Category feed is used, as the name suggests, to create campaigns targeting categories in Dotidot.
It allows you to advertise for queries that are not directly related to products, as is common in classic product campaigns.
It can be a campaign targeting:
- Brands - with keywords such as: Bosch, Givenchy
- Brands + category names - with KW such as: Bosch dishwashers, Hugo Boss perfumes
- Categories - with KW such as: dishwashers, perfumes
- Categories + type - with KW such as: dry shampoos, combined fridges
- Categories + color - with KW such as: pink dresses, anthracite dining table
- Categories + material - with KW such as: leather skirts, wooden tables
And much more. Basically, anything you need to cover categorical queries with advertising. Some of these you may already be using, while others may be impossible to create and manage manually.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of creating categorical campaigns through Dotidot?
- Creation of a categorical campaign within 15-30 minutes
- Minimal time spent on modifications
- New campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads are added automatically
- If a category on the website disappears, the ads will stop being displayed
- Monitoring the number of products on the page - do you have only one or two products in a category on your page? You can set it up so that ads are not created for those categories.
- Display of minimum prices, number of products, highest discounts, etc. in the ad text
- Necessary creation of a category feed:
As you can see, creating categorical campaigns with Dotidot offers many advantages and saves time, but there is also a disadvantage in the form of creating a categorical feed, which can be a hard nut to crack for many advertisers/clients.
Creating a Categorical Feed
You can create a category feed in several ways. The best way is probably to create your own feed, which will be regularly updated.
Creating your own feed ensures that you have everything you need to create categorical campaigns without any further modifications.
The specification of your own category feed may look like this:
- ID - unique category identifier
- Category - category name
- Category_path - complete path to the category
- Brand - brand
- Attribute_1-x - additional attributes according to which you want to filter and create campaigns - color, size, volume, material, gender, diagonal, series, energy class. Basically, anything that you are sure is being searched for and there is a URL for it. If they are not available, the values will remain empty.
- Price_min - the price of the cheapest product in the category
- Product_count - the number of products in stock in the category
- Discount_max - maximum discount in the category
- URL - URL of the category with filters used
*Differences may occur across different segments and types of e-shops, but this is a healthy basis that you can use and modify.
Feed format: CSV, XML, JSON, Google Sheets
Creating a categorical feed using Scraper
A categorical feed can also be created using the Scraper tool in Dotidot.
To create a feed, you will need the URL of your website's sitemap, which is usually located at yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml. Sometimes, sitemaps are directly divided into categories, which have their own URL.
Scraper will automatically retrieve basic information about the pages, so you will have a URL to target and a category name from the title attribute, which you can use to create keywords and ads.
If there are the number of products, lowest prices, and other values that may be interesting for campaign creation, you can use Scraper wizard or manually insert variables.
The second option may be more technical, but generally, if the value is on the website/source code, we can access it. If you need help, don't hesitate to contact us.
Creating a category feed using Feed grouping
A category feed can also be created from an existing product feed using the feed grouping function, which you can find at the level of each data source.
On the following screen, you select which attribute from the product feed you want to group the items by. In this example, we use the brand attribute.
It is also good to limit the availability attribute to only in-stock products, so that the resulting number of products in the newly created attribute is counted only from them.
In the preview, you will see that the products are grouped according to the chosen attribute from the feed in the Group by setting. So in this case, a new data source will be created, where each item will be a different brand.
The new feed will contain brand names, the calculated minimum price of in-stock products, the highest discount within the brand if present in the feed, and many more. For any numerical variables in the original feed, Dotidot will always automatically calculate the minimum, maximum, and average values into the new categorical feed.
The only thing we currently lack for campaign creation is the URL. We can create it using a new text variable if the URL logic is consistent across the website.
For example, if we know that the brand category URL always has the format of the basic domain and the brand name after the slash, we can easily concatenate it.
If that is not possible, then Scraper comes into play. However, this time we don'twant to create a new data source, but only enrich the existing source with new information from your website, so we use Scraper as Data Enrichment at the data source level.
In Scraper, you enter the URL of the products, and either Dotidot automatically recognizes the category URL from the breadcrumb navigation or you need to select a specific URL on the page that we need.
This way, we have the necessary information in data source to create a category search campaign.