Boosting ad performance on Google Shopping with optimized feeds

Meaningful results

When Mike Lindamood, the owner of Lamood Big Hats, was invited to participate in a six-month A/B test by BigCommerce, he jumped at the chance to have his Google Shopping catalog optimized by Feedonomics.

To that point, Lamood Big Hats had used free options—like the Sales and Orders app—within BigCommerce to manage its product feeds, and the app’s optimization capabilities were limited.

“I couldn’t really optimize the feed too much,” Lindamood said. “I just kind of went with what the app would allow. But I would go into Google Ads and manually adjust things. If there was a product not doing well, I would pause it, change the bidding, or something like that. I was probably spending two to three hours per week doing that.”

Lindamood has advertised on Google and Microsoft for years, so while he’s gotten used to tinkering with product listings in different ad platforms, he didn’t realize the impact large-scale optimizations could have on performance. Since Lamood Big Hats started working with Feedonomics in May 2022, the company has seen a significant improvement in key advertising metrics, such as conversion value, conversion rate, clicks, and click-through rate.

“Having my feeds optimized by Feedonomics has really been wonderful for the business,” Lindamood said. “There hasn’t been a downside. Pretty much every performance stat is better than what it was before.”

Optimized listings from Feedonomics perform better

One of the main reasons Lamood Big Hats switched from Magento to BigCommerce years ago was the suite of included features and apps. The acquisition of Feedonomics in July 2021 gave BigCommerce merchants like Lindamood access to even more omnichannel resources—namely, full-service product feed management solutions—and he took notice.

So when Lindamood was contacted about participating in a six-month optimization test with Feedonomics, he said it was really a no-brainer for his business.

While the original goal of the A/B test was to see if an optimized group of the company’s specialty hat products performed better than an unoptimized group on Google Shopping, Lindamood chose to pull a year-over-year report comparing Feedonomics to the Sales and Orders app he used during the same period in 2021.

To optimize Lamood Big Hats’ catalog, Feedonomics added critical feed attributes like brand name, age group, gender, product type, and hat material to resolve outstanding product warnings and to improve product titles. The team also assigned accurate Google product categories, cleaned up product descriptions, and standardized color names.

Even though Lamood Big Hats’ 2022 sales numbers combined the unoptimized group of products with the group Feedonomics optimized, the results highlighted the impact high-quality data has on performance.

“This is taking both groups together and comparing it to the Sales and Orders app, and it’s still pretty great,” Lindamood said. “The optimizations Feedonomics does benefit the business a great deal with the extra sales revenue and the lower spending cost on those ads.”

While the results have been significant, a performance increase isn’t the only advantage of working with Feedonomics. With a dedicated feed manager and full-service support team handling all things feed management for him, Lindamood now devotes the time he used to spend manually adjusting product listings to other business activities.

“If you want to increase your sales, then you need to go with Feedonomics and stop messing around trying to do this all yourself,” Lindamood said. “You save time and money, and you make more money, too.”