What are product feeds
In order to start advertising your goods on selected advertising platforms and be able to list them in product catalogs, you must send them the required (and possibly optional) information about them. Product feeds are used for this purpose, which contain data about your products.
Typically, these are their name, description, price, delivery date, category and many more. This way, you can distinguish individual items from others and at the same time assign them to a category with the same products. Another option is processing data files from suppliers for import into the e-shop – see our articles about Custom format.
Mergado works with XML and CSV feeds. It allows you to edit them in bulk to suit individual product comparison engines. The application then further expands the feed editing options.
What is the XML feed for?
Your data for advertising channels
As part of registering your store on the website of the selected advertising system, you also must specify the export URL. This is how the system will download information about your goods. You can find the export URL in the administration of your e-shop. If you don’t know where, contact your solution provider. Where does your XML feed lead?, we showed you some time ago on the blog.
Elements
Elements are parts of the feed that always contain one specific piece of information about the product (e.g. name, price, etc.). Each advertising channel has slightly different elements and their structure. MERGADO can transfer elements between individual channels, allowing you to expand your advertising to more of them.
Why you need data feeds
Refine your advertising and eliminate errors
The use of feed management is currently one of the biggest competitive advantages in digital marketing. With its help, marketers and e-shoppers can eliminate tedious manual data management and set up automated, error-free sales of goods on multiple platforms. Thanks to this, they don’t have to hire developers and wait for their interventions in the product data.
To facilitate content filtering, advertising channels operate on a system of rules, requiring compliance with them. This allows you to add and edit product information according to the requirements of advertising channels and comparators or create segments of best-selling products. By targeting all their ads well through feed management, refining product data and correcting any discrepancies, sellers can create effective advertising.
You are watching the requirements of advertising channels, product comparators and marketplaces
Relying on an e-shop to attract customers on its own is not enough these days. To increase the visibility of your offer, there are several ways to advertise goods using third parties.
In order for your product advertising to be accepted and displayed without errors (and therefore not to lose you money), these channels require to supply product information in a specific format. Each of them has its own requirements that you need to take into account. Here too, feed management plays a big role, as it can allow you to advertise on all your chosen advertising systems from one place.
These processes work by sending product feeds (most often in XML and CSV formats, but also as a text file), which contain information about the goods you sell.
How feed management tools can help you
What feed management tools can do
This is online software that will help you simplify and automate the work of optimizing product data and get rid of the need to hire a developer and the waiting associated with his work. The user uploads his input feed to the selected tool, which he adjusts to meet the requirements of each selected advertising channel.
Feed management tools allow you to add data to product descriptions and segment the products you want to advertise on the advertising portal. They also reduce manual errors and ensure that every product listing is immediately active. With their help, you will achieve your sales goals more effectively.
5 reasons to use feed management tools
- Advertising rejection: When optimizing manually, you can easily make mistakes that may prevent the system from including your products in the advertisement.
- Format issues: Each channel has requirements that you must meet in order to advertise your products. If you do not submit the feed in the appropriate format, the data may be displayed incorrectly or inaccurately.
- Time and financial delays: Without an automated system, you will have to list your products one by one. This takes up a huge amount of time and resources.
- Legacy during individual registrations: With manual advertising, you will have to set up product data for each sales channel separately, which takes a long time.
- Get ahead of the competition: With better quality data, you will appear higher in search results. At a time when clicks are becoming increasingly expensive, this is a great advantage.
Try Mergado. It offers more than 14 years of tradition
MERGADO will simplify the management of all feed management processes, so you can focus on other essential tasks of your business. In addition, it can manage more than 700 sales channels in 50 countries from one place.
Thousands of customers use Mergado to optimize their product feeds. Through it, they comply with all advertising channel rules and can automatically update product data. The result is effective advertising that you set up yourself without the need to hire a programmer.
Mergado:
- Thousands of satisfied users use it daily.
- They include more than 120 certified agencies and specialists.
- Offers an unlimited number of exports.
Take advantage of the free Feed Audit
With an audit, you will detect even the smallest errors in your data feed and remove problematic parts that slow down your advertising. Whether you have already tried this check or are still waiting for it, this small encyclopedia will provide you with all the important information about the audit.
Audit is a technical check of the XML feed, which will show its errors that require correction for correct inclusion of the e-shop in the products, or for improving the advertising status. Its principle includes checking the validators, which represent the individual parts of the audit.
We can constantly expand the audit using user suggestions. After receiving feedback, our developers take other important validators into account in the checking process.
How the data feed works
To give you a better idea of how the data transfer works, we will describe the process of the path of the XML or CSV feed from your e-shop through Mergado to the product comparator.
1. Data on the e-shop
Feed generation
E-shops usually generate a new feed at specific times. You can find out what your situation is with your e-shop solution provider or in the e-shop administration.
Example:
- Let’s say your e-shop generates a new feed every 6 hours (at 4:00, 10:00, 16:00 and 22:00).
- So if you change the data at 10:30, no change can be reflected in the search engines for the next five and a half hours, because they have the old feed available.
This is usually the first source of delay, which you can work with either by knowing the times of generation of the new feed or by adjusting them to suit your requirements (e.g. more frequent generation).
2. Data passing through Mergado Editor
Mergado downloads data after 2 to 4 hours
Another delay may occur in MERGADO. Depending on the server load, it downloads data from the e-shop once every 2 to 4 hours.
Example:
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If you made changes at 10:30, your feed was not updated until 16:00.
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Mergado downloaded the data, for example, at 11:00, 13:00 and 15:00, but it will not download your updated feed until approximately 17:00.
In such a case, more than 7 hours may have passed since the changes you made to the first download of the feed by Mergado.
Do you need to know when Mergado:
- last downloaded your data,
- made adjustments according to the applicable rules,
- created an updated feed for commodity search engines?
Along with information about when the feed was downloaded by the advertising system (depending on the type of export), you can find it on **the *History tab.
3. Data arrived at the advertising channel
Data download by the advertising channel also has its frequency. You can also find this information in Mergado on the *History tab (for example, Heureka downloads feeds approximately every two hours). The feed transfer process does not end here either. The advertising system must process the changes on its side, and this can take time.
Where can you save time when sending new data?
Given what you already know about your feed path, try:
- planning especially large data changes so that they are submitted to the search engine as soon as possible,
- adjusting the frequency of generating the feed from your e-shop,
- **using the ** Regenerate changed option in Mergado on the Export settings tab.
How to fix errors in your feed
Do you want to use Mergado effectively, but are you encountering recurring obstacles? Let’s look at common errors, such as a missing identifier in Google Shopping.
How to fix common errors in your XML feed?
One of the first steps on the path to more effective advertising management and higher profits from is a feed audit, offered by Mergado for free. After performing it, you will receive a list of errors and recommendations on how to eliminate the problems discovered. Let’s see how to solve the most common errors.
Below we describe several common errors that XML feeds have. To fix them, it is often appropriate to use regular expressions. If you have not worked with them yet, or want to focus on them in more detail, you can download our free e-book.
Useful instructions for working with data feed in Mergado
Mergado Editor allows to easily solve many basic and specific tasks for optimizing product feeds:
- How to open a large XML file
- How to easily get a feed into Mergado
- Mergado can handle secured feeds
- Automatic feed backup will save you a lot of worries
What a master feed can help you with
In Mergado you manage advertising on advertising channels by creating exports in which you edit the necessary data. If you have multiple exports and you repeatedly perform some edits in each export separately, you will streamline this process by creating a master feed. Let’s show you how to set it up so that you can perform a significant part of the edits in bulk.
Solve general feed adjustments at once
Having a master feed in Mergado means making an additional “main” export and then creating all “smaller” exports from its output URL address. The main export makes it easier for you to set up general and basic data adjustments. In individual exports, you will only make necessary, specific adjustments for a given product comparator adjustments.
You can also combine both methods of data adjustment. Of course, you can also correct e-shop feeds using selections and rules as you are used to.
Tips for working with feeds for individual channels
Mergado Editor is a comprehensive assistant in the case of optimization of Google Merchant feed. Check out our tips on how to guarantee the success of campaigns in Google Shopping.
Read the instructions that will guide you through setting up the feed for other well-known formats:
- 6 most common errors in the GLAMI feed and how to fix them
- 7 most common errors in the FAVI feed and how to prevent them
- Learn how to properly set up Shoptet feed security
Which applications make feed management easier
Combining XML feeds is now easy. With the new Blending Bull application
Do you import data from multiple suppliers and your shop system can only import it from a single feed? Do you need to process data before importing it into the shop system in Mergado? Combining input XML feeds into one output used to be difficult. But that’s no longer the case - the Blending Bull app will speed up your work.
Blending Bull combines data feeds into one
Blending Bull can download multiple input data XML feeds and combine them into one output XML. It downloads files automatically and regularly. It creates one output file from them, which can be further processed. Its setup is simple, you can process everything in the administration yourself without the need for cooperation with an administrator.
Do you need to edit problematic feeds? It’s easy with the Blending Bull app
Are you struggling with unusual data file formats in your marketing work? Or do you only make simple edits and don’t want to buy an expensive editor for them? Use the new version of the Blending Bull application, which we have enriched with useful functions for editing XML and CSV feeds.
Blending Bull from the basics: How will you use the application in practice?
Explore all the possibilities offered by the Blending Bull application. In the first part of our smart guide you will learn how to create a data source and get to know its interface. In the second article we will show you how the app will make your work easier during common e-shopping tasks.