Online Shopping Nightmares: Scary Shopping Campaign Mistakes in 2024

As Halloween and the 2024 shopping season creeps closer, let’s dive into the world of online shopping management gone wrong. The e-commerce game has its own spooky stories filled with mistakes that can even scare off potential buyers. We prepared this guide, so you can avoid the terrifying errors in feed management that might make your online shopping experience a real nightmare.

"Since shopping campaigns rely entirely on product feed data for information, optimizing and maintaining a synchronized feed is critical for strong campaign performance."

1. The Curse of Wrong Prices

Imagine a potential buyer comes across your shopping ad with an incredible price, but when they click, they discover that the actual price on the website is significantly higher than what the ad promised. Or even worse, imagine you’ve put in all the hard work to create an irresistible sale for a product, but your shopping ad ends up displaying a higher and completely unrelated price that spooks away potential buyers before they even visit your website.

The Q4 shopping season, where discounts and promotions abound with different rules and conditions, is a prime time for problems to arise, resulting in un-updated ad prices.

Vigilance in maintaining accurate pricing is crucial to prevent customer confusion, damage to your brand’s reputation, increased bounce rates, and higher costs.

Think of it as a leaky pipe that’s causing potential buyers to slip away because your product feed is simply not in sync with the advertising platform.

But fear not! You can easily fix this issue by using a feed management tool where any changes you make to your product feed will directly be updated in your ads without the need of IT, ensuring that everything flows smoothly and customers stay engaged.

2. The Ghostly Disappearance of product titles and descriptions

One of the scariest things for online retailers is when their sales vanish without a trace. You’ve set up your ads, but the results are as mysterious as a ghostly presence.

The secret to avoiding this nightmare is by optimizing your product feed to match the guidelines and best practices of each advertising channel, where you want to showcase your products. During this shopping season, your competitors will be aggressive with bidding and hefty budgets. To increase the chances that your ads will be seen and clicked on, it’s important to not only raise your budget but also tailor your ads to fit the format of each channel.

Take, for example, Google Shopping – ads that provide lots of product information, like the brand name, color, size, pricing before and after discounts, product ratings, and the enticing offer of free shipping, not only has better chances to come up on search results but also has more chances to be clicked on.

However, including these attributes is just the beginning. To truly stand out and capture buyers’ attention, you’ll need to optimize your product titles and descriptions, from removing html codes, adding letter cases and fixing text errors to enriching product descriptions, this will not only increase visibility and clicks on your ad but ultimately also drive more purchases.

With Feeditor you can clean up coding and text mistakes and enrich product titles and descriptions with AI in just two clicks, which can lead to 150% average increase in ROAS!

3. Product images that will make you scream

Another common issue that can spook your customers away is bad product images.

If these images don’t meet each channel’s guidelines, they might scare off potential buyers or, even worse, the ads may not show up at all!

The use of low-quality images is a big no-no when it comes to shopping ads. When you use low-quality images, it can give your store an unprofessional and unreliable appearance, causing potential customers to steer clear. High-quality product photos play a pivotal role in helping customers grasp what they’re purchasing and fostering trust in your online store, so be sure your product feeds feature only product images of top-notch, high-quality images, providing buyers with a clear view of what they’re about to purchase.

Another tricky practice is having just one picture for each product. Shoppers like to see items from different angles. When there’s only one picture, it’s like missing pieces of a puzzle. Customers can’t fully check out the product, which can make them hesitate and not buy.

Perhaps the most spine-chilling scenario of all is when the product you’re promoting doesn’t align with the image in your shopping ad. If you’re advertising black sneakers, it’s crucial to ensure that the image corresponds precisely to that variant, avoiding the display of white sneakers or, worse yet, an entirely different product. Such mishaps can result in your ad not being displayed at all or even worse, the disapproval of your products.

For maximized performance make sure your product images have a neutral white background with no overlays or frames, featuring a single product positioned at the center and occupying approximately 75% to 90% of the frame.

4. The horror of disapproved products

As a retailer, you’ve likely encountered the creepy sensation of disapproved product alerts lurking on platforms like Google Merchant Center or Facebook Commerce Manager. These disapprovals can haunt your shopping campaigns, preventing product ads from seeing the light of day.

These spooky disapprovals often arise from various issues in your data feed, including outdated product availability or prices that don’t match with the website, non-compliant images, broken links, invalid GTIN or MPN, or missing critical product information such as shipping and tax details, along with the correct price in the relevant currency. These issues create a graveyard of disapproved products, causing your ads to fade into the darkness.

To ensure your products are always approved it’s essential to maintain a constantly updated product data feed and customized feed versions for each channel and currency, banishing all disruptions and allowing your online sales to rise from the dead.

On a more serious note

Since shopping campaigns rely entirely on product feed data for information, optimizing and maintaining a synchronized feed is critical for strong campaign performance. But distributing an optimized feed to multiple channels and marketplaces in the format they demand is not always an easy mission and requires a lot of manual labor. Using a product feed tool will help you format and optimize your product feed to maximize the potential of your products and ultimately bring more purchases.

Feeditor is a feed management and optimization tool that doesn’t require technical skills and eliminates the need in IT and massy spreadsheets. With just a few clicks Feeditor can fix coding and text mistakes, enrich your feed with valuable data, and improve your product titles and descriptions with AI. You can also customize your feed by applying filters, labeling products, and creating multiple feed versions. Then, you can easily export these optimized feeds to any advertising channel to ensure your ads are always running smoothly and bringing in more conversions.

So as you get ready for Halloween and the rest of the shopping season, keep these feed management nightmares in mind, but with some care and attention, you can banish these spooky errors and offer customers a more enjoyable shopping experience.

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