Keller Sports is an online retailer providing advisory-intensive sports and outdoor products to the European market.
The company has maintained its market position by adapting to the demands of the ever-changing and rapidly growing e-commerce industry.
Keller Sports knows that, aside from delivering a trusted and superior shop performance and implementing sophisticated bidding and pricing strategies, high quality product data has become a pivotal element in performance marketing success.
Not only is competition growing steadily but Google (the company’s primary product advertising channel) has very specific requirements that a data feed needs to adhere to in order the products to be considered for listing on search result pages.
However, the complexities involved in managing and optimising their product data made it very time-consuming.
Keller Sports was spending a lot of IT & Marketing resources in preparation of their product data feeds.
The marketing department would try edit these feeds manually but it would often rely on IT for technical support. But with more than 130 000 products in its inventory and no clear presentation of the data, the assessment of initial data quality and further improvements, made it time-consuming and sometimes impossible to deliver feeds to Google Merchant Center (GMC) or price comparison partners error free.
The product data feed optimisation process looked something like this:
- Marketing briefs IT ticket to create product data feed
- IT creates the feed
- IT sends marketing a feed link
- Marketing sends the feed link to the export channel GMC*
- GMC assesses the feed
- Marketing receives error report from the GMC
- Marketing briefs IT to amend the feed
- IT corrects data errors
- IT sends marketing a new feed link
- Marketing resends the feed link to the GMC
*or other shopping channels such as price comparison partners.
Such a process was clearly neither optimal nor scalable.
Keller Sports needed a dedicated tool that would enable the marketing department to independently and efficiently work with their product data.
In December 2013 Keller Sports discovered Productsup. The technology provider’s centralised and user-friendly platform enabled Keller Sports to finally understand what was going on with their product data, which also helped identify and unlock hidden potential in the data. Marketing no longer needed IT and because the cloud-based software has integrated the knowledge of all the relevant feed specifications, they now prepare perfectly crafted feeds the first time round, eliminating the wait on an error report from the GMC. The platform also enables them to get products live in new marketing channels in a matter of minutes.
Since Keller Sports began using the Productsup Platform, the company has seen clear rewards, including:
- Sales increased by 31%
- Product-related traffic increased by 22%
- Rejection rate of products reduced from two digits to 1 % in GMC
- The average time to go live with new shopping channels reduced from a few days to a couple of hours, including feedback loops with partners
- Increased efficiency in product data handling & optimisation by 15%, through rule-based efficiency gain
“Ongoing feed maintenance will always be necessary, but with the tool it has become a lot easier and quicker”, says André Patrzek, Director Marketing & Sales at Keller Sports.
“Although efforts shifted from IT to Marketing, the fact is being able to work more independently from IT restrictions was quite a big time saver. Despite a financial investment, taking into account our efficiency gains we have saved on total resources spend. Our sales performance significantly increased. And going forward, rapid expansion into new countries, especially setup & go-live with new partners would not be possible without such a tool.”