LoveYourFeed.com

We often see many merchants delivering feeds to the shopping engines with no sort of tracking method implemented. It doesn’t make any sense to just start sending data feeds and not have a way to track clicks and conversions. We’ve recommended that merchants use the ROI tracking solution from Become.com in the past, and suggest this for any of the other comparison shopping engines as well. But what if you don’t use those other engines, or don’t want lots of tracking code snippets on your website? You should use your Google Analytics account to help keep track of the clicks. This won’t always provide the most detailed conversion data, but you can still see click traffic. Here’s how to set up Google Analytics to monitor your shopping engine traffic with utm parameters. Not sure what utm parameters are? Check out this helpful Google Analytics article.

utm_source: Here’s where we suggest a high level campaign name like “shoppingengine” or “cse” so you can differentiate all traffic from the shopping engines.
utm_medium:  This is where you might insert the name of the specific shopping engine
utm_content: A lot of merchants will add the sku or product id here so they can segment reports based on their products.
utm_campaign:  This is a parameter that a marketer might want to add if they are constantly running promotions or sales and they want to distinguish the different prices or offers that are being pushed in their feeds.

An example of using some of these utm parameters on a product url would look like this: (Note- the first parameter requires a ? to join your base product url. For consecutive parameters you can use an &)

http://www.mydomain.com/product1.html?utm_source=cse&utm_medium=googleshopping&campaign=valentines2009

Once you’ve added the parameters you want and deliver your shopping engine feeds start watching your Google Analytics traffic sources reports. If you have conversion tracking enabled for ecommerce stores, you should also get a basic report on orders and revenue. You can create a custom segment in Google Analytics to show you only this filtered view.

SingleFeed offers advanced conversion tracking and can automatically add utm parameters to product feeds for merchants as well.

Note- If you are submitting your products to the shopping engines with an automatic feed from your store (ie- Yahoo! Store catalog.xml file) you won’t be able to have these parameters appended to your urls.

In case you missed the webinar or had to leave early, we made a recording and will soon have it available online.

Thank you to Matt Ledford and Grant Henry of FastPivot for sharing some great information for Yahoo! Stores.

Recording: Now Available!

We covered the following topics:
- How to add custom fields to your Yahoo Store
- Properly measuring results with Yahoo/Google Analytics
- Take home action items/tips to optimize your feed
- Yahoo Shopping & Pricegrabber changes

We had several great questions that were asked during the webinar, here are a few of the more popular ones:

Question:  I use a third party developer for my Yahoo! Store who generates my shopping engine feed. Would SingleFeed be able to help me?
Answer: Yes. SingleFeed can provide you or your developer our instructions which contain all the information needed to put together a custom feed file.

Question: How do the shopping engines show an aggregated view of products from multiple sellers?
Answer: The shopping engines use several fields to “normalize” the same product and list it for sale from multiple retailers by looking at UPC, ISBN, model number, and more.  By including all these custom fields in your feed, you can ensure your item is listed properly.

Question: Does it matter how often I submit my feed to the shopping engines?
Answer: Yes it matters for several reasons. First is that it ensures accurate product and price information. You wouldn’t want to list products on the engines that may be out of stock or have the incorrect price. Secondly, many of the engines will deem a “fresher” feed more relevant (for reasons described in number 1). Pay special attention to Google Product Search, as your listings expire after 30 days and need to be re-uploaded.

Question: What if my product descriptions contain HTML?
Answer:  The shopping engines do not allow HTML to be submitted. SingleFeed helps merchants by automatically stripping out any HTML and disallowed keywords or phrases from your feed before sending it out to the shopping engines.

Question: How do I ensure my products show up in the right categories on each of the shopping engines?
Answer: When submitting your feeds to each engine, ensure that you are using the taxonomy guide that is specific to each engine. This is a very tedious task but is critical for your success. Poor categorization yields poor results. SingleFeed offers complete feed categorization for our clients.

Question: Is brand field synonymous with manufacturer field?
Answer: Yes for all intensive purposes they can be referred to as the same field.

Question: What are the top 3-5 fields that a Yahoo! Store should add?
Answer: We get asked this all the time by merchants on all platforms. There is no “magic” field that makes your results shoot to the top. We strongly recommend Yahoo! Stores add Manufacturer, Model Number, and any other applicable fields that are relevant to your items.

Question: Since image urls change frequently for Yahoo! Stores, how do I ensure my product images show up on the shopping engines?
Answer: SingleFeed (and FastPivot) both offer methods that ensure the product image urls are updated and your results maintain images. Many other Y! Store feed solutions don’t handle this properly and require you to pay for separate image hosting fees.

Question: How do I add custom fields to my Yahoo! Store to use on the shopping engines?
Answer:  Legacy stores will need to add the custom field to each product, one product at a time. New Merchant Solutions stores can add custom product fields globally, but we recommend working with a Yahoo! Store helper company like FastPivot.

On Wednesday, February 24,  at 2 p.m. EST / 11 a.m. PST,  join SingleFeed as we share our expertise and advice in getting started with the shopping engines.  Yahoo! Stores design and helper company FastPivot will be joining us to not only discuss how to properly track your shopping engine campaigns with Yahoo! Analytics, but also help you understand what metrics to keep an eye on.

We’ll be covering the following topics:
- How to add custom fields to your Yahoo Store
- Properly measuring results with Yahoo/Google Analytics
- Take home action items/tips to optimize your feed
- Yahoo Shopping & Pricegrabber changes

Register for the webinar

For those of you who missed our Shopping Engine Success for Yahoo! Stores webinar, or want to catch it again, head over to Rob Snell’s website or watch them below.

http://www.robsnell.com/singlefeed-webinar.html

Many of you heard last week that Yahoo Product Submit announced that their product comparison results will soon be replaced by Pricegrabber results. Learn how this will affect your store listings. Visit Brian Smith’s post at http://comparisonengines.com/2010/01/11/yahoo-product-submit-replaced-by-pricegrabber/ for a full explanation and links to Yahoo’s pages addressing the change.

Well it’s nearing the end of 2009, so here’s a little recap if you’re a new follower or missed out on some previous posts. It has been really great to get to help explain the world of data feeds, optimization and feed management to our readers and we’re excited to see our visitors and reader count grow. Thinking ahead to 2010, there will be plenty more informative and juicy posts to keep your data feeds optimized. We’re planning for a few blog post series and perhaps some guest writers!

Here’s our top 5 list from the past year:

1. Using Google Analytics Intelligence alerts for Data Feeds – How to let Google Analytics alert you if your shopping engine traffic dips
2. Using Google Product Extension Ads – Connecting your Google AdWords ads with your Google Product Search data feed
3. Google Base Product Type – Pay attention to this often left out and misused attribute for Google Product Search
4. Use Holiday Keywords in Product Titles and Descriptions – Leverage holiday keywords to gain additional traffic from the shopping engines
5. Getting Seller Ratings on Google Product Search – Ratings are reviews are incredibly important to your shopping engine performance. You should also check out an older post, Google Product Search Merchant Reviews.

What was your favorite LoveYourFeed post of 2009 and why?

Google recently released Product Extension Ads, also known as Ad Extensions for AdWords. This new feature is available to merchants using Google AdWords and Google Product Search. Within your Google Merchant Center account, you can connect your AdWords account to use product information to create extension ads. AdWords will use your Google Base/Product Search feed to accomplish this.

It’s important to note that you may be able to obtain multiple links to your products on one of these results pages. You can have an organic listing, Product Extension Ad links, and Google Product Search results under the “Shopping results for…” section which can increase the number of chances you’ll get a visitor to your website.

For those who don’t what an Extension Ad looks like, check out these results.

Search “Fein Multimaster” with results from AllProTools/AllProFein

Search “Delta 470″ with results from PlumberSurplus.com. Note that their Google Checkout badge is showing as well, with a current $5 off orders of $30 or more.

Once you add your AdWords account id to your Google Merchant Center account, you can then go add new keywords campaigns that utilize this data. To learn more about how to create these ads visit AdWords Help Center.

If you’re like most merchants, you hardly have time in your day to grab lunch and check your voicemails, let alone analyze report data for hours to determine if a shopping engine has dropped in traffic. We recommend that merchants also use the ROI trackers from each individual engine in conjunction with our SingleFeed tracking, and also it’s a good idea to track this stuff with your own analytics. Most merchants these days are using Google Analytics; it’s free and fairly easy to setup and provides great insight into your website’s performance.

As a back up alert system, I came up with this idea for merchants to setup Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts for their data feeds, should something go wrong.  If you are using utm_ parameters on your produt urls for the shopping engines, then you”ll be able to set up one of these alerts with no problem. One of the available default tracking options we have at SingleFeed is to tag product urls with utm_medium and utm_source parameters which gives merchants the ability to see the breakdown of shopping engine traffic in Google Analytics.

Within your Google Analytics account, navigate to My Customizations > Intelligence area and click on “Create New Alert”. I’ve created 3 custom alerts for starters, but you can create how ever many you want.

As for the actual alert settings, if you are using SingleFeed’s default url parameters then you can set something up by either medium (shoppingengine) or source (engine name). You can set the % values at whatever you want, I figured 25% was a good starting point. You don’t want to receive too many alerts if you set it at 3%, but you wouldn’t want it to large and never receive an alert if it was at 90%. Perhaps over time, you’ll find a more realisitic number like 30 or 40%. Remember the goal of these alerts are to warn you that something has happened to cause the traffic on your Google Product Search listings to drop. That could be from a botched feed upload, expired products, etc.

This alert will notify you when your overall traffic from the shopping engines drops more than 25% from the previous week.

This alert will notify you when your traffic from the one specific engine (in this case, Google Product Searc) drops more than 25% from the previous week.

So here’s just one idea that you can implement to help protect your self from a larger issue of having your feeds go down and not know about it. We often hear from merchants who had no idea that their items were down on an engine because they weren’t checking the reports. We understand that reviewing report data takes time and you’re short on it. So let technology do the work for you and alert you when you need to step in and investigate.

* Please note that the settings you see here are intended for merchants using utm_ parameters on their product urls which go out to the shopping engines. Some changes may be needed if your parameters are different.

The shopping engines work just like search engines.  They looking for relevant data in your feed to inform shopping search engine result pages (sSERPS).  Yes, the algorithms look at a lot of information, but everyone who thinks about data quality knows that fine tuning product titles and product descriptions makes a big difference.

So I’m always shocked when I realize around this time of year that merchants haven’t taken the time to include holiday keywords in their product titles and product descriptions.  So run a quick test and see what happens.  There are so few search results when you search for ‘christmas present’ on the leading shopping engines that you can probably stand out really easily.   Smarter.com tipped me off to this strategy 3 years ago!

Don’t spam the engines, but if you have great potential Christmahanukwanzaakah presents, then go for it.

Here are some holiday keywords to consider: christmas/hanukkah present, christmas/hanukkah present for dad/mom/boyfriend/girlfriend.

For example, in the description for ‘Men’s Fleece Jacket’ test out something like:  Men’s Fleece Jacket makes a great christmas present for Dad.

Many of you are probably using Twitter so we’d like to share some info with you so you can make sure you’re following the right people and using the right hashtags for data feeds, shopping engines, and ecommerce.

Suggested Twitter hashtags:

#datafeedoptimization – data feed optimization
#cse – comparison shopping engine
#loveyourfeed – new!
#googlebase – Google Base/Product Search, formerly known as Froogle
#comparisonshopping – new!
#singlefeed
#ecommerce

Suggested Twitter users to follow:

@singlefeed
@loveyourfeed
@getelastic
@thefind
@bingcashback
@powerreviews
@shopcom
@googleretail
@become
@nextag
@prontodotcom
@yahooshopping
@pricegrabber

If you know any more users or tags, feel free to add them as comments!