LoveYourFeed.com, our sister blog, is chock full of data feed optimization (DFO) tips, and we highly recommend that you check out the posts. But if you’re looking for quick inspiration to improve the quality of your data feed and succeed on the shopping engines, I’d also recommended following SingleFeed on Twitter. Throughout the holiday shopping season, I’ll be posting lots and lots of DFO tips. And because we’re only talking about 140 characters or less, you’ll be getting direct, no bs information to help you optimize.
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We’ve received some great feedback on our new reporting system that we launched last Wednesday.  This was a major project for the SingleFeed team and we couldn’t have done it without all the great feedback from our customers.  Many of the questions and comments we’ve received have highlighted a specific area of confusion and that is the relationship between the click and order metrics that we report for each product.  It seems like a simple concept but it can be a bit confusing.  Here’s the gist:

The product clicked isn’t always the product ordered.
When “Product XYZ” shows 200 clicks and 4 orders, it means that the shopping engine listing for “Product XYZ” was clicked on 200 times and that those visits to your site resulted in a total of 4 orders… but, importantly, those orders don’t have to be for “Product XYZ.”  Shoppers will frequently click on one of your CSE product listings and then end up purchasing a different item once they get to your site.  They could have decided on a different color, or newer model, or maybe they purchased other products in addition to the one they clicked on (one order can contain multiple products).  For these reasons, it’s important to remember that your total revenue for those 4 orders will not necessarily be the price of “Product XYZ” times four.  Also, even if you haven’t sold a single unit of “Product XYZ”, it’s still a very productive ad listing and therefore should not be removed or suppressed from your feeds.

Performance metrics are tied to the click.
All performance metrics are reported in-line with the product click.  This means that a report for January 6th will show you all clicks that occurred on that day plus any orders and revenue generated from those clicks… even if those orders occurred on subsequent days.  In fact, SingleFeed uses an industry standard 30 day window during which a shopper, after clicking on one of your CSE listings, can place an order on your site and have that order attributed to the original click-out and appear in your reports.  Importantly, this means that your reports can change retroactively for up to one month as additional sales come in.  This method of reporting orders and revenue on the day that the click occurred provides you with the most accurate ROAS (return on ad spend) metrics because the revenue generated is displayed in-line with the advertising cost that drove that revenue.

Finally, we do have plans to provide more order reporting information.  The SingleFeed tracking code you install on your post-checkout page is equipped to accept information about the number of items in each order, as well as the product ids.  As long as you fill in this information each time you call our conversion code, we will be able to include this info in your reports.  We plan to introduce a new order report that includes the date/time of the order, the date/time of the click that generated the order, the engine, the individual product skus, the total number of items in the cart, total revenue, etc…  look for these updates in the future!

Accessible immediately from within your account center is our all new reporting interface. After lots of feedback, we knew that our previous reporting system didn’t have enough functionality to meet your analytics needs nor was performance able to keep up as demand grew.

Quick notes:
-The interface is entirely new. You’ll recognize the engine and product reports, but we now have an overview dashboard along with charting and more robust filtering capabilities. We highly recommend checking out our video tutorial.
-Performance, and report load time, has improved dramatically. Seriously. It’s fast!

We have one or two follow up releases (coming almost immediately) that will leverage our new reporting interface. So stay tuned. We’re trying to get as much out now to help you improve your performance on the shopping engines for the holidays (and beyond)!

If you aren’t yet taking advantage of SingleFeed’s reporting, there’s no better time than now. It’s included free of charge in your monthly package and is now more valuable than ever in helping you optimize your data feeds. Implementation is a breeze and you can start collecting performance data in time for the holidays. Find out more on our tracking settings page from within your account.

SingleFeed’s team are big users of Salesforce, which helps us stay in touch with our customers. This summer, our engineering team also got into the spirit, and integrated our feed processing system with Salesforce as well. Now, whenever any of our customers imports a new feed, when our system finishes doing its magic on a feed, and when we deliver our customers’ feeds to the shopping engines, our Salesforce integration updates our customer records. This allows our account managers to always have real-time visibility into the status of every customer in a common interface. They can also be alerted when a feed has problems, in order to proactively offer assistance to a merchant and ensure that their feed makes it out to the shopping engines promptly. We’re always on the lookout for tools to help us help our merchants, and integrating Salesforce with our own system has definitely improved our ability to quickly see what’s going on and respond.