Since he started managing Google ads at Trellis three years ago, Kris Clason has seen the digital marketing landscape become more product centric and dynamic. In his experience, any marketing based on product feeds is essentially the optimization of that feed, making regular catalog updates a requirement for success on the top advertising channels.
“Having professionals and experts that are focused on only managing feeds is ideal,” Clason, now the Director of Client Marketing at Trellis, said.
The only problem is that most organizations don’t have in-house experts dedicated to product feed management. As an ecommerce-focused agency, Trellis specializes in campaign management and performance marketing, so catalog updates were just another task Clason's team had to take on.
Keeping up was a challenge as Trellis supported one of its clients, VIETRI. Clason said VIETRI—an Italian-inspired brand that sells handmade dinnerware and decor products for the home and garden space—adds about 500 products per month to its website and regularly discontinues and removes other items as well.
To properly categorize VIETRI’s evolving product mix and organize its campaigns for Google Shopping, Trellis had to upload a supplemental feed to Google Merchant Center in addition to the main product catalog sent from Shopify. Clason said VIETRI often updated its main catalog more than once per week, so his team had to spend around three hours per week ensuring all the data matched up.
“If we weren’t on top of it, we would essentially have products that were not running in some of our shopping or product-focused campaigns,” Clason said. “Three hours a week turned into 12 hours per month, which is a lot of time in the services and resources business.”
After testing other feed management tools, Clason realized the team needed a fully managed solution to bridge these optimization gaps. As a full-service agency, Trellis chose to recommend a service provider who offers that same level of support.
Since Feedonomics became VIETRI's dedicated product feed management provider in September 2021, the brand has seen a massive improvement in performance on Pinterest, Facebook, and Google Shopping. The company’s click-through rate, conversion rate, and return on ad spend have all increased, while its cost per acquisition and cost per purchase have both decreased.
“Feedonomics has definitely exceeded expectations in every single touchpoint that we’ve had,” Clason said. “We knew Feedonomics was going to be a good option for developing, managing, and optimizing the feeds that we’re using for our ad platforms, but we didn’t expect how good the service was going to be.”
We knew Feedonomics was going to be a good option for developing, managing, and optimizing the feeds that we’re using for our ad platforms, but we didn’t expect how good the service was going to be.”
Automated product categorization and A/B testing.
Feedonomics has a native integration with Shopify, so it didn't take long to pull in product data from VIETRI’s catalog and set up unique feeds for Google Shopping, Facebook, and Pinterest.
The Feedonomics platform automatically categorizes products with FeedAI and can regularly sync catalog updates from a merchant’s ecommerce platform, so Clason’s team no longer had to spend hours per week manually uploading a supplemental feed with additional product attributes.
Instead, with the feed specialists at Feedonomics handling ongoing optimizations and product segmentation for A/B testing, Trellis was free to focus on running campaigns with a full assortment of products.
“The biggest thing is being able to advertise all of our products, regardless of how they’re being sent, and regardless of the attributes that are in the ecommerce platform,” Clason said. “So, not being limited to the ecommerce platform and the attributes there, including any miscategorization, missing attributes, or anything like that.”
VIETRI is an Italian term and an Italian-inspired brand, so many of its products have Italian words in the titles and descriptions. Clason said one of the company's collections (Pesci Colorati) features hand-painted marine life, so people looking for it would often search "VIETRI fish plate," or just "fish plate."
To account for this, he worked with his dedicated feed manager to A/B test if including the term “fish” with the collection name in the product description and title would improve campaign delivery and performance.
“It's always good to connect the dots and have, at scale, the Feedonomics team there to support the translation from Italian to English,” Clason said. “The team allows us to test different methods and capture searches where people might be referencing what they saw as opposed to the actual product, product category, or collection name.”
Another significant A/B test Feedonomics supported was Smart Shopping versus Performance Max. Clason said the impending transition is a big change for all agencies or brands that use Google Shopping, so the ability to test out this new campaign type in a lower-stakes setting was key for his team.
“We were able to segment our product feed in a place to allow us to test Smart Shopping versus Performance Max and be able to make optimizations to how we deliver Performance Max before having to go all in on Performance Max,” Clason said. “Proper segmentation, proper labeling, and proper attributes are required for that to happen.”
The hands-on feed support Trellis receives from Feedonomics gives Clason's team the flexibility to optimize its campaigns, segment products, and deal with unforeseen issues quickly—like when the Facebook-Shopify API temporarily overrode its feed earlier this year.
“A managed service is great for optimization, but there could be a drawback if you cannot move as quickly as you need to,” Clason said. “But Feedonomics has that support and allows us to be really agile when we need to make changes to the feed.”
A managed service is great for optimization, but there could be a drawback if you cannot move as quickly as you need to. But Feedonomics has that support and allows us to be really agile when we need to make changes to the feed.”
Performance improvement across the board.
Enabling Trellis to focus on campaign management rather than feed management has positively impacted VIETRI’s performance across key advertising metrics. To gather the most accurate, representative data, Clason’s team pulled a report comparing the same four-month period from October 2020 through January 2021 and October 2021 through January 2022.
The year-over-year numbers were pretty remarkable:
These figures stand out even more when you consider that Trellis scaled its budget by around 40% over that same period. Clason said the improved data quality and ability to test and make changes quickly with Feedonomics gave his team the confidence to increase its ad investment.
“Feedonomics allows us to do what we’re good at, which is manage paid marketing and performance marketing,” Clason said. “So not having to be feed optimization experts allows us to focus on what we’re building, as opposed to having to split time, effort, and energy in multiple directions.”
Feedonomics allows us to do what we’re good at, which is manage paid marketing and performance marketing. So not having to be feed optimization experts allows us to focus on what we’re building, as opposed to having to split time, effort, and energy in multiple directions.”
