It’s a familiar story for ecommerce and digital performance teams. Performance dips across platforms like Meta and Google Shopping. Pressure builds as advertising costs rise. That futile feeling, like building a sandcastle when the tide is coming in, rumbles in the back of your mind.
The immediate solution is to increase spend, launch new campaigns, and push for more traffic. But what if the issue isn’t actually volume, but the underlying foundations?
Think about it. A house built on unstable ground will always show signs of stress. Walls shift, cracks show, doors stop closing properly. You spend more time fixing problems than making improvements. Digital and ad performance work much the same way. When product data quality is low, no amount of media spend will consistently deliver strong results. Simply maintaining the digital experience across platforms like Meta, Google Shopping, and marketplaces takes huge manual effort, let alone enriching that product feed data to optimise results.
In our in-depth webinar, leaders from Athos Commerce, David Jones, and Hearts & Science explored this central theme. Here’s a breakdown of the practical takeaways about strengthening data foundations to truly optimise and drive measurable commercial outcomes.
From discoverability to ad performance: why feed quality determines outcomes
When there’s a constant list of “home improvements” across the digital retail footprint, it’s common to lose focus on the performance impact of product data feeds.
The starting point for David Jones showed room for improvement. Customer Success Director at Athos Commerce, Sathish Poonath, noted the product data had “very few attributes” and identified “a lot of disapprovals” during his analysis. These data issues had immediate and far-reaching impacts.
Poor product data limits visibility across Google, Meta, marketplaces, and AI-driven discovery channels. It also undermines ad performance. Campaigns struggle to deliver strong click-through rates and conversions because the underlying data lacks relevance.
Even more critically, missing attributes, inconsistent taxonomy, and feed errors mean many products simply don’t show up when shoppers are searching. The products that do show up often don’t engage shoppers enough to earn their click.
The knock-on effect translated directly into that feeling of fighting against the tide. Alex noted, “ Some of those core elements to our product feed and then into our Google Merchant Centre meant we had a significant amount of manual uplift to actually enrich that feed, maintain it, but then also make sure that our disapprovals were always kept in check.”
When the product feed foundation is weak, everything built on top of it is compromised. To take the hard work out of building those strong foundations, Athos Commerce is introducing the Channel Assistant, part of the company’s feed management and intelligent discovery platform. It helps retailers run automated feed audits, catch issues before they trigger disapprovals, and syndicate optimised product data across 1,400+ partner feed templates.
Fixing the foundations that drive performance
The first step was a full audit by Athos Commerce, which not only identified existing issues, but also uncovered new opportunities. Head of Digital Experience & Operations at David Jones, Alex Carter, described, “ We quickly identified that one of the biggest priorities was improving the stability, reliability, and overall quality of product data all the way through. It clearly underpins both customer and channel performance.”
The team worked together, focusing on restructuring the core data. Titles were rebuilt to include key attributes like brand, size, and colour. Product types and category breadcrumbs were standardised. Descriptions were cleaned. Missing fields were filled and values transformed to align with advertising platform requirements.
The focus then shifted to rebuilding the product feeds from the ground up. This meant cleaning up structural issues and enriching the data at scale. Category breadcrumbs were fixed, disapprovals addressed, and gaps across key attributes were filled. Titles, descriptions, and product values were reworked to align with how platforms actually interpret and rank products.
Now on solid ground, David Jones reclaimed time and focus to support additional operational improvements. Alex explained, “We were very much focused on maintaining the existing feed. As things improved, we were able to adjust our team structure, the ownership, and move away from a waterfall effect into a more agile approach.”
Small improvements compound into major revenue gains
With strong foundations, the team could now focus on optimisation through incremental enhancements and controlled tests. As Alex outlined, “Small, minor improvements can make as much of a change as large ones. That agility and ability for us to start testing and learning at this point was really helpful.”
The team restructured titles, standardised attributes, cleaned descriptions, and filled missing data. Individually, these changes may appear minor. In practicality though, they collectively drive real commercial impact.
Experimentation further accelerated outcomes, testing and learning rather than working with assumptions. Ahead of Mother’s Day, the team tested keyword enhancements. The result of this test saw a 62% increase in revenue for the segment.
James explained, “These tests generally give us clear, actionable learnings that help us drive incremental traffic and revenue. Now, they’re solidified as part of our BAU (business as usual) strategy.”
From strong foundations to scalable growth
Clean, structured product feeds enabled what many online retailers struggle to achieve: fast, scalable growth. With feed changes no longer bottlenecked by manual processes, campaign updates flowed faster. Testing moved from occasional to continuous. The team could now respond quickly to trends, seasonal peaks, and competitive pressures with confidence.
The same principle applied to promotions. Instead of broad, blanket discounting, the team used product feed data for precise targeting. Alex explained, “We were able to target specific categories, products, and brands where we knew that we would see much better value and a profitable promotional program.”
Since including promotions in the feed, David Jones has seen a 43% uplift in click-through rate. Results like this reinforce the importance of a robust product feed management framework.
Rather than chasing more traffic to compensate for low relevance, online retailers can shift their focus to automation and strategy. With stronger data foundations, signals to platforms like Google and Meta allow for true optimisation.
Scaling performance through automation
David Jones automated a large part of their feed management by moving away from manual updates towards a rules-based, template-driven setup within the Athos Commerce feed management platform, taking full advantage of:
- Rules engines to standardise attributes like size, colour, and product types
- Feed templates tailored to channels like Google and Meta to automatically format data correctly
- Automated processes to clean titles, descriptions, and values at scale
- Ongoing disapproval management to catch and fix issues before they impacted performance
By partnering with Athos Commerce, David Jones could reimagine the impact of product feed performance. From auditing and identifying gaps, to structuring and enriching product data at scale, to aligning feeds with campaign strategy and feeding performance insights back into optimisation decisions.
With the right foundations in place, retailers move out of damage control mode. They stop reacting and start building.
Just like any improvements, when the ground is unstable, every addition creates risk. When you’re patching problems reactively, progress slows. However, when the foundations are solid, you can build with confidence.
Every online retailer deserves the opportunity to add new layers, expand into new channels, and test, learn, and scale what works. The Athos Commerce team exists to power peak performance on online retailers. We’re here to help you build stronger, scalable foundations and continuous optimisation opportunities through:
- Auditing and identifying data gaps
- Structuring and enriching product feeds at scale
- Aligning feed data with campaign strategy
- Enabling continuous A/B testing and optimisation
- Connecting performance data back to feed decisions
If you feel it’s time to stop chasing performance and start engineering it, request your complimentary demo of the Athos Commerce Data Feed Management platform.