Google Analytics: Separating Product Listing Ads From Product Extensions Traffic
Paying for Google Shopping Traffic?
A few months ago we described the difference between Google's paid product listings: product listing ads and product extensions.
A brief recap: Aside from standard Google Shopping, our top performing CSE, merchants have alternatives to advertise their individual products online–for a fee.
Whereas Google Adwords limits you to just advertise your site along with a short message–Product Extensions and Product Listing Ads (or just PE and PLA) build upon both your Adwords and Google Shopping campaigns, allowing you to showcase your individual product listings alongside your adwords listings.
Molding Them All Together
If you're using Google Analytics, by doing the minimum and linking your Google Merchant Center and Adwords account–which enables you to use Product Extensions and Product Listing Ads–all your traffic will be attributed to whatever you tag your URLs with within your Google Shopping datafeed (without any appending it'll show up as "google / organic").
For instance if you append your Google Shopping URLs with: utm_source=googleshopping&utm_source=cse
Any clicks and conversions you receive from users on Google Shopping (the free part) will show up as "googleshopping / cse" in analytics, as well as any traffic you receive from Google Product Extensions and Product Listing Ads (what you're paying for).
How to Differentiate Them All
The issue of course is that Google Analytics is now bundling all the traffic and conversions you're getting for both its free and paid channels, but as an ecommerce guru you don't want this–you want to be able to track them all individually. And all it takes is a few slight additions to your Google Shopping data feed.
Step 1: Add a column called "adwords_redirect" within your Google Shopping feed (the one you submit to your Merchant Center)
What this does: By default, your PE and PLA listings will direct a user to the URL specified in your Google Shopping's "link" column (column A in the picture below). By adding this column, we now control where a user coming directly from a PE or PLA listing goes.
How to do this: A separate column labeled "adwords_redirect" should be added at the end with your full URL, but with different tracking parameters.
In the example above the standard URLs were appended with: utm_source=googleshopping&utm_medium=cse
In this new column let's change it to something like: utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords It can be anything, so long as it's unique to what's currently in your link column.
For example your feed could end up looking like this:
Now, any traffic coming from PE or PLA will be tracked under "googlepepla / adwords" within Google Analytics.
Step 2:
So now we can differentiate between (free) Google Shopping and PE+PLA traffic–now we must figure out a way to differentiate between PE and PLE traffic.
All this requires is another column, called "adwords_queryparam". Curiously Google has taken this part off their help pages for whatever reason, but it still seems be active and working for our clients.
In the example below we fill this column with "utm_content={adtype}".
What this column does is allow you to have Google automatically append your URLs with what's in the column, and replace {adtype} with "pe" or "pla" depending how a user got to your site.
To backtrack a step–a user going to your site via PE or PLA without this column will end up at:
[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords
With this new column, a user coming from PE specifically will end up at:
[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_content=pe
And similarly a user coming from PLA will end up at:
[yourdomain.com]/page1?utm_source=googlepepla&utm_medium=adwords&utm_content=pla
Which then allows you to further break down your traffic source between PE and PLA users.
Makes Sense? Good. Confused? Even Better.
Now you're equipped with the ability to differentiate between all your Google Shopping feed traffic–or you're utterly lost–either way comment or contact us if you have any questions about what you just read, or to see how we can help your overall CSE campaigns.
Comments