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Verified Merchant Program technical best practices and troubleshooting tips

Verified Merchant Program technical best practices and troubleshooting tips

    Hello! Welcome to the Verified Merchant technical best practices and troubleshooting tips. The purpose of this article is to provide recently onboarded merchants with tips on VMP setup as well as common flags you may see if you experience an issue. This information has been provided by @PinterestBrad on the VMP team at Pinterest.

    Shopify specific tips:

    If you’re using Shopify as a content management tool, check out the Pinterest for Shopify App to automatically set up the Pinterest Conversion tag on your site and create a product catalog in your Pinterest account. Once fully connected, you should be ready to apply to the VMP Program.

    If you’re planning to use the Shopify App to pass your product feed and conversion tag, you’ll need to be sure that the Pinterest Conversion Tag isn’t present anywhere. 

    • Tag: Often, users have added the conversion tag and checkout event code within Shopify. You’ll want to be sure to remove the conversion code from your Shopify site before connecting your Pinterest & Shopify accounts. If you’ve already connected, you can remove the tag from your Shopify account and then disconnect/reconnect the accounts one more time.
    • Feed: if you’ve previously uploaded a feed manually to Pinterest, the Shopify App will not override any existing data feed in your Pinterest account. You can connect Shopify to Pinterest to pass the tag. You’ll need to continue to manage your feed via the URL you’ve added manually within the Catalogs section of your Pinterest.

     

    Feed upload tips:

    Always be sure that Pinterest can access your link when adding your product feed’s Data source URL. Check that the link can be accessed by users outside of your organization and include the username and password (if you’ve set one on the URL).

    Unhealthy Feed Status

    Catalog Needs Attention: You will see this alert if less than 50% of the products in your feed were ingested and able to show on Pinterest. Click View issues, and be sure to check out this article for all the formatting and alert tips.

    Unhealthy Tag Status

    Tag Needs Attention: You will see this alert if your Tag Health is out of compliance with the Verified Merchant requirements related to the Conversion tag event setup. Click See Details to get a closer look at your conversion reporting to see what needs to be updated within your tag setup.

    Tag Helper Extension: Anytime you have a question with Tag health or conversion tag setup, you can use the Pinterest Tag Helper extension to see what info is getting passed to Pinterest as you navigate your site.

    Test Events Tool: Navigate to Ads > Conversions > Test Events within your Pinterest Business account. You’ll be able to enter your website URL and track the conversion event values that are being passed from your site to your Pinterest account in real-time. This tool is especially useful for troubleshooting when events are passing product_id values or if you see a product_id mismatch alert.

     

    Tag Setup tips

    Product_id: One of the most overlooked elements of the Pinterest Tag setup, including the product_id value on all three of the required events (PageVisit, AddToCart, Checkout). You want to be sure your product_id values found on your website matches the ‘id’ field for each product in the data feed.

    • Example of product_id passback in the Checkout event 

    PageVisit: You want to be sure to only place the PageVisit event on your website’s pages for each product for sale within your data feed. We call these Product Description Pages or PDPs. Placing the PageVisit event only on PDP pages will ensure you’re getting accurate reporting for how often users view each of your products.

    AddToCart: The AddToCart events should be set up to fire and pass the product_id value only when a user clicks on your “Add to cart” button on your website. A common pitfall that we see is where the AddToCart event fires any time a user visits or loads the website’s ‘Cart’ page - this can lead to overinflated statistics and instances of the AddToCart event firing with no product_id present.

    Checkout: The Checkout event should ONLY fire when a user has fully completed a purchase on your website. When a Checkout does fire, it should pass:

    • product_id
    • value of the items purchased with no symbols (i.e., 100.00 not $100.00) Example: here
    • currency (i.e. USD)

    We hope this information helps those using the Verified Merchant Program at Pinterest save time when setting up your account to utilize this program. 🙂

    Comments
    teriacoxdesigns

    Hi

    As I read through All the print information, it would be great if there was a video created for other's that don't use Shopify as to where to place All the codes.  Each day I try to correct the Unhealthy issues, but so for, now luck I have requested Support, no help yet.  I do receive emails telling me of the problems, but no direct help.  I am still waiting for help.

     

    Looking forward

     

    PinterestSusana

    Hi @teriacoxdesigns, I completely understand your frustration. I can see that you've opened up a ticket with our support team regarding the issue. Please continue working with that team on this as they partner closely with engineering who has the ability to diagnose any issues with Pinterest accounts. I wish there was more I could do here but the teams who work on your ticket are closer to the work being done to resolve your concern.

    PoetStreetBoutique

    Hi. I know this is an old feed, but hoping you can help me. Shopify automatically sends my catalog to Pinterest. It seems to constantly be duplicating the items, and adding a pin for each size variant. I have a little over 100 products, and had over 2000 pins automatically created. Is there a way to stop the automatic process? I am attaching  the only spot I can find on shopify that shows where I think the option might be. I just spend over an hour deleting pins from my board. ThaScreenshot (31).pngnk you in advance.