Working at a display technology company I encounter data feeds daily. I’ve noticed that advertisers often run into problems when it comes to managing their data feeds. When the data about your products or dealers is not managed correctly, it can result in incomplete or irrelevant banners, which naturally perform badly. Therefore I provide five easy-to-implement-solutions to common problems with data feeds.
Update your feeds
Make sure your feeds are updated daily, so your customers know what you have in store. It’s an advertiser’s nightmare to show products that aren’t for sale anymore. A renter looking for a house is not going to be amused by investing his time in houses that aren’t on the market anymore. Updating your feed daily or weekly can easily prevent this. You can do this yourself or ask your display technology company to automate it for you.
Product names: keep it short and simple
The products in your feed should have a short and simple name. If not, the name of your product simply won’t fit in the banner. How will your customers be able to see what you are selling when the product name does not fit the banner? Although it depends on the size and design, you generally don’t want to exceed 40 characters.
Enrich your product data
To make sure your banner ads are as relevant as possible, enrich your product data. Include the product category, popularity index, or special offer you have to the products in the feed, so you can filter on this and/or communicate this in the banner. You could even choose to just show products that are currently on sale, or only show products that a specific user is interested in. Either you or your display technology company can add this to the feed behind your dynamic banners.
Use the right formats
Use the right formats for your feed to make sure your banner performs as intended. This might sound like an open door, but it goes wrong quite often. First Party Data needs to be transformed in order to be used in dynamic banners. Importing this data is impossible if the formats aren’t supported by the display programs. A good example is providing the location of products or dealers. If you want to show your customers products or dealers close to their location, you need to transform the location into something the computer understands, which is called geocoding. This process transforms the written address into a latitude and longitude, which can be used to calculate the distance to the visitor. Ask your technology company how this can be done without problems.
Prevent overload, speed it up with external servers
To prevent slowing down or even crashing your website while your banner campaign is up and running, you can make use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN). If images in your feed are served from your own server to thousands of customers, it could cause high server loads or even a server overload. Technology is your friend to face this challenge. Adding a CDN to host their images on external servers keeps your website running at its normal speed.
Do you run into problems when it comes to managing your feeds? We are more than happy to help you. Send us an email at support@adcombi.io and we will help you as soon as possible.
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