For a long time product data was a maintenance job. Somebody set the feed up once, it worked, and nobody looked at it again for years.
That was survivable because the advertising was manual. You chose what to appear for. The product data merely described what you sold.
Today the system decides from your product data whether and to whom you appear at all. That moved the feed from maintenance into strategy, and at most companies the ownership did not follow.
Once the system handles bidding, targeting and placement, there is not much left that lets you meaningfully change the outcome. The inputs are what remain. Of those, product data is the most concrete.
If the title is accurate, the category correct, the stock live and the attributes filled in, the system can find the actual buyer. If any of that is missing, it guesses, and it guesses with your money.
Title structure. Brand, product name, then the most important filterable attribute. Not keyword stuffing, but what a buyer would genuinely type.
Live stock. Spending on an item you cannot ship is not an optimisation question, it is wasted money. It also spends the customer's trust.
Exclusions. Not every product belongs in advertising. Filtering out items with thin margin or heavy returns is often worth more than any bid adjustment.
Passing margin through. If the system only sees revenue, it optimises for revenue. If it sees margin, it can optimise for profit.
Do not think of the feed as a file. Think of it as the instruction you give the ad system. No system, however good, can make up for an inaccurate instruction.
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