Associating product categories to items

If you have product categories containing multiple items you can now analyze the performance of those product categories right in Google Analytics. This is called Content Groupings in Google Analytics.

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It is very valuable to see how groups of pages perform, as opposed to individual pages. What is the value of your best performing pages? In general, optimization is far more manageable for a few a buckets than for lots of individual pages or products. Even cross-selling rules are far easier to find than on an individual sku-level.

It’s therefore highly recommended that you take the extra step to categorize your product pages. Luckily, it’s easy to add this capability.

Google Analytics

You need admin rights in order to add Content Groupings. The main thing is that you make a note of the slot:

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In your .monitus.net tools settings, just select the same slot:

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If you don’t see Content Grouping in the tools settings, it means that we don’t have your categories information on file. Please read on.

Product Categories data setup instructions:

If you use Merchant Solutions or have upgraded to Merchant Solutions there are several ways with which to associate items with product categories:

1) In Catalog Manager:

Click on “Manage Your Tables” and edit “default-table” (If you use other tables repeat these instructions). In the “Custom Fields” section click “Edit”. Add a new field called monitus-category of type Text. Hit Update when you are done and “Save” the table.

You will now see this new field when you add or edit your items. Add the category name in this field for your items. Publish your catalog when you are done. The monitus-category field will be added to your XML feed catalog.xml, which we can then pick up. Of course, your XML feed has to be enabled. If this is not the case, you can enable the feed in Store Manager > Search Engines.

2) Send us a simple CSV file:

The csv file should be comma-separated and only contain two fields: id and category, where id is the id of the item. Click here for a sample file: categories.csv

Finally email this file to us and we will associate it with your account.

Useful tip

If you have hundreds or thousands of products it may be very time-consuming for you to add categories to items. However, if you use the Store Editor and if your catalog is categorized according to sections and products, you could use a simple RTML template to help you generate the csv file automatically. Get your RTML developer to do this for you if you don’t want to do this yourself.

Here is a sample RTML template that you could use. It uses the helper RTML template find-top-section to associate every item with the top-level category in your store. Then copy and paste the output to a text editor and save as a csv file.

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Is my Google Analytics data safe?

The Web Analytics Connector does not access data in your Google Analytics account and therefore does not require you to supply your login information or grant our application API access to Google Analytics. You have the option to automatically execute customized tracking methods (such as event tracking) on your site, but none of data thus collected by Google Analytics contains personally identifiable information (PII).

How many Yahoo! Stores can I track?

You can track up to 5 Yahoo! Stores with one subscription at .monitus.net. All sites tracked count towards your page view total.

When you register for our service, you will be asked for the UA code, Yahoo! Store ID and associated domain names of your first site. Please email this information for any additional sites you want to track and we will add those to your account.

Web Analytics connector for Google Analytics and Yahoo! Store

The Web Analytics Connector enables Google Analytics to properly track Yahoo! Store e-commerce transactions. Using a first party cookie approach, our method preserves the original referrer all the way through to the actual transaction. Reliable web analytics data and proper attribution of your marketing campaigns and keywords is the basis for optimizing your site.

We make it super-easy for you to get started and offer free installation and free audit of your Google Analytics configuration. We’ll even install a checkout funnel at no charge.

But we didn’t stop there and have added a number of additional capabilities that are relevant for online retailers:

  • Track Yahoo! Store site search terms automatically, including zero results searches
  • Check SEO rankings directly in your analytics reports
  • View checkout errors directly in your analytics reports to help optimize the checkout process
  • Track coupon code usage directly in web analytics and tie to transactions
  • View product options such as size and color across all products in order to get an aggregate view of demand
  • View PersonaQuest campaigns directly in Google Analytics.
  • View revenue attributed to Yahoo! Store’s cross-sell functionality
  • Group your items and analyze your product categories via the Google Analytics Product Categories report. Learn about setting up product categories
  • And many other custom events and variables

The data provided by the Monitus Tools service allows you to see how visitors interact with your site in a way that you can understand and help you improve your online store. And of course, we offer a free trial with free installation so that you can start analyzing your data instead of worry about proper implementation.

Event tracking and custom variables