What is a child product?

Some products have parent/child relationships. There is a parent product, and then multiple variations are the child products. Advertisers want to optimize campaigns at a child product level to ensure they are promoting the most relevant and best performing products to customers.

Other products will not have these relationships, and therefore will see no change or impact in the platform.

UI capabilities

Product selection

When selecting products, parent/child products will be grouped.

You can click a parent product and it will expand to show child products. This will allow your advertisers to optimize to a unique child product level in the campaign.

Reporting

In-platform reporting will automatically group by parent product when a product has a productCollection associated with it.

In CSV exports from the platform, for product codes there is a new "Parent Code" column, which will populate the productCollection value.

If filtering by product code in the UI, then the parent product metrics are blank, and the parent product can be clicked to show reporting for any child products.

Integration requirements

Updating products

When you synchronise products with CitrusAd, there is a new productCollection field in the POST request for your products.

POST $BASE_URL/v1/catalog-products?teamId=<YOUR_TEAM_ID> HTTP/1.1 
accept: application/json
content-type: application/json
Authorization: Basic <API_KEY>
{
    "catalogProducts": [
        {
            "catalogId": "628dbe95-2ec9-4e07-881d-3e9f92ab2e0b",
            "gtin": "23556578965543",
            "productCollection": "abc-123",
            "inventory": 50,
            "price": "19.99",
            "tags": [
                 "imageurl:https://your.image.host.com/image.jpg","name:Covergirl Clean 120 Creamy Natural Liquid Foundation30mL"
            ],
            "filters": [
                 "category:Health&Beauty","category:Grocery","Brand:Covergirl","Special_Flag:0"
            ]
        }
    ]

When this field is present, the product selection and reporting tables will aggregate at the product collection level for all products that have the same productCollection.

If you are synchronising by file, there is a product_collection column that you can optionally populate per product.

Ad rendering

There are no changes needed when rendering ads from CitrusAd. The gtin you receive in the API response will be that of the "child" product, and you will need to render that on your website to your customers.