Associating product categories to items

Posted on April 21, 2014

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.

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:

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

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.

Service Issue

Posted on April 18, 2014

An issue with one of our servers today produced a small disruption in our services. The episode lasted a little less than one hour, from 12:27 PM to 1:21 PM. We were warned of the issue within 30 minutes of the incident’s beginning, and were able to isolate and fix the issue rapidly.

We are sincerely sorry for the problems this may have caused you. Failures of this sort will unfortunately happen, and we are taking every step possible to make sure they don’t happen often. Our next effort will be in improving our response time.

It is to be noted that for those running the latest version of our code, your store would normally not have been prevented from displaying. The possible symptoms this would have caused would be the loading indicator running for longer than usual in your visitor’s browser (but again, the page would still be loaded and usable) and for those using some dynamic features like checkout buttons, those would not have loaded, or loaded more slowly.

For those of you still using our old code, you unfortunately would have seen slowness and, in the beginning of the incident, your page might have stalled on the monitus code. That is one of the major improvements of the new version of our tools, so if you were blocked by monitus tools, please contact us so we can see if your code needs upgrading – and we will upgrade it for free, at your earliest convenience.

We are thankful for the trust you show us by placing our code on your store, and are committed to offer the best service possible. Rest assured we are constantly improving our tools and monitoring to offer you the best possible service and turn-around in case of failures.

Thank you,

Michael and Jean.

Upgrade to Universal Analytics

Posted on February 26, 2014

As you may have noticed Google Analytics has a new tracking and processing platform called Universal Analytics. All accounts will be migrated to Universal Analytics from classic ga.js tracking at some point. If you would like to upgrade now to Universal Analytics you have to take these steps:

1) Look for the Upgrade link in your Google Analytics admin section and click on Transfer on the next page.

You must wait until the transfer has been completed before making any tracking code changes.

2) You must let us know when the transfer is complete. This can take up to 48 hours. We will then set your account to use Universal Analytics. Note that once you upgrade you cannot downgrade.

3) You will need to update the tracking code on your site. You can see the updated code in Your Account > Tracking Code. In most cases this will be a simple copy and paste over your existing monitus code, but the new code completely replaces any existing monitus code. Look out for code for example that may have been installed the footer of the checkout wrapper. That code will have to be removed.

Also note that if you have any event tracking calls on your site, e.g. to track onclick events, you will have to update those code snippets. For example, the event tracking call might look like this:

Classic ga.js: _gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'button', 'click', 'nav buttons']); Universal: ga('send', 'event', 'button', 'click', 'nav buttons');

4) Since more tracking logic has been moved server-side you should also add a couple of domains to the referral exclusion list:

store.yahoo.com , store.yahoo.net and paypal.com (to account for Paypal orders)

If you are in doubt about anything, please don’t hesitate to contact us. If you prefer that we handle the upgrade process we’d be happy to do so for a nominal fee of $49.

Google Analytics dynamic remarketing lists and demographic data

Posted on October 25, 2013

Interested in managing dynamic remarking lists or get demographic data in Google Analytics?

In order to get this to work the dc.js library instead of ga.js has to be loaded on your site. Fortunately, it’s an easy change. Please edit your current monitus tag as follows.

This is what your current tag should look like this:

Note that monitus.id=123456 is just an example, you will have a specific id that should not be changed. You just have to add one line as shown in bold in this code:

Just publish the store editor and you’ll be done.

Then follow the Google Analytics instructions to enable demographic reports. In the last step, hit Skip Validation.

Magic Cart

Posted on October 9, 2013

We are pleased to announce our newest cart recovery feature, called Magic Cart.

It’s a known fact that we live in a multi-device world where customers start shopping on one device and continue on another. According to a recent study by Google as many as 67% of shoppers start on one device and continue to another. Furthermore, smartphones are the most common starting point for sequential activities and in particular shopping.

Yet, when it comes to buying online, many people still prefer placing orders on their desktop or tablet. One of the main reasons for that is the difficulty entering shipping and payment info on a small screen. Some people are also not as comfortable entering credit card information on a mobile device. This is reflected in conversion rates that are typically much lower for mobile devices than for desktops.

How can we help customers pick up on a new device where they left on one device? If a customer places an item into the cart on a smartphone, how can she continue the checkout process on her desktop without having to find the items and add them to the cart again?

That’s the problem the Magic Cart solves. At its core, the magic cart allows customers to send their cart by email. On the cart page there is a customizable button that prompts customers for an email address. The email that is then sent contains a link to the cart page.

But that’s not all. At Monitus we know a thing or two about tracking, so here’s the really cool feature. The carts are in fact synced across devices. So if you update any items in the cart on one device it will automatically be reflected on the other device. Magic!

Your customers will love the magic cart because it makes it easier for them to buy from you using multiple devices. You, the retailer, will love it because it’s easy to implement and helps drive conversions. It’s a win win for everyone.

I invite you to take a look at a two-minute video:

If you have a significant amount of mobile traffic you should consider the magic cart approach.

There is a $149 implementation charge for active Monitus Tools customers using our paid cart recovery service. This charge covers the provisioning of the email platform and implementing the button on your checkout to match your css. The Magic Cart can only implemented on a Yahoo! Store checkout page. If you use a 3rd party mobile solution that uses a different checkout, the Magic Cart cannot be implemented. In general, we recommend to all our clients that they use a responsive version of the Yahoo! Store checkout.