A high-quality product feed is essential to drive product discovery that converts, especially when paired with First-Party Advertising powered by Deep Learning.
E-commerce is still growing fast, despite market uncertainty. With two-thirds of ad spend now going to digital, competition is only intensifying. The brands winning today aren’t just adopting the next-gen tech – they’re optimizing every controllable detail to make sure that tech works harder.
Deep Learning is powering today’s most advanced performance platforms, activating advertisers’ first-party data. It is surfacing products users haven’t seen before, and driving real incremental revenue. But to take full advantage, the foundation has to be solid, and one of the most overlooked levers is a high-quality, up-to-date product feed. It won’t drive results on its own, but it helps your tech work to its full potential, and your media dollars go further.
How Does This Play out in Practice?
Imagine you’re launching a performance campaign with a single objective: maximize conversions. You start by activating your first-party data and layering in next-gen dynamic retargeting. This allows Deep Learning algorithms to analyze your best customers’ behavior, identify non-obvious converters, and surface novel product recommendations. The creative itself is dynamic and shoppable, personalized in real time to drive maximum engagement and purchase.
This is where your product feed becomes mission-critical.
The feed is a structured source of truth for your campaign, containing real-time information like product titles, categories, prices, availability, imagery, and URLs. While it’s not responsible for every element of the campaign, it does determine which products are eligible to be shown in ads. If a product isn’t in the feed, or if the data is incomplete, it simply can’t be surfaced, no matter how relevant or conversion-likely it may truly be.
Why does this matter? Because discovery is happening inside your ads. In fact, we’ve observed that 60% of purchased products were never viewed before. What’s more, while bestsellers often drive first-time purchases, we’ve seen that different product categories tend to drive follow-up conversions. If those categories are hidden due to feed gaps, missing metadata, broken links, or outdated availability, you’re not just losing individual sales; you’re forfeiting future growth.
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Getting the Feed Right
Still, many advertisers settle for a product feed that’s only 80% accurate, assuming that’s “good enough.” But in performance marketing, every percentage point counts. At our internal standard, we encourage not to go below 90%, because we consistently see the impact on results when the feed is tighter, cleaner, and more complete. That holds true whether you’re running Deep Learning-powered performance campaigns or legacy Machine Learning remarketing; the precision of your feed is a lever that influences the final outcome.
So what does “getting it right” actually look like? Think of it as a three-part checklist:
Reflect what’s available right now. Out-of-stock or outdated products don’t just waste ad spend, they damage trust. Your refresh frequency should match the pace of your catalog updates.
Ensure price consistency between your ads and landing pages. If there’s a mismatch, users bounce, and no smart targeting will recover that lost opportunity.
Fix the basics: broken URLs, missing product IDs, and missing transaction IDs quietly sabotage performance. These gaps break the user journey and cut off the signals that power optimization. They’re often surprisingly easy to fix.
Beyond the essentials, consider feed enrichment. Adding supplemental attributes like ratings, reviews, promotional labels, or even dynamic inventory badges can further sharpen product relevance and boost conversion rates.
Brands that scale their programs often use automation tools or custom API integrations to manage and refresh feeds automatically across multiple channels. Investing in automation reduces human error and ensures that your most important asset, your product catalog, always stays campaign-ready.
Power the Tech. Perfect the Feed
Growth is still on the table for those ready to grab it. The tools are here, the tech is powerful, and the brands pulling ahead are the ones making it all work harder.
Discovery is where incremental results are won. When the right product finds the right person at the right moment, it’s not luck, it’s precision powered by next-gen tech. The details aren’t just technical, they’re transformational. Start with your feed.
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