If you’re still treating your feed like a static spreadsheet, you’re playing yesterday’s game.
Product feeds used to be the backend bit you would send to Google once a month before hoping for the best. Today? Your feed is your growth engine. PMax, Meta, TikTok, dynamic ads – every one of them depends on how well your product data is structured, enriched, and optimized. With AI doing more of the targeting heavy lifting, your feed isn’t just important, it’s everything.
Add to that the explosion in post-COVID commerce, where social platforms like TikTok and Meta aren’t just brand-building tools, they’re serious revenue drivers, and now your feed needs to work harder than ever, everywhere. No longer is it just about being visible on Google. It’s about showing the right product, at the right time, in the right format, across all the places your customers shop.
So, here’s the real question: who should manage it? Your internal team? Or a feed management agency that eats this stuff for breakfast?
What Feed Management Involves
Once upon a time, feed management meant uploading a CSV and checking some boxes. Now? It’s a full-on performance lever.
Now your feeds have to:
- Pull in product data from wherever it lives (PIM, ERP, sheets, or backend systems)
- Format it correctly for each channel (Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, affiliates—you name it)
- Enrich it with the right search terms, price formats, inventory tags, and seasonal messaging
- Power optimization tactics like Custom Labels, campaign segmentation, and A/B testing
But even the cleanest feed won’t catch what’s really blocking performance. That’s where the experts come in. A specialist feed management partner will:
- Spot and fix issues that would otherwise stop your products from showing
- Handle diagnostics and troubleshoot disapprovals across all platforms
- Work directly with Google and other channels to resolve warnings and suspensions
- Build a complete optimization roadmap: from enriching foundational data to deploying testing frameworks and performance levers like Custom Labels, category splits, and keyword embedding
- Monitor your feed health daily: with alerts for disapprovals, stock issues, formatting errors, and visibility drops—so you’re not caught off guard
And here’s a big one: Who picks up the issue when something breaks? With a feed management agency, there’s no ambiguity. It’s their job. They catch it. They fix it. They keep things moving.
Because the feed doesn’t fix itself, and platform policies don’t get easier.
In-House Feed Management: Control or Chaos?
| In-House Team Pros: | In-House Team Cons: |
| You control the levers. No third-party dependencies.Small tweaks can be fast if the right people are aligned.No agency costs, just your team’s time. | Feeds are now complex, multi-channel, and ever-changing. Without deep technical knowledge, you risk visibility, compliance, and performance.Most internal teams focus (rightly) on media performance. Feed strategy gets deprioritized.Managing feeds across multiple territories, categories, and SKUs? That’s a full-time job.When GMC flags an issue or suspends your account, do you know what to do or who to call at Google?Are you confident you’ve set up all the necessary alerts—and that someone is watching them daily?Do you know if your feed is holding you back?Is your IT department delaying the data you need to move faster?Are your channels underperforming, and are you unsure if the feed is to blame? |
Specialist Feed Management Agency Partner: Performance, On Tap
| Feed Management Agency Pros | Feed Management Agency Cons |
| • Expert teams that live and breathe feed optimization. • Channel-specific feeds tailored to Google’s specs, Meta’s quirks, and TikTok’s weirdness. • Scalable setup across SKUs, markets, and platforms. Built-in resilience: diagnostics, disapproval handling, proactive updates. • Creative solutions: Custom Label strategies, stock-led logic, DPA overlays. • Deep strategic input: the best feed management agencies know exactly what a successful optimization plan includes—from fixing foundational data to building in test-and-learn structures that fuel continuous performance gains. • No finger-pointing: agencies take ownership. Monitoring, fixing, escalating, they handle it all. • Not just execution, you get education: the best agencies upskill your team as they go, sharing what’s working right now based on real-world experience. | • Costs more than DIY (but usually pays for itself if done right). • Less direct access unless you’ve got a collaborative partner. Setup takes time – Good things usually do. |
Let’s be real: most of the tech platforms out there are self-serve. That means you still need to know what to do with them. How to structure your feed. How to diagnose a problem. How to optimize for each channel. Working with a specialist feed management agency means you don’t just get the tools – you get the people who know exactly how to use them.
More importantly, you’re investing in a feed management solution that goes beyond maintenance—it’s built for performance. A solution that scales with you, evolves with platforms, and keeps your product data ready for anything
Budgeting
Budgeting for a specialist feed management agency is a key consideration. They’re not cheap—and that’s a good thing. They’re not a plug-in or a patch-up job. They’re a long-term strategic partner that helps you build the foundations for growth and supercharge feed strategy and product data, improving RoAS across every channel.
How to Choose: Start With These Questions
Ask yourself:
- Do we have feed specialists in-house, or are we winging it?
- How many SKUs, categories, and channels are we trying to manage?
- How frequently does our product data change?
- Are we running performance levers like Custom Labels or keyword embedding?
- Do we know how to resolve disapprovals or GMC suspensions fast?
- How much are we spending, and how much performance are we leaving on the table?
- Do we know if the feed is what’s holding our performance back?
- Do we know how to audit our feeds to find issues or recognise optimization opportunities?
- Do we know how to check source feed vs. channel feed?
- Do we want to learn a new tool, and then know how to build a plan around it?
If your team is firefighting data issues or missing out on scale, it might be time to call in help.
Final Thought: The Feed Is No Longer Optional
Let’s be blunt: AI is now making the targeting decisions. Creative and budget still matter—but without the right feed, the algorithm has nothing to work with.
If your feed isn’t optimized, you’re not just missing out. You’re actively throttling your performance.
Zoe Bates is Performance Director at FeedSpark
