Dealing with Metadata Imported From Your Shopping Cart - Show or hide?
When importing shopping cart data into Sproxi, attributes & meta data are imported. Meta data is where custom field and additional data created by plugins is stored in WooCommerce, for example. This meta data is imported into Sproxi and may be used in your Google Listings. This article shows some useful way to handle this metadata in Sproxi.
A bit of background About WooCommerce Metadata
Although this is not a technical explanation of what metadata is (relative to WooCommerce), this is a good way to think of it. WordPress uses metadata to offer additional content or data for a post. Since WooCommerce product pages are technically posts, metadata offers a way to add additional data for a product.
WooCommerce offers a variety of standard product fields, and through the use of attributes, you can add some more information. However, using attributes has some limitations that we will not discuss here. With that said, you might use a plugin like “Advanced Custom Fields (ACF)” to add information to the product. The ACF data you input is stored as metadata for that product.
Too Much Metadata?
As we discussed above, adding metadata is useful and gives you the flexibility to add a significant amount of data to a product (post) that isn’t native to WooCommerce, but you may find useful in your products, and for your Google Listing.
With that said, metadata can get a bit overwhelming because this is where many themes & plugins store their data. For example, Yoast, a popular SEO plugin for WooCommerce uses metadata. This allows you to store custom data like your title tag, meta description, etc. But there’s a lot of metadata installed with the plugin that isn’t useful in Sproxi.
So imagine a WooCommerce install with 30 active plugins and a custom theme. While some of the metadata could be useful when creating or optimizing your Google Listings, much of it is not. Those of you familiar with WordPress know that even uninstalled plugins and themes often times leave metadata behind.
How Does Sproxi Help You with Metadata?
Sproxi has no way of knowing what metadata would or would not be useful for your Google Listings. Therefore, we import all of your metadata so you can decide what you want, or don’t want to use. For example, the screenshot below is an example of some metadata fields imported into Sproxi from a WooCommerce account.
In this example, there are over 80 different metadata fields Sproxi imported from the connected WooCommerce store–most of which are not useful for Google Listings. For example, you will notice in the screenshot below there are four metadata fields imported that are not very useful. These are metadata fields created by the Astra theme. Please note: when we say they are not useful, we mean they are not useful for our purposes in creating Google Listings only.)
Dealing with metadata fields that I know I won’t use in Sproxi might get a little annoying, so Sproxi has a “show/hide” feature. Setting meta data fields to “hide” will exclude them from the different tools, such as field mapping, offered in Sproxi to help improve your Google Listings.
How to Hide Metadata Fields in Sproxi
First, navigate to the the Metadata field table by going to “WooCommerce > Meta Data” located in the left menu.
Next, using the bulk selector tool, click the check box (or select all) next to the metadata fields you want to hide.
Once you select the fields, you will notice the yellow-colored button for “hide.” After clicking that button, a dialog box will appear, click the “ok” button.
Now, once on the table, select “Shown” in the “visibility” drop-down filter. The metadata fields you selected to “Hide” will not show.
Finally, when using tools like the “dynamic field map” you will notice that these “Hidden” metadata fields do not appear.
