By now, you've certainly seen the number of Free (organic) Google Shopping Listing clicks by day in your Merchant Center account. But, what else have you seen? Probably not much more...
As of now, visits to your site from these listings are lumped in with 'google / organic' results in your Analytics. But there are a few ways to separate this traffic from organic and cpc results. Here's how we setup one method to work around the tracking limitation.
Tag & Track
The first thing you want to do, is add a inconsequential tracking parameter to the end of your product URL in your Merchant Center Feed but NOT a utm_ parameter since those can be overwritten with auto-tagging. We chose something that is at least somewhat meaningful:
exampleurl.com/product?feed=gm
You could either do this manually inside your feed to Google, or use a feed rule directly inside the Merchant Center. To do so as a Feed Rule follow these steps inside your MC account:
Click 'Products' > 'Feeds' > Select Your Feed > Click 'Feed Rules'
Click the Blue '+' > Under 'Processed Attributes', select 'link' from your list
Leave the conditions blank as this will be applied to all products, and click 'Set to'
From the drop down, select 'Primary Feed' > 'link'
In the next box that displays "Type or select', type ?feed=gm
Click 'OK' > 'Save As Draft' > and then 'Apply' on the next screen
For good measure, I also go back to the processing tab, and Re-Process the feed
Technically, at this point you have what you need to separate paid from free listing traffic, by filtering your visits by landing pages that contain your parameter (feed=gm) and with campaign name (not set). But we decided to take it one step farther and add another inconsequential url suffix to our shopping and smart display campaigns (remember, these use the feed data, too) when they are in use. We chose src=gads.
Filter
Finally, you're ready to bring it all together. If you've copied the same parameters to your setup, you can click here, and apply this saved Google Analytics report to your Analytics Profile. Even if you are using different parameter values, you can apply this one, and edit the filters to match your setup as well as fields that are important to your reporting. Viola! Now you can see all of your normal metrics and truly measure the impact of all the hype on your business. Now go forth and optimize!