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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.

A few posts back we recommended that if you are advertising your products on NexTag and Shopping.com, you ought to consider installing their respective ROI Trackers. These ROI trackers in particular not only give you another vantage in which to view and analyze your campaign performance, but more importantly, they can boost performance, getting you a higher return for your advertising dollar.

Add Become.com’s newly improved ROI tracker to our recommended list. We recently found that they have made significant improvements to their ROI tracker. Once installed, it will track your products’ conversion rates and use that information to provide a ranking boost to products that are performing well and downrank poor-performing ones. This should improve your conversion rate and ROI! Thanks Become.com!

SingleFeed currently offers an all-in-one shopping engine tracking solution, allowing you to see real-time click and conversion data across all shopping engines in one handy online interface. Even if you have our tracker installed, we still recommend that you install these ROI-improving trackers from NexTag, Shopping.com, and now Become.com.