Remote Meta Data Collection for SAINT — Suite Talk

With the lat­est release of Seach&Promote there is an excit­ing new inte­gra­tion geared at mak­ing your life just a lit­tle bit eas­ier. Search&Promote now has the abil­ity to export the meta data about the con­tent it indexes to SAINT, with­out .….…(wait for it).….…. any IT involve­ment. Let me give you an exam­ple of what I mean if I am col­lect­ing a friendly prod­uct name, the aver­age star rat­ings for my prod­ucts, and their cat­e­gory in Search&Promote, I can pass that data over to Site­Cat­a­lyst for use in my reporting.

Back­ground

To set a lit­tle back­ground here. Site­Cat­a­lyst allows users to col­lect infor­ma­tion, such as prod­ucts, page names, search terms, etc, in vari­ables (eVars, props, and events). That infor­ma­tion can then be rolled up by apply­ing meta data to the val­ues col­lected in the vari­ables. This is done through a process called clas­si­fi­ca­tions using a tool called SAINT (Site­Cat­a­lyst Attribute Import Nam­ing Tool). If you are unfa­mil­iar with SAINT I would rec­om­mend read­ing this blog post.

Search&Promote is a great search tool, gen­er­ally speak­ing it works by crawl­ing a web site and index­ing the con­tent of the site for search­ing. It allows the results to be manip­u­lated through busi­ness rules to pro­vide the right con­tent at the right time. As it indexes a site, it can pull out meta­data for fil­ter­ing pur­poses. It is this meta­data that we can pass over to SAINT for report­ing purposes.

How to set it up

This inte­gra­tion is avail­able today, there is no addi­tional cost for the inte­gra­tion (assum­ing you have Site­Cat­a­lyst and Search&Promote) and there are no code changes needed for this Inte­gra­tion. There are 3 major steps to get this up and running.

1. Gather the Infor­ma­tion that you will need
   You will need an API shared secret so Search&Promote can down­load the clas­si­fi­ca­tion con­fig­u­ra­tion. The API shared secret is tied to the user name. You can do this by going to the Admin Con­sole > User Man­age­ment. When you cre­ate the user name be sure to add them to the web ser­vice access group and the all report access group. When you save the user you can find their shared secret by click­ing on the user again.
   
   To setup the clas­si­fi­ca­tions you will need to know which fields you want to import. To see what you have avail­able you can log into Search&Promote the go to Settings>Metadata>Definitions.
   
2. Set up the clas­si­fi­ca­tions in Site­Cat­a­lyst
   Clas­si­fi­ca­tions for any vari­able can be setup in Site­Cat­a­lyst via the Admin Con­sole.  The process is cov­ered in depth in this blog post. You will want to make sure that you have the fields setup that you want to use from the Search&Promote Meta Data.
   
3. Setup the export in in Search&Promote
   To do this you will want to nav­i­gate to Settings>SiteCatalyst> SAINT Clas­si­fi­ca­tion Feeds.
   
   Once there hit add new to kick-off the wiz­ard to take you through the process. There are 7 steps in the wiz­ard that will take you through every­thing you need to start pump­ing data in the SAINT from Search&Promote.
   

Here are a cou­ple of things to keep in mind.

• It can take sev­eral hours for clas­si­fi­ca­tions to be applied so give it sometime
• You may want to setup mul­ti­ple feeds to layer in the infor­ma­tion depend­ing on the data you have in S&P. If you do, use the Search Cri­te­ria in Step 5 to con­trol which rows are exported
• Numeric and Numeric 2 clas­si­fi­ca­tions are not cur­rently sup­ported. We want to do that in the future but want to make sure we have the right use cases. Drop us a com­ment if you have a use case, or bet­ter yet sub­mit it through the ideas exchange

Hope­fully this makes your life a lit­tle eas­ier, you data a lit­tle richer and you ROI a lit­tle fat­ter. I want to give a huge shout out to the S&P team for mak­ing this a reality.