Is bad product data suppressing your products?

Is bad data suppressing your products?

How many times has someone come to your desk, sent you a message in slack or invited you to a Zoom out of the blue to ask you

“Why can’t I find our products on abc’s website?”

or

“When I Google {insert common search term}, competitive products are being promoted by distributor abc and not our own.”

A very likely reason in both cases is poor product data.

When I had responsibility for overall digital marketing and ecommerce performance, products with poor product data were the first thing I would suppress or exclude from email campaigns, paid marketing campaigns, site search results and recommended products to name a few. Basically any marketing efforts.

For example:

Product name that looks like a part number - excluded excluded from campaigns and suppressed in search

Fuzzy product image or no image - excluded and suppressed

Poor product description - excluded and suppressed

Incomplete product attributes - excluded and suppressed

Inability to categorize based on too little information - excluded and suppressed.

The reason for doing this was very simple, our team was evaluated on revenue, margin, new customers, transactions, customer retention, ROAS, LTV, CAC as well as reducing credit and returns, cost to serve and ability to collect.

Poor product data has a negative impact on every single one of these metrics.

And rather than make excuses about site performance and for our suppliers, it was easier to simply promote, feature and boost the products with great product content that was easier for customers to find, select and purchase directly off the page.

If the quality of your product data available to your distributors is making it difficult for users to buy directly off the page, then there is a good chance that you are being suppressed by your distributors and you don’t even know it.