Syndication Tracking

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Background

Point2 is heavily engaged in online marketing solution offerings to the REALTORS worldwide. We have over 180,000 users from 100 different countries worldwide. Our highest user concentration is in North America. We have started listing (web) syndication by embarking on it around 4 years ago. Since then we have worked with a large number of partners (web site providers) and currently have 30+ active syndication partners. As of this year we have initiated our integrations with all of the US MLSs to acquire all of the US listings and REALTORS. This will tremendously increase the number of listings and users that we will be syndicating to. At the same time we are working towards expanding our syndication network to include more localized hyper sites, mobile sites, TV and print media.



Problem

In our last 4 years of experience with syndication one thing that has become quite clear is that fire and forget approach does not work or scale. Users relying on our syndication solution always have few basic questions.



Where are my listings being displayed on every site that you syndicate to?
How many times each of my listing was viewed on each site?
How many leads did I receive on every listing across all of the syndication sites?


It is easy to see how these simple questions can create a complex problem of tracking hundreds and thousands of listings across a large number of sites. This creates incredible support cost and without any automated mechanisms in place, one simply will fail to answer above questions for any user base which can then collapse a syndication solution.



In addition to the above questions there are other related questions as well.



When were my listings published on each site?
When will my listings be updated after I changed some fields such as asking price?
When will my listing be removed after they have been sold?
How many photos does each site displays?
What is the listing acceptance criterion for each site?
Why was my listing rejected from a particular site?


Further there are processing errors while partners are processing syndication feeds. Tracking (and reporting) over such errors is also necessary.



Last but not the least is the listing advertisement on syndication sites also require the tracking, so users can feel confident in that their dollars are spent well. No one will buy the ad if they cannot see where and how it is going to be displayed. This should be an important consideration for the feed consumers and publishers as they would like to monetize the listing syndication relationships.



Tracking & Reporting

Given the listing syndication in an ongoing regular data exchange among one or more partners, it is desirable that standardize tracking mechanisms (reports, APIs, etc) are developed in addition to the basic listing syndication format. We all understand and agree on the value of standardization.



Point2 for now generally relies on two methodologies to obtain answers for some of the above mentioned questions.



Our syndication partners generate a list of URLs where the syndicated listings are displayed on their site. These URLs are then surfaced to our users for every listing. They can view all of their listings on partner sites by a simple click.
Building the list of URLs can be fairly straight forward. For example, most sites have standardizes detailed view URLs that take a listing ID parameter.
Incase a listing is rejected by the partner they can simply indicate the reason instead of providing the listing URL. The error is also surfaced to the users so they can take corresponding actions.
Partner can provide us an API that we can query to generate listing URLs or error codes.
The listing URL reports can contain the necessary timestamps.
The partner generally prepares the report while consuming the feed and while accepting or rejecting each listing. Many other approaches are also possible.


We provide a web bug URL for each of our listings that our partners simply place on the listing detail views. That is the only work item on their behalf to track the listing views.
An API or web service call also works.


Each listing also contains an instrumented URL to connect web site visitors back to the listing agent. The instrumented URL then tracks the listing click thrus or leads on our servers.


There are of course many other simple and/or sophisticated methods available to track syndicated listings across multiple partners but the above can be a good start discussion.