Driving successful ecommerce campaigns with
full-service feed management

When Darwin Liu left his previous marketing agency to start X Agency (formerly SEMConsultants) in 2017, he already knew the company needed a feed management solution to support its clients. X Agency specializes in ecommerce marketing, and high-quality product feeds are a fundamental part of any client’s advertising or selling strategy.

Liu’s search for a feed management provider started with two Feedonomics competitors: Productsup and DataFeedWatch. Both companies had a platform capable of optimizing product data for advertising campaigns, but Liu said the service component was lacking.

X Agency was looking for a company that could not only troubleshoot errors, but one that could also implement data optimizations and provide feed recommendations. Those requirements led Liu to Feedonomics.

Since X Agency started using Feedonomics as its feed management provider four years ago, numerous clients have improved their performance across a variety of channels. Most recently, Feedonomics helped the eFavormart and Tableclothsfactory group eclipse $100 million in revenue, enabled City Chic to expand into the global market, and generated a 2.5x return on investment (ROI) for Evans.

“Whether it’s custom or standard, Feedonomics has been able to come up with a solution for any sort of situation that we’ve had with a client,” Liu said. “We haven’t had to go outside for any additional help. You’ve been able to handle everything feed related that we’ve needed.”

Managing product data and feed issues in-house

Liu refined his ecommerce marketing skills over more than seven years at his previous agency, Didit. When he decided to move to X Agency, Liu said Didit still had an in-house specialist who used a “custom, Mickey Mouse-ish transformer” for feed management. He knew that wouldn’t be enough to support the new client base at X Agency.

“With us being an ecommerce-focused marketing agency, we needed a company that had experience doing this for a lot of clients, versus sort of the Mickey Mouse in-house thing that I was used to seeing,” Liu said. “We needed a feed management solution—a company that’s focused on feeds that can come and help us clean them up for our clients.”

Cleaning up clients’ feeds was just one expectation Liu and his team had for a feed management provider. X Agency also wanted support when clients ran into issues, such as emergencies when their feeds went down. Receiving feed recommendations on a regular basis was another requirement.

While Productsup and DataFeedWatch fulfilled the first condition, Liu said they came up short on the service and support front.

“Being on DataFeedWatch and Productsup, there really was limited help,” Liu said. “If there were feed issues or we had warnings, we were never able to say ‘Hey, can you come look at this?’ We had to go in and troubleshoot it ourselves. Again, if we were a feeds company, we’d be a feeds company.”

Another challenge X Agency faced was data complexity. Many of its clients used various systems and platforms to operate their ecommerce stores, so their raw data was in different formats, making it much harder to optimize for specific channels.

“One company we worked with used one of the cheaper plug-ins on Shopify for feed aggregation,” Liu said. “A big problem with that was the client had to manually figure out what to transform and what to put in the feed, so they sort of took a cookie-cutter approach.”

Flexible, fully managed solutions

With Feedonomics, X Agency and its clients no longer have to take a one-size-fits-all approach to data feed management. Feedonomics can import data from any file type or platform, optimize it, and list products on hundreds of online channels.

Those platform capabilities have solved issues for many of X Agency’s clients over the years. One recent example was with the City Chic group. Liu said City Chic runs all of its operations, including five different accounts, off one CMS. Feedonomics’ platform was flexible enough to pull City Chic’s data off the site and get products from multiple brands listed on Google Shopping.

“If you were to use Productsup or DataFeedWatch, whatever comes out of the box is just impossible [to work with],” Liu said. “Feedonomics actually had to come up with a custom scraping solution to pull things off City Chic’s site for us. That customizability is definitely huge [when dealing with different types of clients].”

Finding custom solutions to clients’ issues is just one layer of the fully managed service Feedonomics offers. From initial feed setup to data transformations and ongoing feed maintenance, Liu said Feedonomics has provided the type of hands-on support his team wanted for channels like Google, Facebook, Pinterest, and more.

“With Feedonomics, when we have an error or see a message that says a feed has been disapproved, we just shoot a request to the help team asking them to take a look at things,” Liu said. “So, it helps us save a ton of time from a troubleshooting aspect.”

That full-service experience is one of the main reasons Liu said he recommends Feedonomics to every single client X Agency brings on, regardless of size or industry. Whether it’s timely support or expert recommendations on feed and channel best practices, Liu said the Feedonomics team has always delivered.

“The big thing I see from Feedonomics is, yeah, all of these other companies can almost do the same thing,” Liu said, “but your team is there to help us out during emergencies, during fixes, or whatever we need. You’re just one email away, versus the other guys [who aren’t].”

A significant increase in ROI and brand presence

Liu said X Agency currently has between 15-17 accounts on Feedonomics, and that extra layer of support has paid dividends for many of them. One of the best examples of that is the eFavormart and Tableclothsfactory group. When Liu first started working with the group back at Didit, he said its revenue was around $45 million. With Feedonomics now optimizing the feeds, the group is well above $100 million in revenue, Liu said.

“They never got past that $45 million mark before, so hopping on Feedonomics and being able to run more Shopping campaigns, being able to have a cleaner feed, really helped us grow their account,” he said.

Though growth with Feedonomics is typical, it doesn’t only manifest itself in sheer revenue numbers. Because Feedonomics streamlines the data ingestion, optimization, and listing processes, the platform allows many brands to scale their operations. The City Chic group is evidence of that.

When City Chic first started with X Agency, Liu said the group had just one account through Feedonomics. But after experiencing so much success with a cleaner feed on Google Shopping, City Chic has increased its brand count fivefold.

“We’ve grown City Chic from one account to five different brands now, so the group is taking things global in its market,” Liu said. “At the end of the day, being able to run a full ecommerce marketing account really entails good Shopping campaigns, which really entails good feed management.”

Liu said Feedonomics has become a core part of X Agency’s pitch to prospects, but many clients are already with the feed management provider when they sign on. However, for brands that don’t use Feedonomics, Liu said there’s an opportunity for massive returns right
off the bat.

“When we first started working with Evans, a new client who’s part of the City Chic group, we knew it would take a month to a month and a half to get a good feed going,” Liu said. “Feedonomics was amazing enough to get us a working feed to start with that wasn’t optimized.” So, it was an unoptimized feed that companies normally would have from their CMS if they weren’t using a feed management provider like Feedonomics.

“What ended up happening was Evans was getting a 1x return on its investment, spending in the six figures every month. And then, right after the switch to an optimized feed from Feedonomics, it was pretty immediate—we saw a 2.5x return on investment from that same dollar amount.”

Results like that are pretty typical of X Agency’s clients who use Feedonomics. Liu said that, on average, a company that goes from no feed management provider to a feed management provider normally sees a 25 to 35% increase in ROI immediately. After some more tweaks through Feedonomics, X Agency’s clients usually see anywhere from a 60 to 80% increase in return on ad spend.

Client returns are always a major focus when evaluating a service provider, but Liu said X Agency has discovered another benefit of working with Feedonomics over the last four years.

“A lot of companies try to find partners, and I would definitely say that Feedonomics is at that level,” Liu said. “You’re so easy to reach that I
can basically say you are a partner. Any question that we have, you can answer for us.”