Sunday, November 2, 2008

GoDataFeed's Top 10 Holiday Datafeed Optimization Tips

This holiday season, many shoppers are going to skip the malls and shop directly online. In fact, Forrester Research predicts online retail sales this holiday season will grow 12% to $44 billion. With the holidays right around the corner, it's the best time to increase your store's reach and visibility.

To help you optimize your product feeds in time for the holidays, the GoDataFeed team has compiled its Top 10 Holiday Tips for optimizing your retail product feeds:

  1. Anticipate upcoming traffic and bid more aggressively on top performing categories on peak bargain-hunting dates: Black Friday in Late November, “Cyber Monday” after Black Friday, pre-holiday, early December and post-holiday, December 26th and January 1st

  2. Take advantage of GoDataFeed’s Featured Merchant Offers--which include free merchant credits, free listings and clicks-- by Smarter.com, Become.com and ShopMania to expand your holiday promotions

  3. If you’re not already submitting to Google Base--- Sign Up-- it’s free and you could be reaching thousands of shoppers

  4. Create compelling call-to-action promotions in feeds that allow promotional messaging, i.e. Holiday free-shipping incentives, Price Discounts, Date-specific promotions that prompt buyers to shop by a holiday deadline, Gifts with Purchase

  5. Where applicable, include the “Retail Price” or "MSRP" field along with the “Sale Price,” so customers can see their holiday savings

  6. Deepen your product descriptions by adding recommended data feed fields like gender, color, size, etc…

  7. Provide as much preliminary information as possible in the feed including shipping costs, tax rates and delivery date estimations

  8. Consider advertising on Microsoft's Jellyfish/Cashback, which employs a Cost-per-Action model - you only pay for conversions!

  9. During the holiday rush, make sure to filter out any out-of-stock products and submit your feeds on a daily or weekly basis to keep your data feeds fresh

  10. Install GoDataFeed analytics to get instant feedback on your holiday feed campaigns to gain insight on your best performing shopping engines, categories, products and holiday promotions--to learn more about installing analytics, go to your merchant home page--under 'View Start Page' ->'Activate Analytics'

Want to optimize your feeds in time for the holidays? Contact GoDataFeed at http://www.godatafeed.com/ or call us at 954-472-3400 to schedule a tour of our datafeed management software

Shopping Engines & Product Data Feeds