How to Track Traffic from Google Base (Google Product Search)
I wrote some time ago about the top Google Base Ranking Factors and had some good feedback and opinions. One of the questions which kept coming up was how to monitor traffic you received as a result of listing your products on Google Product Search. I’ve found a pretty good way of doing this via Google Analytics so I thought I’d share this technique with you. You do get some stats by logging into your Google Merchant Centre but I wanted to see how much revenue was being generated in comparison to other traffic sources.
If you’ve used Google Base at all, you will know that it involves uploading a feed of all of your products to the system. Part of this feed is the URL of your product, all we are doing is adding a small piece of tracking code to each of your product URLs which will feed click data into Google Analytics.
I used the principle behind the Google URL Builder to get the correct tracking URL.
I’ve basically tagged all my product URLs with the following:
?utm_source=google&utm_medium=base&utm_campaign=products
The important parts are the source=google and medium=base which feed back into Google Analytics. If you use this format, it will show as this when you view traffic sources:
Now that you have your tracking code, you need to attach it to all of your product URLs. If you are a developer or have someone to call upon, they can do this automatically for you when you generate your product feed. However if you are limited to just the standard feed, you can do some tweaking with Excel to take care of this issue quickly.
1. Download your product feed and open with Excel
2. Insert two columns to the right of the column that contains your product URL (column header should be “link”)
3. Write your tracking code into the cell to the right of the URL:
4. In the next cell to the right that you’ve previously inserted, write the following formula, substituting cell numbers if appropriate:
=CONCATENATE(B2,C2)
You should see a result similar to the screenshot below showing the two cells merged together:
5. Copy the cell formula all the way down to cover all of your products so that all of them having the tracking added.
6. Highlight all of your product URLs which now have the tracking code added, copy and paste them into Notepad
7. Delete the columns you’ve just created so that you only have the ones you started with.
8. Paste in all of your new URLs over the top of the old ones – you have to do this in order to get the spreadsheet back in a format to be uploaded – the extra columns will be rejected.
9. Upload to Google
10. After a day or do, log into Analytics and go to traffic sources. You should be seeing traffic from Google / Base showing. Assuming you are getting traffic! It can take some time to start showing and build up a good ranking. Best to test by clicking on a few of your own first to see if the tracking is working properly.
Paddy Moogan
Paddy is an SEO Consultant working for Distilled in the London office.
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March 6th, 2010 at 2:08 am
[...] How to Track Traffic from Google Base (Google Product Search) [...]
November 2nd, 2011 at 2:54 am
Thank you Paddy for this post I found it quite helpful. Along with passing arguments such as Source and Medium in the URL, I was wondering if we could have the keyword passed. In my analytics, I don’t see keywords being passed from google merchant and unfortunately I wasn’t able to find tricks on how to do it.