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, accessible from within your account.
-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.

Here at SingleFeed we’re big believers in trying to work in an agile way — taking on the work in bite-sized chunks, getting them done, and seeing what’s next, rather than attacking a huge monolithic project and not seeing results until it’s done. As part of managing that work, we use Jira to track items that need attention, as detailed in a previous post. For breaking down a project into the aforementioned bite-sized chunks and tracking progress, however, we’re looking at other tools.

Certainly, there’s the good old “task list in TextEdit” approach, or using Excel to list what needs to be done and tracking things old-school. There are better, more modern ways, however. Jira has a plugin called GreenHopper which seems interesting, but it’s fairly complex and expensive. Right now we’re interested in testing things out and keeping investment low, so we’ve been looking at tools such as Pivotal Tracker, AgileBuddy, and ScrumNinja. AgileBuddy isn’t free while the others are, but it’s not expensive either. At the moment, we’re trying out ScrumNinja on one of our current projects, and so far it’s simple but gets the job done. We’ll see what we think when we’re done with the project.

Tools are useful, but only if they aid a process that everyone buys into and that gets things done in a healthy way. Since Agile development can mean so many different things, it’s important to decide on your process first and then find the right tool, rather than allow a tool to change your process in ways that might not be right for your team. We’ll report back after our experiments, and in the meantime welcome other suggestions and descriptions of other experiences.

We would like to invite you to a webinar that we are co-hosting with our partners at FastPivot, TopRight and PowerReviews. Together, our four companies provide technology, services and expertise for Yahoo Stores. You can register now for this opportunity to hear the experts share tips and advice from their specific area.

On Wednesday, October 21st at 1pm Eastern Time, we will get together to share some best practices with you.

Simple Improvements for Big Holiday Results

We will focus on some quick changes you can make to your Yahoo Store to earn more revenue this holiday season:

* Managing your shopping engine feeds
* Adding intelligence to your email marketing
* Impacting conversions with customer reviews
* Installing features your customers expect

There is no cost for this webinar, but you must pre-register to ensure that there will be enough spots left for everyone who is interested in attending. Please register now.

Amazon is running a promotion during the month of October, offering a $25 click credit for new merchants receiving their first click-out from Product Ads over the course the month.  If you haven’t already checked out Product Ads, definitely do so.  We’ve found that it is a channel that converts extremely well for many of our customers:

This summer, SingleFeed’s engineering department migrated our systems from a dedicated hosting provider. Our web application and back-end feed processing is now done on virtual servers running on Amazon’s EC2 cloud computing platform, where we’ve joined companies such as the Washington Post, Harvard Medical School, Virgin Atlantic, and Autodesk in taking advantage of the expandability and flexibility of cloud computing.

What does this mean for our merchants? Most importantly, the ability to instantly add new resources to our system enables us to grow as needed to continue offering prompt feed processing and engine delivery. In fact, since moving to EC2 we’ve already transparently upgraded several of our servers, and in each case it took only a few minutes. Back when we were running on dedicated hardware, that process would have begun by requesting a new server, followed by days to get it installed and configured before we were even able to begin using it.

We’re also able to set up server instances for testing on demand, allowing us to explore new ways of providing better service for our customers. It’s marvelous to be able to create an exact clone of our system whenever we want to try out a new approach, and then just let the instances vanish when we’re done.

As we continue to grow, we’ll take further advantage of this flexibility to provide greater power for parsing, analyzing, and delivering our customers’ data feeds.

As with any complex system, at SingleFeed it takes some effort for us to track what’s going on, who’s working on what, and the status of things. For tracking new tasks, improvements we want to make, and, yes, bugs — it happens to the best of us — we’ve been using a web application called Jira. I’m a big fan of Jira, and have used it at several previous companies. It makes it easy to describe work that needs to be done, classify it by both type (task, bug, etc) and system component, and track what state it’s in: open, in progress, resolved, and so on. We can assign items to each other, get notifications when things change, link items together, and even vote on new features. Viewing reports of issues is easy, based on any criteria you can think of: date, state, owner, component… And then we can track releases by assigning issues to upcoming release dates, so everyone can see what’s coming up. Most importantly, Jira’s a very easy system to use, both for technical and non-technical members of the SingleFeed team.

How does one find the time to manage all the marketing and sales activities to ensure that traffic and orders are coming through the door? Everyday there are hundreds of distractions and responsibilities that demand your attention. Managing data feeds for the comparison shopping engines shouldn’t be one of these. That’s where we come in, but we’ll save the shameless self-plug for later in this post.

I constantly find myself searching on Google for tips and shortcuts that can help save me time and energy. When you start to repeat the same task over and over enough you’ll start thinking to yourself “gee, activitiy x sure takes up a lot of my time each day”, you’ve already began the hunt to find an efficiency for that task. It’s why there are automatic sprinkler timers and self-cleaning litter boxes. What’s that, you want more real-life online applications? There are plenty of great tools out there for online junkies like us; there are thousands of FireFox browser plugins for any conceivable problem, Twitterfeed for automatically Tweeting when you have a new blog post, heck what about feed readers? The list goes on and on. Yet there are some tasks that there just aren’t a lot of tools available for to help save time.

Over at PowerReview’s office here in San Francisco, I saw a big, highly visible banner that read “Work smarter, not harder”. That motto has been one of the newer one’s we’ve adopted this year at SingleFeed. Finding ways internally to work smarter and more efficiently, while still helping our clients save time and money as well when it comes to getting up and running on the comparison shopping engines. Our core value proposition to use one feed for multiple shopping engines. Every step forward in efficiency for us is also a step (or two) forward for our clients. Take for example system alerts that allow us to respond quickly to a problem with a merchant’s account before they even realize it. We’ve just saved an hour or more of work for our team, and saved the merchant from losing out on traffic and sales to their site. It’s a win-win situation. We’ve built our MegaTaxonomy tool which makes it quicker and easier for us to get a merchant’s products categorized, saving the merchant from hours of work themselves. We’re building better reporting to make it quicker to view your performance and find areas of opportunity on the shopping engines.

Why hassle with building a data feed, formatting that data feed, categorizing that data feed, uploading and re-uploading? It might take 4 hours to get up and running on each shopping engine yourself. Multiply that by 10 shopping engines and you’ve just spent a full work week just to try and get started. Don’t forget you will still have to maintain each of those shopping engine feeds and upload them regularly, that’s another few hours every week. Build just one. We’ll send it to over a dozen comparison engines, and do all the tedious work and heavy lifting like daily submission, categorization, validation and formatting. You can focus on those other important marketing activities and maybe sneak in a early weekend and leave the office chanting aloud to your coworkers “Be Efficient. B-E-Efficient!”