Overview 

Akeneo app for Business Analytics is the application that we use to collect your business data that will be exploited in the Studio Analytics dashboard. This app is free and available in our App Store.

We aim to get these five business metrics: 

• revenue
• units sold
• page views
• add to cart rate
• conversion rate

We will collect these metrics daily (6 am UTC) using your preferred product identifier.

Requirements

To be able to use this feature, your sales data must be stored on one of these four cloud platforms: 

• Google Cloud Storage
• Google BigQuery
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Amazon Web Service S3
   

This app will let you provide your credentials so that we can store your data in our infrastructure, synchronize your PIM data, and finally display the results of our science in your PIM Analytics dashboard.

Connect your app

The first thing to do is to search for the Akeneo app for Business Analytics in the PIM App Store. Once you've found it, click on “Connect”. You'll have to follow the usual steps to give the app authorizations. Once done, you can set up your app by clicking “Open app.”

Set up your app

Create your first sales channel

Now it's time to add your first Sales channel! You may wonder what a sales channel is. 

For comprehensive business analytics, it's essential to understand the precise sources of your sales data, which offer greater detail than the PIM channels provide. The content you create for a range of products for one PIM channel can feed a lot of different sales channels. A PIM channel named “digital” can indeed feed your own e-commerce website as well as some unowned e-commerce marketplaces. That's why it will be important to create the sales channel you really want to analyze, the ones that make sense for your business. It offers you a real flexibility.

Let's see the sales channel creation/edition form in detail.

Data source name

Define here the name you want for your sales channel. 

PIM channel

This is the PIM channel you want to map your sales channel with. We list here all the activated channels of your PIM. 

You may need to take action once you've analyzed your product performance, for instance, improving the description of your products with lousy performance. That's why we ask you to map your sales channel with your PIM channel in the app settings. This way, you can work on the right PIM channel scope.

Product Identifier

Here is the list of all the PIM product identifier attributes. Choose the one you want to use in your sales data file to identify your products both in the file and in the PIM. 

Cloud platform

In this field, we ask you where your sales data is stored so we can connect to your platform and fetch the data. You can choose among four cloud platforms: 

• Google Cloud Storage
• Amazon Web Service S3
• Microsoft Azure Blob Storage
• Google BigQuery

Depending on your cloud platform, you'll have to provide different pieces of information. The form is updated as soon as you change the cloud platform. 

Activate this channel

You must fill in all the required fields to enable your channel. If you select “Yes,” we'll start synchronizing your data. If the status is disabled, no data is synchronized. 

Choose your currency

You can select the currency that will be used for your revenue metric. As we don't handle currency conversion, you must define the one you use in your data file. 

By default, the currency is US dollar ($). 

List your sales channels

Now that you have at least one sales channel, you can see a list gathering the main information: 

• the name of the sales channel (ex: US_webstore)
• its status (active/inactive)
• the PIM channel linked to the sales channel (ex: e-commerce)
• the cloud platform where the data is stored (ex: Google Cloud Storage)
• the product identifier used to identify the products (EAN)
• and the platform attributes

You can edit your settings by clicking each row or the dedicated icon.

It's also possible to delete a sales channel. To do that, click "edit" , then "Delete this channel".

And you're done! You can now use your PIM analytics dashboard to follow your product performances on your markets, and reshape your enrichment strategy based on your results! 

Technical information

File format

In order to synchronize your data, you must follow the expected file format:

File transfer use cases

If your sales data is stored on Amazon AWS

Setup configuration needed:

• S3 URI to the file (ex: “s3://…”)
• Pair of access keys
  • Access key id
  • Secret access key

If your sales data is stored on Microsoft Azure Blob

Setup configuration needed:

• Data path (ex: “file.json”)
• Azure storage account name
• Blob storage container name
• SAS token

If your sales data is stored on Google Cloud Storage

Setup configuration needed:

• Source URI (ex: “gs://…”)

You’ll need to grant bucket access to Akeneo’s service account:

• sa-for-datasync@akecld-prd-perf-analytics-prod.iam.gserviceaccount.com

… through a roles/storage.objectViewer role (which is customizable to more granular permissions)

If your sales data is stored on Google BigQuery

We recommend using an authorized view to give us access to only the data we need. Access is authorized by permitting our service account.

You can decide which data you want to share and control their access.

• The authorized view should have a specific schema.
• To configure access to it, we recommend creating a custom role with two permissions:
  • bigquery.jobs.create to query your sales data. This permission must be set at the project level.
  • bigquery.tables.getData to read your sales data. This permission must be set at the dataset level.

There are different ways in which you can assign these permissions to our service account. 

The easiest way is to assign the BigQuery Data Viewer role at the dataset level and the BigQuery User role at your GCP project level. 

You can also create your own custom roles with these permissions and associate them with our service account.