Cubalaya integrates with Drupal

Not many people have heard of Cubalaya. I know I hadn't a few months back when they contacted me about potential advertising on my site. Now Cubalaya isn't a shop - its not like Amazon or even eBay. Its more like Kelkoo or Pricerunner - its a Price Comparison Site really. Well now you can easily integrate this PPC (Pay Per Click) advertiser onto your site and provide your own category sensitive products.

Contents:

• How do they make money?
• The Cubalaya module
• Conclusion
• What's to come?

How do they make money?

Quite simply, they take a share in the revenue generated by the click. Who better to describe it than Cubalaya themselves:

…makes money when people click on the results from our retail and online advertising partners. Our advertisers are willing to pay per click because our site delivers high quality shopping leads that convert into real purchases.

When you click on a link on my site, you get taken through to their site. The type of page you get taken to depends on how I configured by product. They have 3 types on pages you can send a user to; Offers Page, Deals Page and a Direct Connection. Leads are generated from these pages. The term "lead" isn't referring to the action of PURCHASE. A lead is when a customer ends up on a partner website.

The Cubalaya Module

I have just finished the first stage of a module to easily integrate Cubalaya into a Drupal website. My module allows you to create products which you tag up using taxonomy. The module then picks up on nodes you're viewing and displays a block with related products on it by doing a comparison on like terms. The more terms a product and node share, the higher it appears in the block.

If you use, as I do, the wonderful Views module then you can also override the default view output (which I do anyway) and at the end, call up the Cubalaya function which looks up the products (cubalaya_get_associate_products) and pass it the term ID from the 'taxonomy/term/[tid]' pages. This way anyone who lands on your category pages will also get to see related products.

Conclusion

I think this is a pretty cool service. Although Amazon offer a similar affiliate service I don't think they allow you to custom pick the products you wish to display. With this module I can hand pick a select set of products which I believe will be relevant to that tag and, assuming I tag things up sensibly, all nodes will therefore have relevant products displayed.

What's to come?

Currently there are a few things I'd like to include in the module which aren't there right now...

1. Better reporting. Currently there is a horizontal bar chart of the past week. There is no easy way to tell which products are serving well and which are not - or even which PAGES are serving you well.
2. Impression counter - currently there is only a Hit counter. I get a report from Cubalaya which tells me how many leads I generated - I can then map (currently using Excel) these leads to hits to get an idea on how my day went (not product specific). Unfortunately, the report from Cubalaya only has a daily conversion rate however I understand they're pretty close to unveiling an online tracking system.
3. Better block settings. What if a node matches 100 products? You dont want all 100 to be loaded... There needs to be a limit.
4. "Sticky" product. What if you want to promote a product to the top per category or globally? This isn't possibly... yet.
5. Better integration with Views.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to improve this module - please leave a comment or contact me at webmaster@thingy-ma-jig.co.uk.