As you know, SingleFeed sends out your data feeds every 24 hours. While we thought our weekend release (January 27) went out without a hitch, it seems we were wrong and feeds were not processed and sent to the shopping engines on Monday, January 28 or Tuesday, January 29. Existing feeds remained live, but new or updated feeds were not processed during this time.

Your data feeds were processed and delivered this morning as soon as we discovered the problem.

I sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused you. We are implementing new safeguards and better notification systems so that any future feed delivery problems are discovered and addressed much quicker. After about 180 days of no problems delivering feeds, we got a little lax. This won’t happen again.

Ciao, one of Europe’s leading shopping engines, is coming to the United States. To find out more about Ciao, read my post at ComparisonEngines.

Ciao US is not yet live and therefore SingleFeed isn’t officially supporting the engine. Before adding partners, we like to get to know the partner and make sure our merchants will be completely taken care of, but we wanted to at least pass along the special promotion that Ciao is running for merchants that sign up pre-launch (around February 7).

Email Markus Rottmaier @ ‘markus.rottmaier at ciao-group.com, tell him that SingleFeed sent you, and he’ll give you 3 months of FREE clicks. Ciao will run on a PPC basis like most US based shopping engines, so 3 months free is quite a steal.

Only time will tell whether Ciao will become a successful acquisition channel for merchants, but it can’t hurt to reserve those free clicks today.

As I mentioned over at ComparisonEngines, SingleFeed is hiring.  In order to delight our merchants, we need to bulk up a bit.  We’re hiring Perl/mySQL developers (JS, CSS, AJAX experience a plus), a Sr. Director of Engineering (who has to be willing to jump into the code and get his/her hands dirty), an Account Manager (this is NOT a sales position, that’s not how we work around here), a Business Development Associate/Manager (to strike lots of revenue driving mutually beneficial partnerships), and Information/Library Science Specialists (we’ve got some tricks up our sleeves to handle the shopping engine taxonomies).

Why work here?  Because we’re a fast growing internet start up which is changing the way merchants create, submit, manage, and optimize their data feeds.  We’re a disruptive force in the industry; heralding the benefits of data feed optimization (DFO) and putting the merchants first.  We’re young and scrappy.  Team members are empowered to make a difference. We’re backed by True Ventures and NetService Ventures, VCs that have invested in GigaOm, Automattic (makers of Wordpress, which just raised $29.5m), Zvents, and Aggregate Knowledge.  In other words, we have a lot of smart people behind us.

Our main offices are located in Palo Alto and San Francisco, but we have a distributed team (Portland, NYC, East Rochester, Boston). Ideally, you’re in the Bay Area, but if you’re an amazing contributor, we might consider non-locals.
If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, want to revolutionize an industry, work your ass off, and have fun doing it, then send your resume to ‘jobs at singlefeed dot com’.

SingleFeed is observing the MLK Jr. Holiday.  Some of us are lurking around the office, but for the most part, if you call or email us questions, expect to hear back from a SingleFeed representative tomorrow.

If you’re using SingleFeed’s Advanced or Advanced Plus tracking option AND passing back optional variables to SingleFeed, starting today, you’ll see order_value (Revenue) displayed in the reports.

As I explained a couple days ago, we’re taking baby steps. Expect more enhancements soon.

We’re here to make reporting easier for all our merchants. Tell us what you like or don’t like about our reporting solution, and we’ll work on improvements as quickly as possible.

You can once again sign up for a new account with Shopping.com.  Here’s the sign up page.

Better late than never.

While Easter Eggs are typically thought of as those cute, decorated eggs hidden by the Easter Bunny, SingleFeed also has a couple Easter Eggs in its data feed.

If you’re looking to test an optimization strategy for Google Base and Google Product Search, consider using the GOOGLE BASE PRODUCT NAME REPLACEMENT and GOOGLE BASE PRODUCT DESCRIPTION REPLACEMENT fields. Filling out these fields will allow you to easily enter alternative product names and product descriptions for your Google Base feed. SingleFeed will check these fields before we send your feed to Google Base, and if populated, we will replace the content in the PRODUCT NAME and PRODUCT DESCRIPTION fields with the content in these Google Base replacement fields.

All you have to do to get started with these fields is include them in your next upload. Make sure to use the exact heading names (yes, we know we have to be more flexible):

GOOGLE BASE PRODUCT NAME REPLACEMENT

GOOGLE BASE PRODUCT DESCRIPTION REPLACEMENT

We do not allow merchants to use black-hat tactics like keyword stuffing, and Google Base will penalize you for this activity, but think about using these replacement fields strategically to test more targeted product titles and descriptions.

Instead of using the title ‘columbia sportswear jacket’, try ‘[insert gender, size, color] columbia sportswear jacket’ on some percentage of your listings. Monitor your results (track!) and see what happens. If there’s any adverse impact on your feed, just remove the content from the replacement fields. One nice thing about feeds is that you can make changes and see the results within 24hrs (although I’d recommend a longer test period before jumping to conclusions).

As most of you know, I think there are three parts to data feed optimization (DFO).

1. Engine set up

2. Qualitative DFO

3. Quantitative DFO.

Since inception, SingleFeed has dedicated a ton of time and resources to the first two parts of DFO, with the thought that if you’re not set up on the engine properly and haven’t taken the time to create a quality data feed that all reporting and analytics will tell you is to cut your feed in half. That doesn’t make sense to me. However, it also doesn’t make sense to completely ignore reporting and analytics which drive quantitative data feed optimization decisions. We’ve therefore encouraged our users to use our engine level tracking in coordination with their third part analytics provider (Omniture, Visual Sciences, Google Analytics, Engine Ready, etc.) and also use shopping engine specific ROI tracking services to check product level results.
While SingleFeed will continue to lead the way with Engine Set up and Qualitative Data Feed Optimization, it’s time to roll out our reporting system which will help merchants with quantitative data feed optimization. Thanks to Alex, Grant, and Neil for the hard work!

We think we can dramatically improve the way merchants make quantitative data feed optimization decisions. We’re going to move slowly and deliberately to build a system which will benefit all our merchants. This means that our goal is to release early and often. There are some downsides to doing this, and we might not have the coolest, fanciest system for some time, but we will listen to your feedback, give you the core features to help you improve your results on the shopping engines, and build the best data feed reporting system on the market.

We already have a number of merchants using the system. Like I said it’s early. We actually have a release next week which will add some meat to the system, but we want more merchants to start playing around with it. You can find it under the Profile tab when you log into your account.

You will have a number of options as we wanted to make reporting available to all merchants regardless of technology expertise.

Novice Tracking

This solution only tracks clicks. This tracking solution requires absolutely no extra work on your part. What we’re doing is activating re-directs so we can grab click information for the links that we send out to the shopping engines. For those of you not familiar with redirects, what SingleFeed is doing is sending out our own re-direct URL to the shopping engines. When someone clicks on that URL on the shopping engine, it goes to our reporting service for an instant and then redirects the user to the URL that you specified. This happens in a blink of an eye so your user will never really know that they were ‘re-directed’. What happens in that blink of an eye, though, is SingleFeed logs that click so we can report back to you on your engine and product level traffic.

It’s very important to note that not all shopping engines support re-directs. In fact, one of the requirements we follow as a Google Product Search partner is that we don’t send them re-direct URLs. If you choose the Novice Tracking option, we will not enable redirects for Google Product Search.
Advanced Tracking

This solution tracks clicks and sales. Advanced tracking makes use of a re-direct + JavaScript code that you must put on your post checkout/conversion page. With this JavaScript code on your site, SingleFeed will be able to track your clicks and your sales. Again, we will not enable re-directs for Google Product Search, so you will not see clicks and sales for that engine.

Advanced Plus Tracking

This solution tracks clicks and sales. Advanced Plus does not make use of re-directs, but purely uses JavaScript code (which means it’s the solution for tracking Google Product Search clicks and sales). You will be required to put JavaScript code on your post checkout/conversion page AND your product pages. It’s a little more work on your part, but allows for Google Product Search tracking. One downside to this tracking solution is that your checkout page/process must reside on the same domain as your regular site. Some ecommerce providers switch to a completely different domain for the checkout process. If that’s the case for your site, do not use the Advanced Plus tracking option.

It’s time to TEST!

As you can see, there are definitely some limitations with our initial release. Please also know that we’re not currently tracking cost data so we can’t provide you with a complete ROI picture. We will address this issues shortly. Like I said, we’re taking deliberate steps to build the best reporting system possible, but it will take a bit of time. Expect more updates over the next couple weeks and months.

But right now we want you to test our solution. So go to the Profile page, and find the link for reporting. Choose the right option for you. Give it a day, and then check back and view your reports. If there are any problems, contact ’support at singlefeed.com’ and we’ll look into the issues. Remember, this is a BETA launch, so it’s not going to be perfect, but we want your feedback.

Thanks!

-brian

According to the merchant sign up page, Shopping.com is still not accepting new merchants.  The moratorium was supposed to be until January 1, so I’m sure they’ll open back up again soon.  We’ll keep you posted.

NexTag’s 25% CPC rate increase ends today, but NexTag is not automatically dropping your bids for you. You must login to your account and do this yourself. Read our post at LoveYourFeed to find out more. Also, while you’re at it, you might want to think about some bidding strategies. You do this with Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Why not the shopping engines? Bidding on the shopping engines is a poorly covered topic, but increasing your bids by just a penny or two can produce great results. Run a test or two and see what happens.