Meaningful results

As a family-owned business in the home and kitchen appliance space, Warners’ Stellian constantly vies for market share against larger, more recognized retailers. 

Marketing Manager Julie Carlson describes the company as a “specialist,” meaning many customers aren’t as familiar with Warners’ Stellian as they are with household names like Best Buy and Home Depot. Having 11 brick-and-mortar locations spread throughout Minnesota and Iowa helps, but appearing in product searches is what really drives new business for the company.

That’s why Warners’ Stellian sought out additional help with its product listing ads four years ago. After struggling with data feed management for some time, the company started using Feedonomics in 2016. Since then, Warners’ Stellian has decreased its average cost-per-click of Google Shopping campaigns, increased its click-through-rate, and saved even more money on third-party development resources.

“Feedonomics has offered the kind of functionality that we really needed, as well as the value-add of support and being an extension of our very small, scrappy team,” Carlson said.

Building and maintaining Google Shopping feeds

Warners’ Stellian was already using product listing ads to reach customers back in 2016, but Carlson knew the company needed to scale and optimize its data feeds to better attract those in-market.

“At the time, we’d been running product listing ads on Google, and the feed was managed by our web development partner,” Carlson said. “All of the product listing updates were super manual and time-consuming. We realized that product listing ads would be a large source of revenue and opportunity for our company, so we needed to find a way to make quick and efficient adjustments.”

Part of those adjustments included feed maintenance when Google flagged Warners’ Stellian’s products with item disapprovals. Because the company’s listings were error-prone, Carlson and her team had to fight fires on a regular basis.

“We used to receive a lot of errors and missing values in our feed,” Carlson said. “We were looking for and needed additional support beyond our agency partnership for troubleshooting our feed and resolving Google Merchant Center errors.”

The manual feed builds caused many of Warners’ Stellian’s problems. Because there weren’t efficient ways to optimize product titles or scale the process, some sacrifices were made for the sake of time.

“Our product feed was set up by our development partner quite functionally, but not really considering what we needed from an advertising standpoint,” Carlson said.

Scalable product feed optimizations

In the midst of these issues, Warners’ Stellian asked its digital marketing partner to research feed tools, and the agency recommended Feedonomics as the best solution.

Feedonomics made the entire feed process easier for Warners’ Stellian by automatically pulling product data from its shopping platform, updating it in line with best practices, and listing the company’s products on Google Shopping. So, instead of optimizing products manually, one-by-one, Warners’ Stellian leveraged Feedonomics’ technology to create product listing ads and update its product data at scale.

That functionality was key because Google Shopping is the main advertising channel Warners’ Stellian uses. The appliance industry doesn’t engage in marketplaces like other industries do, Carlson said, so it was important to ensure the company’s product data was optimized in order for its products to display in relevant searches on Google.

“The Feedonomics team helped us implement hundreds of transformers that we use to optimize product titles and descriptions, and we still have many of them in place,” Carlson said.

The support Warners’ Stellian receives from Feedonomics extends beyond just product optimization, error resolution, and feed expertise. Feedonomics has partnerships and integrations with key players in the ecommerce space, so Warners’ Stellian was able to use those connections to drive its remarketing campaigns in a unique way as well.

“Bronto is our email marketing platform, and we bring our product feed in through Feedonomics to power our cart abandonment and browse abandonment email campaigns,” Carlson said. “We have workflows set up through Bronto that if a user meets certain criteria about adding items to cart or viewing certain items, we can trigger emails with a specific product. And the product has preferred titles and is displayed in a better way, I think, than our feed would normally allow it to.

“So, it was an easy way to take advantage of Feedonomics’ partnership with Bronto and our desire to import our product feed in there. It’s nice that we can use the work we’ve already done on our feed and leverage it across multiple platforms.”

Sustained success on Google Shopping

In the four years since Warners’ Stellian started using Feedonomics, the company has seen consistent results from its product listing ads on Google Shopping. In 2020, for example, its average cost-per-click of shopping campaigns was down 25% compared to 2016, while Warners’ Stellian’s click-through rate was up 26%. So, as Carlson puts it, the company spends a quarter less and does a quarter better with the help of Feedonomics.

At scale, these returns illustrate the sustained success Warners’ Stellian has experienced with Feedonomics—especially when you consider how the company evaluates its service providers.

“We have very high standards and tend to be very conservative with our investments, so if we’re not seeing returns—increased performance and increased efficiency in our hours—we’re going to move on within a year,” Carlson said. “We were able to save time and see improved results quite quickly after we started using Feedonomics.”