What are Field Conversions?

Get an understanding of what Field Conversions are, how they make your life easier and how to apply them to your project data. 

Field Conversions is a step in between your projects and your channel feeds. That means you can optimize your data with custom automated rules before your data is sent to your chosen channels. 

In this example we are going to show you how to optimize your product title, by adding Brand to the title, if it is not already contained in the Title. This is an optimization you would use in both Google Shopping, Facebook and more, why it is best to do it as a Field Conversion rather than as a manual transformation on each of your channels.

Creating a Field Conversion

To create your first Field Conversion, go to your project > “Field Conversions” and click “Create”.

 

Then choose a random unused field that you can use to hold your new optimized title. In this example we choose "Extra Field 30".

 

Configure your custom field
Give the new optimized field a custom name (1), so it is easier to recognise later. In this case we have called our field “Title (optimized)”.
Click “Insert field” (2).
Then select the field you want to base the new data on (3).

 

Make the magic happen

In the previous step we selected the Product title to base the new “Title (optimized)” on. When you select your field you will be presented with a list of output (1) data, to verify you have the correct field.

If you want to make any modifications to your output data, this is where it happens. Click “Modify” (2)

 

In this case all our product titles are upper case, which we do not want. Therefore we click “Casing” and select “Convert to lowercase”, and then click “Casing” again and select “Capitalize first letter of every word”

You will immediately see the changes in your Output list of data.


We then notice some of the products are missing the brand in the title. We want to add the brand to the beginning of the title for all products that are missing the brand in the title.
To fix this click “Modify text” (1).

Select “Prepend field if not already contained” (2). This will look for the value of a different field, ie. Brand, and prepend it to “Title (optimized)” if it is not already contained in the in “Title (optimized)”.

Select “Brand” in “Field to look for” (3).

And to avoid the brand sticking to the product title like this example on, add a space in “Add after” (4)

 

From the previous screen shots you will notice that the last two Fox products had the brand name added all along, so they were not affected by the “Prepend field if not already contained”.

Here is the final result with all the modifications:

 

This was just one example of how you can transform your product data to meet the requirements of your chosen channels. With more than 100 transformations in our transformation engine it is possible to accommodate almost anything - provided you have the right data to work with.

 

Save your magic

Once you are happy with the transformation of your data, “Save” your Field Conversion.


 

Activate your Field Conversion

Running the Field Conversion is what applies the rules to your product data and allows you to use your new field, “Title (optimized)”, in any channel.

 

Validating your changes

Once you have run your Field Conversion/s you can go to “Stored data” and manually check if it worked.

 

Here we see that the original imported product title is still “SPARTAN LORENZO REPLICA” in all caps. That hasn’t changed. 😬
Further down the page we find our new field “Title (optimized)”, and it looks much better, with all our rules applied and the brand added in front of the original title. 😎

Alternatively you can go back to your project overview (1), click “Details” (2) on the “Items” tab. Then Download the excel file to check your new field locally (3).

 

Use your new custom field in your channels

Go to your channel/s and click the “Product title” property (1), choose the Transformation Engine.

Click “Insert field” (2), select your new field (3), in this example it is “Title (optimized)”. Then “Save” (4).

The great benefit of using Field Conversions is that you can create one new field that can be used in multiple channels, so you only need to maintain that one set of rules.

If you have not yet created a channel, here is how to do that

The next level
Once you have mastered the field conversion, you can take it up a level and copy those conversions to other projects or even sync them with other projects, so you only have to maintain one set of Field Conversions. That’s efficient.