Managing Thousands of Products - AdWords Product Feed

[chabbs]

I am curious to know how you manage your feeds or your clients' product feeds for Product Listing Ads.

When there aren't many products one can easily use a CSV file, but when there are thousands, the job is much more difficult.

So, how do you manage them?

[TheRealSaxman]

Generally eCommerce websites have a product feed that they allow you to download. Many eCommerce Shopping Carts also have a specific "compatible" feed they have set up just for Google Merchant Center... although many that I have used are outdated and always seem to have the need for manual updates. When I find that a client doesn't have the resources to pay me to build them a feed from the ground up (for all of their products) I will generally let them know that I can build a test feed that will target only a few of their most popular products. After letting the test feed run for a few weeks they start to see the value and can then justify spending the money to build a complete feed. When I build the feed myself I always like to utilize Google docs as they have all the attributes setup already, and the upload is much easier.

[chabbs]

Thanks for your reply. I have been doing the same with two of my clients, working on their feeds manually through Google docs.

Doing it manually allows me to optimize the feed and spot issues. It's just that it's a lengthy process and was hoping to find out if someone is using a better solution than my current one.

[TheRealSaxman]

If there is a better way I haven't heard of it...

On the brighter side it does allow us an additional revenue vertical that we can bill out as work hours. We won't give a flat rate on product feeds as they are time consuming and need to be done correctly.

I'll continue to watch this thread to see if you find something... I know of services like GoDataFeed.com that help with distributing product feeds across multiple services such as Bing Shopping, Google Shopping, PriceGrabber, Shopping.com and many others... but you still have to have one complete feed to utilize the service they offer...

Good luck!

[chabbs]

I've been looking and asking people that I know to see if someone is using a "secret" technique. Nothing yet. I looked into GoData and came to the same conclusion.

I'll post if I find anything.