The digital marketing ecosystem is going through a major transformation. As access to third-party cookies becomes increasingly limited by browsers, user preferences and privacy-focused updates, e-commerce brands are being pushed to rethink their data strategies. On top of that, rising ad costs make it more critical than ever for brands to use their advertising budgets efficiently.
Today, the path to better ad performance and higher conversion rates comes down to one core element: first-party customer data.
But collecting this data is not enough on its own. First-party customer data needs to be matched with accurate product data and delivered to advertising channels in an integrated way. To address this need for e-commerce brands, Hardal and Optifeed have connected their infrastructures. Hardal and Optifeed are now officially integrated.
In this guide, we cover the operational advantages the Hardal & Optifeed partnership brings to e-commerce brands, its impact on ad performance, and the steps to connect the two platforms.
Strategic and Technical Advantages
In e-commerce, product feed management and data analytics are often run as two separate, independent operations. The Hardal and Optifeed integration brings these two processes together, making the data flow more centralized, automated and actionable.
Here are the key advantages of the integration:
Higher Signal Quality
Ad platforms such as Meta, Google and TikTok rely on high-quality signals from your website to power their targeting and optimization algorithms. Hardal's server-side data collection technology helps capture user behavior on your website (events such as add to cart, product views and purchases) in a way that reduces browser-related data loss.
With the Optifeed integration, the accurate product IDs in the product feeds sent to ad platforms are matched more reliably with the server-side user signals coming from Hardal. Better match quality means campaigns are optimized on more accurate signals, helping you manage ad costs more efficiently.
Dynamic, Up-to-Date Targeting
Manually exporting segments of users who visited your site or showed interest in specific products to ad platforms costs time and quickly leaves the data out of date.
With the Hardal & Optifeed connection, you can keep granular audiences, such as "users who viewed products in a specific category recently but did not purchase", up to date and use them in your dynamic product ads.
This way, your campaigns are shaped not only by historical data but by current user behavior and current product feed information.
No-Code Integration
Combining first-party customer data with advanced feed scenarios normally requires custom software development and data engineering effort.
The Hardal & Optifeed integration lets marketing teams start the data flow directly from the platform interfaces, without depending on technical departments. As a result, brands can turn user behavior and product data into campaign actions much faster.
How to Connect Hardal & Optifeed
The integration is designed to make data transfer between the two platforms secure and simple. Follow the steps below to set it up.
Step 1: Get Your API Credentials from Hardal
- Log in to your Hardal dashboard.
- Go to the Integrations tab in the left-hand menu.
- Select the Optifeed integration and copy the API Key generated for your account.
Step 2: Add Hardal as a Data Source in Optifeed
- Log in to your Optifeed dashboard.
- Click Integrations in the top-right menu.
- Choose the Hardal integration from the add new data source section.
- Paste the API Key you copied from Hardal into the relevant field and save the connection.
Step 3: Use Hardal Data in Your Product Feeds
- Once connected, the first-party user events Hardal collects from your website start working together with your product catalog structure in Optifeed.
- From here, you can create a new product feed using the user behavior data from Hardal, or apply additional filters and segments to your existing feeds.
- When your enriched feeds are ready, you can deliver them from a single place in Optifeed to Google, Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, AI Shopping experiences and other supported marketing channels.
Use Cases for Campaign Management
Once the integration is complete, here are some of the key scenarios you can put to work in your ad accounts:
Product Segmentation and Custom Labels
Optifeed lets you segment products using the product-level metrics coming from Hardal. You can automatically segment the products that high-intent users engage with and assign custom labels to them in Optifeed.
For example, you can write high_cr_hardal into the custom label field of products whose view-to-purchase rate exceeds a certain threshold, and target those products separately on your advertising and marketing platforms.
Similarly, with a segment such as "Items Purchase > X and Items Revenue / Items View > Y", you can isolate products that have both a high order count and high revenue relative to their views.
Using these custom labels, you can allocate more budget to high-potential product groups on ad platforms and improve campaign efficiency.
Product Filtering
Sending every product on sale on your website to remarketing channels can cause product groups that contribute little to sales to keep drawing traffic.
By adding an "Items Purchase > 0" filter to the product feed you send to remarketing channels, you can remarket only the products that actually sell, which also makes budget management easier.
To get started with Hardal, you can request a demo here.
To get started with Optifeed, you can reach us here.
