"i only speak liquid" #45: UPDATED! Product Recommendations Tracking Parameters

Hey everyone!

Tim here from Storetasker HQ - Just wanted to apologize because I mis-formatted some of Jocelyn’s code in the yesterday’s newsie + caused a weird duplication of content in the “1 app I like section”.

So please ignore yesterday’s email and focus on this one 🙂 

Without further ado: Here is Jocelyn’s 1st edit of i_only_speak_liquid, all edited properly this time!

ENJOY and happy Thursday gang!

What I’ve been thinking about:

One of our retainer client’s SEO consultants came to me about an issue with Shopify’s product recommendation URLs in Google Search Console. I didn’t know this, but Shopify adds many tracking IDs into the product recommendation URLs in order to create reports.

For example:

This was causing the Shopify site to experience a below par internal structure that made it unnecessarily difficult for crawlers to crawl all the pages within the website. The tracking parameters were good for internal Shopify statistics, but it also created 10 times the amount of unique URLs the crawler had to follow.

There are 2 options to fix this:

1. If you don’t care about tracking recommended product performance: Strip the tracking data from the URLs like https://great-website.com/products/white-leather-holiday-short-blue-trim instead of https://great-website.com/products/white-leather-holiday-short-blue-trim?pr_prod_strat=copurchase&pr_rec_id=3330c9992&pr_rec_pid=8835401843011&pr_ref_pid=8835398336835&pr_seq=uniform. This way we profit from the extra internal links, but lose the tracking possibilities within Shopify.

2. If you want to track performance: Add “rel=’nofollow’” to the link. This solution will keep the tracking within Shopify, but the crawler will ignore those links. 

The client didn’t care about tracking the recommended product performance so we went with option #1 

I achieved this with the following change to the recommended products URL:

It was quite a simple solution but it was an interesting process learning about the impact of tracking on SEO.

3 links you can’t miss:

Using JavaScript to manage the cart: A “back to basics” guide about the Shopify cart and working with it. It also gives some helpful examples about using and working with the FormData interface. 

Limited Supply podcast: Interesting perspectives about DTC discussed in a cool, unfiltered way. It also helps me understand the thought process merchants and marketers have behind the scenes of projects before they reach out to developers.

Shopify Performance blog: Detailed blogs and guides about site speed optimization in the context of Shopify stores. Many site optimization recommendations can’t be applied to Shopify stores due to constraints like 3rd party apps so having a Shopify-specific guide from the mothership is very helpful. 

1 app I like:

Loop Subscriptions 

3 reasons why I love Loop:

1. You can completely customize the subscription widget look and feel in Liquid directly in the app. No more hacky CSS like in Recharge 

2. Amazing customer service and free white glove migration from other subscription apps 

3. They now offer bundles!

In 2022 I had a client that was looking to migrate from Bold subscriptions to another app. I did a deep dive of 8 different apps. I got on sales calls and tested them out on my development store. I decided to recommend Loop because the customer service was fantastic and the app was robust and hit all of the client’s pain points. I even became one of their first agency partnerships. Go check it out if you need a new subscription app!

One learning as a freelancer:

Context is key for a project. It’s why getting on a call is so important. Sometimes as developers we just take a task and run with it without asking any questions. But taking the time to really understand the business, the project and why it’s needed can be invaluable. It will help to have more empathy with the client and make relevant suggestions down the line.

For example, I got on a call last week with a lead that wanted to adapt their Shopify store for franchisees because they were planning on securing franchise agreements in the next 6 months. They wanted to have the same look and feel across all the franchises but the product selection and site content would be slightly different. The options were either to figure out a way to switch between these different environments on the same store or build separate stores for each franchise. 

The important context here was that the franchise owners would barely touch the site at all. Also the “franchises” were just different production centers. Some of the centers couldn’t create some of the products which necessitated this kind of product curation.

This opened my mind to truly understand the problem and we are working now to find a solution using the same Shopify store. 

Hope you enjoyed my first edition. If you have any feedback, or better ways to do the things I touched on, let me know your thoughts!

See you next time,

Jocelyn