It’s funny how the old adage, ‘Nothing is constant, but change itself’, applies to everything. Take building and sending data feeds as an example. We use the concept of templates to build data feeds for our partners. Every time we build a feed, we follow the most current template and tweak it from there. This helps to ensure we’re following the partner's specifications and that we can create the feeds as efficiently and quickly as possible. However, just because we’ve followed the specs today doesn’t mean the feeds are right tomorrow.
Recently Pronto added “Retail Price” and “Special Offers” to their specifications and Google added support for about a hundred new attributes. Now, these new attributes aren’t always required, but the statement “recommened for effectiveness” is a pretty powerful one. Even though we’ve had hundreds of feeds already built for these destinations through the templates, we still needed to go back and modify them in order to take advantage of the new data points. While keeping up with all the changes from all the destinations can get a little monotonous, it’s pretty exciting to see traffic and sales increase because of it.
So, the next time you fire off one of your data feeds, be sure you don't just forget about it. One little change could mean thousands of dollars in new revenue. It’s certainly worth the time to make sure you’re leveraging every change and making your feed as effective as possible.
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