Create a product feed with cool tracking features.
The aim of this article is to show you how I personally used Marketing Manger Pro alongside Feedcentre to see exactly how many clicks were hitting our site from our automated product feeds with the added bonus of not having to be a google base expert.
Most people who have x-cart will have no doubt signed up to you google analytics, a complete data mining solution to find out the state of play with regards to product listings
The aim of this article is to show you how I personally used Marketing Manger Pro alongside Feedcentre to see exactly how many clicks were hitting our site from our automated product feeds with the added bonus of not having to be a google base expert.
Pushing our product feeds to the myriad of shopping comparison sites was a no brainer decision from the start of the shops launch. It might be a crowded market but one worth getting into with a few tricks (those tricks are for another article).
This idea came about when I was running my small tech company a few years ago. Using the Firetank FeedCentre program we were pushing out feeds to google and yahoo on a weekly basis and then logging in now and again to google analytics to see what’s what. However without really knowing our way around the system and not wanting to have yet another cost of paying someone to tell me details about my data I looked for a solution.
The solution hit me was to use marketing manager campaign manager along with the feed centre. We had already been using campaign monitor to let us know what clicks were being clicked on. I’d already been monitoring a few choice placements for products on forums and every forum had a signature linking back to the site.
Using the following code allowed me to see who clicked what links were being clicked on and with the right code, what site they were coming from.
<a href=”http://www.yoursite.com/shop/customer/home.php?MMCF_yoursite”>I’ve a cool ecommerce website, come check it out</a><br />
This simple act alone taught me one thing when trying to build up a business, keep active on forums and make posts relevant. If you spend the time and be active people will click. Obviously this will work if you have our module installed.
Armed with knowledge of this experiment, a cup of tea to aid the thought process and time being of a luxury I decided I wanted to see at a glance the following.
Clicks from google base per month. Why?
After time you can see trends like quiet months, any upturns and if for one month you spike in traffic it’s easier to work out why.
Clicks from all feeds sent out
Like the above plus it gives you a way to prioritize what to focus on. If you have a poorly performing feed, this lets you make an informed decision of it to spend time on that area or increase a better working feed.
Feed Centre, as we already knew, was sending out feeds as and when but how do we get a feed sent out without pulling the data into excel, editing with a shedload of concatenates (google that one), saving, then re uploading.
The answer came from our very own Kurt at Firetanksoftware in the shape of some php code.
At its default setting the feed centre uses the above field mappings. On the drop down box change standard field to php code as below.
Here comes the magic…
In the php box put the following code
$field_value = $data['product_url'] . = “?MMCF_campaign_name_here”;
If you do use this code heres a hint, test the links first before pushing your feed out. Download the csv and copy a few links into the browser for testing.
This code also works for xcarters running clean urls such as DSEFU, CDSEO, etc. For normal
“product.php?productid=12345″ URLs, you’ll have to change “?MMCF” to
“&MMCF”.
So the results. Heres what the result of this simple effort shows.
In the above pictures google_ad was a generic term. I personally used google_Month, changing it accordingly to make sure that I didn’t miss data or skew results. There’s no way to have this set automatically to change at the start of each month but hey, it took most of the work away.
Breakdown.
So what did we do and accomplish
We accomplished what we wanted to, a simple and effective way to monitor clicks from our feeds using the marketing tools already installed on our site.