SingleFeed Merchants,

As some of you know, we have made dramatic improvements to our tracking and reporting capabilities over the past few months.  While performance reporting is crucial to the success of your marketing campaigns, tracking accuracy is very difficult to acheive.  You probably use multiple analytics solutions (SingleFeed, Google Analytics, CSE reporting) and none of them ever match up.  They probably never will.  With all of the different factors (browser versions, cookies, javascript, repeat visitors…) there are a million different ways to track.  The best we can do is provide you with metrics that are as near 100% accurate as possible.  That’s exactly what we’ve worked on recently.  Here are some of the changes:

• On April 23rd we introduced new tracking logic.  Looking back in your reports you should see a very robust overnight increase in your number of reported conversions, revenue and conversion rate.
•  In most cases we were previously over-reporting clicks and under-reporting conversions.  After the update, on average, our customers’ conversion numbers increased by 225% and conversion rate by 325%.
• Last week we simplified our tracking levels and updated the tracking settings page (accessed via the reporting tab).  We now offer two tracking levels:  Novice & Advanced.

Here are how the changes affect you:

If you are currently on Novice tracking:

You do not need to do anything.  However, we recommend activating the Advanced tracking option for the most complete and accurate metrics.

If you are currently on Advanced tracking:

To get the most accurate results, and to begin tracking Google Product Search performance (not previously available on Advanced), you will want to install our javascript code snippet on your product pages (similar to what you have done on your post-checkout page).  In order to do so, please review Step 1 on our instructional page.

If you are currently on Advanced Plus tracking:

You do not need to do anything but please know that we will be discontinuing our Advanced Plus tracking option, which relied solely on javascript code, in favor of a hybrid javascript and redirect method utilized on the Advanced tracking level.  We will automatically migrate you to the Advanced level on Monday July 6th and you do not need to do anything at that time.  This change will activate url redirects for all of your feeds (except your Google feed, if applicable).  These can be disabled, although your reported metrics may then be off by as much as 30%.

Finally, if you aren’t currently taking advantage of SingleFeed’s reporting capabilities, there is no better time than now.  Our reporting will help you make informed decisions about your shopping engine campaigns and, most importantly, it’s included at no additional charge in your current SingleFeed plan.  We look forward to making additional improvements to our reporting functionality and, as always, feedback from you is the most valuable insight we can get.  Please let us know about your experience.

Best,

The SingleFeed Team

Just a couple quick notes for this week:

-Ryan and I (Brian) are at Internet Retailer this week.  We’ll be meeting with lots of merchants, shopping engines, and friends.  Ping me (brian@singlefeed.com) if you’d like to meet up.

-We had a BIG release last week which included our move to Amazon EC2.  We’re not completely in the clouds yet, but this is a big test for the company.  We haven’t been happy with our hosting provider and hope that EC2  will make us more reliable and scalable.  More details soon.

-We launch our first Ruby on Rails page this week, which is the start of a big coding change for the company. More details soon.

-We’re heavy users of Salesforce and are working on important automated integration points (through the API) to enable us to delight our merchants.

-We’re in the process of adding a lot of great content to the site - some sales related but a ton of general shopping engine info.

That’s what’s happening at SingleFeed this week.  As always, feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions (brian@singlefeed.com).

We would like to invite you to meet up with some of the team at this year’s Internet Retailer next week June 15-17 in Boston.

We know that it’s a tough environment out there for retailers and lots of budgets simply don’t allow you to attend this year. For those of you who are unable to attend Internet Retailer, we urge you to stay abreast of the news and happenings of the week from your favorite blogs, including this one and ComparisonEngines.com. You can also follow us on Twitter to see what we’re up to during the conference. http://twitter.com/singlefeed

For those of you who are attending, send us an email or comment on the blog and let us know if you are interested in scheduling time to chat.

See you in Boston!

The SingleFeed site will be down for routine maintenance on Wednesday, June 10th 2009 beginning at 6pm PST (9pm EST) and lasting for several hours.  This will not affect any of your product data or engine feed deliveries.  The post-operative benefit to our merchants will be: speed, reliability, security and scalability!  As our customer base and number of managed product feeds grow, we want to ensure that we keep our system speedy and reliable.  As such, we are moving a lot of our data to some nifty new servers.  Thanks for your patience!

The SingleFeed Team

Hello Merchants!

Google recently announced that they will be making their “condition” attribute, currently optional, required as of June 30th, 2009.  The values for this attribute include:  ”new”, “used” & “refurbished”.  Including this information in your feed to Google, and all of the other shopping engines, is a key component to the success of your campaigns.  Shoppers will often sort or filter by this information and it’s important for them to understand why there may be large price differences between the same product (one is new, one is refurbished).  You want this information to be available to shoppers so that they are informed about your product offering before clicking over to your site.  This reduces the number of “curiosity clicks” you get and will in turn help boost your conversion rate.

If you are a SingleFeed merchant, have no fear!  SingleFeed already supports an optional condition field.  If you aren’t submitting any data in that field for a given product (or all products), we default the value to “new” so that your feed will still be accepted at the shopping engines, like Google, which require this field.  However, we strongly reccomend providing this information if you sell used or refurbished products.  As always, make sure you are tracking the impact (before and after) of any changes you make to your feed.  You can do this through the “Reporting” tab in your SingleFeed account, where you can monitor your traffic, sales, conversion rate, revenue, cost & ROAS.  Any time you make changes to your feed, make sure you are measuring the results!

We will be at eCommerce Merchants Trade Association 2009 Spring Summit in Atlanta, GA this Wednesday and Thursday.  Be sure to attend the session about Comparison Shopping Engines by Brian Smith on Wednesday at 10:15am - 11:00am in Room B.   Look for our team to learn more about SingleFeed’s data feed management services.  Email ryan@singlefeed.com if you’d like to setup a meeting.