What is UTM Parameter and How to Use it on Petal Merchant Center
Hello everyone! Today I will be briefly talking about what is UTM parameter and how to analyze your data on Petal Merchant Center and how to track your traffic. Initially, I will give a short explanation about what Petal Merchant Center is, afterwards I will be diving into the details of data you can analyze.
First of all, what is Petal Merchant Center? Petal Merchant Center (PMC) is an ad delivery and product management platform. Petal Merchant Center helps your products go global. You can set up feeds for multiple countries/regions on Petal Merchant Center to show your products to potential shoppers all around the world. You can also use Petal Merchant Center to set up promotions, which can be applied to all or individual products on your site. Petal Merchant Center not only helps organize your product and business data, but also improves your product performance. To be able to track your data coming from Petal Search, you are advised to utilize UTM parameter. With this parameter, you will have the chance to track users clicked your data.
By the way, what does UTM mean? Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are five variants of URL parameters used by marketers to track the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns across traffic sources and publishing media. The UTM parameters in a URL identify the campaign that refers traffic to a specific website and attributes the browser’s website session and the sessions after that until the campaign attribution window expires to it. The parameters can be parsed by analytics tools and used to populate reports.
As we learnt what Petal Merchant Center (PMC for short) is, let’s get going deep into the details. First of all, we need to complete registration process to be able to PMC. If you haven’t already, there is a documentation demonstrating how to register. Click here to access. You also have to verify your business ownership with either a DUNS Number or Business License. Access here:
Access the PMC through here. Assuming you have successfully logged into the system, access the Feed page, you can manage your data added to your stores here. While adding a feed, you should fill the UTM parameter field.
With this parameter provided, your final product URL will look similar to this: http://www.mystore.com/laptop-huawei-matebook-d-14-ABC123?utm=specified_value. Using this, you will now be able to track your data sources.
Now access the Performance page, you will better know how to improve your product data or campaigns to drive more clicks.
Here on the top left box, you can see CTR graph. This graph shows you the ratio between the products your users have seen and how many of them got clicked by users. On the top right box, you can see Impression graph. This graph shows you the amount of products being shown to the users. On the bottom box, you can see Clicks graph. As the name tells, this graph shows you the amount of clicks your products got. There is a few cases we can study here:
- You have high Impression, but your CTR rate is not pleasant enough.
This means your products are being easily accessed by users, they can reach you with ease but are not interacting with them. So in this case, your aim should be making your products more interesting, attracting users into actually clicking them.
- You have high CTR, but your Impression rate is not high.
This means you are managing to attract users into your products, but only to those few who managed to find your products in the web. So in this case, your aim should be making your products (names, categories, etc.) easier to find, so that you will have more views and be able to generate more user traffic into your website. For example: when a user search's for a specific product category, your products’ and categories’ name should be general enough so that they are listed.
We can, of course, add more reasons for these cases, but in basic terms, I tried to find reasons and provide solutions.
In conclusion…
We have learnt about what Petal Merchant Center is, what UTM parameter is, and how do we get statistics on our feeds in the PMC. We should be able to basically analyze our data in the PMC Performance tab, we should be able to find basic reasons to our insufficient statistics. If you have any deeper curiosity about the statistics of your data, please do not hesitate to ask me.
