Product Feed

It is not practical and sometimes even impossible to have access to all the product details when creating a product-related tracking event (E.g., product impression), which is typically performed in the front end with restricted access to the database information.

To guarantee that all relevant product information is available to enrich events, Kevel Audience offers the option to import an entire product listing at once to the tracking system, using the Google Merchant format. This is how it works:

1. Create the Product Feed and Publish It

First, create a product feed with all the information about each product, following the Merchant specification, in either Atom or RSS formats.

Ideally, the XML containing the product feed should be dynamically created according to the desired schedule, so that each time it is accessed it contains the most up-to-date information about the products that will be tracked on the client's web pages.

The product feed must be available through a public URL that Kevel Audience system may access at any time. For example:

http://client.domain.com/product-feed/export.xml

Kevel Audience will access the URL to fetch all the product details.

2. Scheduling the Feed Import

See the instructions in Product Offline Imports to import the products into the CDP.

3. Review the Data Collection Strategy

When leveraging product data from the Product Feed, the only required product-related field on events is the product id. The product feed then augments e-commerce events with additional fields.

Caveats of Using the Product Feed

When the product feed is available, it enriches incoming events based on the product id. To make the best use of it, users should consider that:

• The data collection strategy needs to be reviewed and possibly changed. If the event includes part of the data that's also on the feed, the information sent on the event is kept, and only the remaining attributes are enriched from the product feed. For example, if both the event and the feed contain category, Kevel Audience will keep the value sent in the original event and ignore that of the feed.
• When a product id from an event does not exist in the product feed, the event won't be augmented. This matters when the data collection strategy changes - for example, removing the category from the event - and a new product is added to the website but not updated in the feed. This will result in an event without product category.
• Product-related data on events is augmented on arrival. Events cannot be changed; if the product feed changes, product data in past events remains unchanged. Data in an updated feed only reflects on future events.