Integrate with Multichannel Marketing

[nima-karimi]

The new multichannel marketing dashboard is being implemented in WooCommerce (woocommerce/woocommerce#34548) and will be released soon. For this extension to be recognized as a marketing channel and be displayed on that dashboard, we need to implement an integration with the interfaces/classes introduced in the WooCommerce core.

Details on implementing this integration are currently available here: pe2C5g-zb-p2

In short, we need to implement the MarketingChannelInterface in the code base and register an instance using the MarketingChannels class. The implementation of MarketingChannelInterface will return information about the Facebook marketing channel, such as its name, descriptions, setup_url, icon, etc., and WooCommerce will display this information to the user on the new multichannel marketing dashboard.

Most of the data returned by the MarketingChannelInterface methods are straightforward to gather and implement. However, returning the following data might be more complicated:

get_product_listings_status

This will return whether the product listings are synchronized with Facebook or the synch is in progress.

One way to get this information is to check whether there are any pending product sync jobs. The \WooCommerce\Facebook\Products\Sync::is_sync_in_progress method will return true if there any pending jobs.

Another method is to check if the product feed has been uploaded successfully and there were no errors. The \WC_Facebook_Product_Feed::is_upload_complete method will check the status of the product feed. However, this method does not seems to be working properly because at the moment the extension does not store the upload_id for the feed.

get_errors_count

This should return the number of errors/issues reported by Facebook for the products and/or account. Meta already provides an API to get the product feed errors here. However, to get the account related errors we need to utilize a different method.

To prevent querying the Facebook API everytime this information is loaded by WooCommerce, we can cache this data locally.

get_supported_campaign_types

This will define what types of marketing campaigns the Facebook plugin supports. It should return an array of MarketingCampaignType objects that define the following properties:

Property Name	Property Type	Description
id	string	A unique identifier for the campaign type. For example: facebook-ads
name	string	Name of the marketing campaign type.
description	string	Description of the marketing campaign type.
create_url	string	The URL to the create campaign page.
icon_url	string	The URL to an image/icon for the campaign type.
channel	MarketingChannelInterface	The marketing channel that this campaign type belongs to. If you are defining the types from within the class implementing the MarketingChannelInterface, then the channel should be set to $this.

The supported campaign types can be the following list as presented to the user when they try to create a new ad campaign:

However, since all campaigns are created on Facebook (and not on the extension), we need to be able to link directly to the page that creates each ad type. If that's not possible, we can create one generate campaign type and provide a link to the Facebook's "Create Ad" page.

get_campaigns

The list of all ad campaign must be mapped to an array of MarketingCampaign objects and returned by this method. Each MarketingCampaign object has the following properties:

Property Name	Property Type	Description
id	string	The unique identifier of the marketing campaign.
title	string	The title of the campaign.
manage_url	string	The URL to the channel’s campaign management page.
cost	Price	The cost of the campaign. This should be an object of the type Price.
type	MarketingCampaignType	The type of this marketing campaign. It should match one of the supported types returned by the MarketingChannelInterface::get_supported_campaign_types

Since the extension does not store any of the ad campaigns locally, we need to implement connections to the API to retrieve the list of ad campaign and then have a caching mechanism for the campaigns to store them locally. Facebook provides data that we need about the ads through different APIs.

From pe2C5g-8v-p2#facebook-for-woocommerce:

Using Facebook’s Marketing API, it’s possible to retrieve information about a merchant’s campaigns, ad sets and ads. The ads_management scope must be included when requesting authorization. Fortunately, this scope is github already included in permissions the extension requests.

Names are available on the Campaign level (documentation), while budget and geo targets are available on the Ad Set level (documentation). For the proposed structured row format, the Facebook campaigns could either display the name only, or include target countries and budget (although that information would have to be collated from each campaign’s ad sets).

[budzanowski]

For now work on this should be on hold.