Your Product Data Feed Is Your Media Strategy

In the early days of Google Shopping, product feeds were predominantly an operational concern. They were often owned by technical or catalogue teams, with campaign strategy sitting separately in the ad platform.

The shift toward treating product feeds as a strategic lever happened gradually. Some larger retailers were already treating feed quality as a performance lever well before the rise of Performance Max in 2021 and Meta’s Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns in 2022, which further accelerated the change.

Fast forward to today, and platforms like Google and Meta have evolved into massive AI-driven product discovery engines that no longer require humans to micromanage individual bids. These platforms are extremely efficient at helping shoppers discover products and brands, but only when they’re given the right data to work with. The algorithm is only as smart as the information it’s fed.

David Jones understood this shift and used it to fuel an aggressive growth phase. By focusing on improving product data quality for better ad performance through the Athos Commerce solution, the team didn’t just fix errors. They fundamentally changed what the platform could do with their budget. Working alongside their agency, Hearts & Science, the product data feed became the load-bearing architecture that allowed their media investment to reach even greater heights. Alex Carter, Head of Digital Experience and Operations at David Jones, described how this enabled much more precise targeting:

We were able to target specific categories, products, and brands where we knew that we would see much better value and a profitable promotional programme.

The result speaks for itself. David Jones increased its digital investment by 97%, driving a 110% uplift in revenue. When your revenue growth outpaces spend, you’ve moved beyond simple scaling into structural engineering.

Continuous Experimentation Is the New Competitive Edge

Strong foundations and a feed-first approach set the platform for growth. But staying ahead of competitors requires something else: a willingness to keep testing, even when things are working.

Consumer behaviours shift, and seasonal intent spikes and disappears. What earned strong results last month may underperform during a peak period. The retailers outperforming their peers aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets. Instead, they’re often running the most tests and rapidly implementing their learnings.

David Jones built this into their operating model using Athos Commerce Experiments. In April, the team ran a 30-day experiment on a specific product segment, testing optimised titles and attributes against a control group. The result was a 66% performance uplift. They applied the same approach to their Mother’s Day campaigns, testing keyword-rich titles to capture seasonal intent. Revenue for that segment increased by 62%.

That agility and ability for us to start testing and learning at this point was really helpful for us… just being able to quickly identify where those small, minor improvements can make as much of a change as large ones.

Individually, each test is a small refinement. Applied consistently across tens of thousands of SKUs, those refinements become a significant commercial advantage.

Beyond Maintenance: Turning Automation into Revenue

Automation doesn’t need to replace the human element of a digital team. The David Jones story shows that automation is what gives the human element room to operate at its best.

Before their transformation, the team spent a large amount of time on reactive maintenance. They were fixing disapprovals, chasing vendor updates, and manually patching feed errors. Progress was stunted because the foundations demanded constant attention.

By implementing automated rules and proactive error management through the Athos Commerce platform, real wins quickly appeared. Over 60% of previously inactive or disapproved SKUs were reactivated. This didn’t happen through a new budget or new product ranges. It happened by ensuring that existing product data was clean, correctly formatted, and visible to the algorithm.

That newly found bandwidth opened further doors. The team activated Merchant Sponsored Shopping campaigns and achieved a 23x ROAS.

Alex described the shift it created within the team itself:

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.

When the operation stops being reactive, online retailers benefit. Automation becomes the mortar that enables the team to build a stronger product data management system, brick by brick.

Building Your Commercial Reality

The results David Jones achieved weren’t gained from a single campaign or a one-off fix. Those results are proof of what happens when technology, data, and human strategy are aligned around a shared goal.

Treating the feed as the core of media strategy gave the team the confidence to nearly double digital spend while improving efficiency. A culture of experimentation uncovered growth where others might have seen stagnation. Automation handled the heavy lifting, freeing the David Jones team to make decisions that actually moved the business forward.

A 97% increase in digital investment. A 6% improvement in overall ROAS. A 23x return on newly activated ad formats. The house of bricks doesn’t just stand the test of time—it becomes a scalable architecture.

If your current ecommerce strategy feels like it’s built on straw, the most powerful place to start isn’t the ad platform. It’s the data that fuels it.

The Athos Commerce team exists to power peak performance for online retailers. We’re here to help you build the house of bricks through:

• Auditing and enriching product data to fuel smarter algorithms
• Aligning feed strategy with media investment for greater returns
• Automating feed management to free your team for high-value work
• Running continuous experiments to find growth across your catalogue
• Connecting performance data back to feed decisions at every stage

If you’re ready to stop patching straw and start building a resilient architecture for product discovery, request your complimentary demo of the Athos Commerce Data Feed Management platform.