedonomics back onboard,” he said. “I actually took myself out of the decision-making process because as much as I wanted to use Feedonomics, I didn’t want it to be a case of “Forget everyone else, let’s just go with what I know.’ So, I got different stakeholders from around the business to be part of that decision-making process, and thankfully my instinct was right in that Feedonomics outshone the competition by quite a way.”

Since the company started working with Feedonomics in April 2021, Dillon has witnessed the impact a powerful feed management platform can have on multiple areas of the business. The company has not only seen an improvement in numerous advertising KPIs, but Dillon said Feedonomics has also lowered the revenue risk from suspended products on Google Shopping and has saved his team 60% to 70% more time on feed management.

“If you’re looking for a dedicated feed management solution, then I don’t think there’s anyone else out there who can do what Feedonomics does,” he said.

Limited control over large datasets

Data quality has a big impact on how well your business performs on different ecommerce channels, and when you sell more than 700,000 stocked products and offer access to three million non-stocked products to a global customer base, issues become magnified. This was the main challenge Dillon faced when he hired on—one he knew couldn’t be fixed with the technology his team had available.

“You’re talking about a lot of products, a lot of product data, and a lot of product data issues,” he said. “When I joined, we were using a different platform and just didn’t have the visibility or speed within that platform to actually make those changes. We had a managed account whereby we had to basically ask for someone to investigate something because we couldn’t do it ourselves because the platform was so slow and clunky.”

Many feed management platforms work under the assumption that a merchant’s data is already optimized and ready to export. That wasn’t the case for Dillon’s new company, and he said the limited control his team had over the company’s large product catalog made feed maintenance far more difficult.

“We needed to make the necessary changes to fix data errors, but the platform that we had didn’t allow us to do queries,” he said. “So, it was slow and meant that we had to download whole datasets, which, when you’re talking about a million-plus SKUs, it’s not opening in Excel, it’s taking time, it’s crashing your computer. It’s just hell on Earth, basically.”

On top of those manual processes, Dillon also routinely went back-and-forth with internal stakeholders and experimented with multiple platforms in an attempt to rectify the data issues. He estimates that he spent 80% of his time on feed management when the company used its previous service provider.

“A lot of my time was spent investigating,” he said. “It wasn’t necessarily even spent trying to resolve issues, it was just trying to understand what data we had there.”

A robust, user-friendly feed management platform

When the company switched to Feedonomics, the first step was to migrate its data into the new platform. The company has 33 accounts—all of which contain double-digit feeds and more than one million SKUs—to support its multi-region and multi-language advertising efforts. It was a big undertaking, one that Dillon said his team would still be working through today if it didn’t receive hands-on support from Feedonomics.

“We had a three-month window where we received additional support from Feedonomics, and this wasn’t something we looked at as a product offering from you,” Dillon said. “It was Feedonomics tailoring the offering to our specific circumstances, which I think is quite unique. There was no ‘But we don’t know about that.’ It was, ‘Yep, sure, we can do that. Let’s figure this out. How long do you need that support for?’ There was no pushing to say, ‘Well, if you are going to do that, you’re going to be tied into three years’ worth of support.’ The conversation was really around, ‘OK, how can we get you to where you need to be in the best time?’”

Feedonomics supports the company’s advertising efforts in 33 markets, powering its comparison shopping campaigns, display ads, affiliates, and—more recently—its supplier sites. Dillon said a lot of the company’s suppliers have started working with his team to create search functionality on their websites with links to other distributors, and the ability to do that quickly and at scale has opened up additional revenue channels for the company.

The ability to do things quickly and at scale is one of the hallmarks of the Feedonomics platform. Dillon said the interface is so intuitive that someone who isn’t tech-savvy can still manage product data at the level of a more experienced feed manager.

“Feedonomics breaks that barrier in terms of technical understanding and makes everything really user-friendly with the ability to do queries, real-time lookups, and preview your data,” Dillon said. “If there’s an error, it’s quite easy to spot where that error is. A lot of the other platforms just basically say ‘That doesn’t work,’ and if you’ve got a string of if-then rules, and you have 10 different points where that could be broken and you’re not being told where, that amounts to another couple of hours investigating why that might be.”

Better platform visibility and functionality with Feedonomics has allowed the company to make product data updates that either weren’t possible before, or would have required additional development work. In fact, Dillon said his team has yet to find an issue that couldn’t be resolved within Feedonomics. 

“The platform has enabled us to not just fix issues, but identify problems that we didn’t know we had,” he said. “Issues that are way, way upstream in our data pools that we’ve been able to flag, get looked at, and have resolved before they even get to us. And this isn’t just affecting stuff upstream and product data, it’s also affecting things onsite and how we display price, for example.” 

Improved KPIs and reduced revenue risk

The ability to resolve errors quickly and permanently with Feedonomics has allowed Dillon’s team to focus on optimization and other key business outcomes for the company. One of the most notable benefits of the Feedonomics platform is the money the company has saved on Google Shopping. While Dillon isn’t able to share specific numbers, he described the revenue risk that was removed as “huge.”

“When I came on two years ago, at any given point, there were a dozen warnings across a number of different accounts for data hygiene, basically,” he said. “And so the revenue risk was high—we were getting suspensions. When you talk about tens of thousands of pounds per day generated through Google Shopping, to have that risk removed is crucial.”

Improved speed-to-market was another significant result of the increased platform functionality now available to the team. Not only has the company been able to expand into new channels faster, there’s also a noticeable difference in the performance on those shopping destinations.

“I think the biggest optic and incremental benefit we’ve seen is probably coming through the comparison sites,” Dillon said, “and that’s due to the fact that you’re only as good as your data. So if your data is not very good, then you’re not going to perform well. And if your data is great, your performance is going to be great, and we’ve seen that. We’ve seen the number of searches we’re appearing on improve. We’ve seen the amount of traffic improve, conversion rate, bounce rate—all of those KPIs you want to be going in the right direction, that’s all been improved.”

Dillon insists that his team hasn’t done anything dramatic to drive these improvements. Instead, he attributes them to “tightening the screws and just cleaning the data up.” His experience with Feedonomics proved the value of having a good foundation of data and what that allows you to do with your advertising initiatives. With Dillon now focused on optimizations and campaign strategy instead of fighting fires, he and his team have cut the time they’re spending on feed management by 60% to 70%.

“Since we’ve gone live with Feedonomics, I’d say we are spending probably 10% to 20% of our time working on data feeds,” he said. “And that is now time spent creating feeds, it’s time spent adding supplies in, it’s time spent optimizing and testing. It’s all time well spent now, because it’s not time spent fixing something that shouldn’t be an issue in the first place.”

Note: The names of those involved in this story have been changed to preserve anonymity.