We finally did it. With your help, we re-built our reporting system from the ground up; and we hope you like it!

As many of you know, we’ve been working our process for quite some time. We not only wanted to build a reporting system that was aesthetically pleasing, we also wanted it to be functionally appropriate for how you do business. Many of you, from companies large and small, and across a spectrum of industries, answered our surveys, met with our account management team, reviewed draft screenshots, and kicked the tires of our demo system. Thank you. We couldn’t have done it without you!

But allow me to share some of the aspects you may not be aware of.

If you’ve ever used our previous reporting, then you probably noticed that instead of taking many minutes simply to get an initial blank report-configuration screen, you immediately see an overview report with data, and a graph to boot –all in well-under a minute. In order to make this possible, we redesigned our reporting database using some data-warehousing techniques using “fact” and “dimension” table where we roll-up reports on a nightly basis, so that your experience is performant and enjoyable.

And, of course, we added those useful visuals to the top of each report. Now, at a glance, you can tell what’s going on with your shopping campaigns. No need to break-out that calculator to decide if you need to act on your product feeds. It’s all there in graphical form –particularly for those of you who (like me) process information visually.

And, if you’re wondering how we made those charts, checkout www.raphaeljs.com — the open-source javascript-based vector graphics library we used

And, of course, we cleaned-up the design of our pages, making them easier to maintain, and more compatible with your browsers. We did this with by using a combination of Ruby on Rails, Jquery and RaphaelJS. (As a matter of fact, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that the reports even work on our iPhone(s)!)

Finally, just three weeks after the introduction of this new reporting solution, we provided the ability to export your reports (we now process these requests in the background) — a major architectural change that I hope to write more about in the future. And we added an initial version of sku-suppression — a feature to help you better control your costs.

So what’s next? Yes, despite all that, we’ve got more coming.

I’ll mention two and whet your appetite with a leading-question on the second one:

• rule-based sku-suppression

and, one of my favorites:

• industries reports

(Let’s say you sell shoes.) Wouldn’t it be great to know which shopping-engines have proven most profitable for the shoe-industry?

Well, thanks again to all of you, our customers. We look forward to bringing you more of the features that have helped make SingleFeed synonymous with the phrase, “Comparison Engines Made Easy”.
Best Regards,
Jonathan Thomas

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.
-b

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.

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.