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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.

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.

January and February are typically slow times for retailers (with the possible exception of Valentine’s day), which makes this an ideal time to rethink, re-strategize, and re-optimize your sales and marketing campaigns for the coming year. Make sure to include a review of your comparison shopping engine (CSE) campaign and its performance. Here are some tips:

1) Deep dive into your data feed and look for ways to improve your product listings. Could your product names and descriptions have better keyword placement? Are you missing important identifiers such as UPC or MPN? Are there optional fields such as size, color, or material you should be taking advantage of? A thorough review can take a significant amount of time, but can be well worth it.

2) Review each of your active shopping engine accounts. Are your tax and shipping rules set correctly? Are your bids back where you want them (after the holiday rate increase)? Look at category and product level performance and investigate products or categories that did not perform well. Also look for promotional messaging programs and opportunities with each CSE.

3) Check some of your live listings. Are the product names, descriptions, and prices correct? Are the tax and shipping costs correct? Is your store logo being displayed? Is your promotional message compelling?

4) Ensure your analytics tool (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc) is accurately tracking your shopping engine ads. Make sure product URL’s are tagged correctly. Run a couple test orders to ensure conversions are being reported.

Once you’ve done all this, you should be well-oiled for a smooth-running 2009. For even more advice on how to optimize your CSE campaign, consider using SingleFeed, which helps online retailers submit, manage, and optimize their product listings on top shopping sites through a single data feed.
Happy New Year!