Say you’re shopping for a pair of sneakers. You search on the web and get a ton of listings. Which listing do you think you’re more likely to click on and eventually buy from: the one that says “Men’s Nike Air Max 360 Running Shoe” or “White Sneakers”? Guess what, your customers are more likely to pick the first link as well.
Contrary to popular belief, most consumers don’t just roam the web clicking random products to buy. The high majority of them are very targeted shoppers who are looking for specific items or specific types of items to purchase. When you deliver your data to the CSEs or search engines, you’ll be far better off if you spend the time to look at what’s being sent and clean the data up. Remove confusing text, rearrange the words, and eliminate HTML to actually help consumers find your products. We’ve seen traffic increase by 10%, 20%, and even 50% just because someone took the time to look at their data and fix obvious problems.
In most cases, the publishers you’re sending data to don’t clean it up. If you’re not doing it or have someone helping you, you can end up like one of the recent casualties I saw:
Product Name: “Nike Shoe”
Product Description: “function openReview(url){window.open(url, ‘ReadReview’, ‘toolbar…”
How much traffic do you think this retailer is getting? How many sales has he lost because he never cleaned up his data? There are simply too many options out there for consumers to waste their time trying to determine if this blob of text is what they are looking for.
The product name isn’t descriptive enough to connect with consumers and the description is just plain bad. Ensuring your product names and descriptions don’t have JavaScript or HTML is a simple way of making your data more readable by consumers and that turns into more traffic.
Take the time and look at your data or get help. At least make sure you’re sending quality data for your most important products. You can’t afford not to.
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