Adding Google Analytics tracking code to product links in abandoned cart email

Question

I am a Magento newbie and I am not much of a PHP guy either.

I am setting up abandoned cart emails in our magento site and it uses Abandoned Carts Pro extension to generate these abandoned cart tables. I want to change the format of the mail that would be sent, and I can't seem to understand how the email variables work.

Right now, the template at app/locale/en_US/template/email/abandoned_cart.html looks like this:

<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" width="650">
    <tr>
       <td valign="top">
          <p><strong>Hello {{var customer_name}},</strong></p>
          <p>Thank you for stopping by {{var website_name}} and considering us for your purchase. We noticed that during your visit to our store you placed the following item(s) in your shopping cart, but did not complete the transaction.</p>
          <p>Shopping Cart Contents: </p>
          <p>{{var products}}</p>

I want to add a tracking code to the product link that comes from {{url products}} and I don't know where this code is being generated or how to change it. I have tried changing the product code to look like this, to check if any of these variables work:

      <p>Shopping Cart Contents: </p>
      <p>{{var products}}</p>
      <p>{{var product_name}}</p>
      <p>{{var product_url}}</p>
      <p>{{var product_image}}</p>
      <p>{{var product_url}}?utm_source=abandoned_cart&utm_medium=email</p>

but the variables are not working like the reference suggests. All I end up getting are empty <p> tags with the analytics text.

How can I add the tracking code to product urls that would get generated?

Answer 1

Figured this out myself, and wanted to post the answer. Also answered here.

The code that generates the products is in the models of the third-party extension I've installed for sending the cart emails. I have too many extensions installed, and couldn't find this one easily.

I understood that all the extension related code is in app/code/local/<extension-name>/Cartalert. (the Cartalert directory would be named differently depending on the extension). I did this by greping through my repository searching for "Save and Send out" text, which is used in CMS for manually sending these emails.

grep -Ril "Save and Send out" <directory>

This was my reference. Also, if you're dealing with custom emails like me, this would help.

Next I went to the model where these alerts are being generated, which was in app/local/<extension-name>/Cartalert/Model/Cartalert.php

This was the relevant code I had to change.

for ($i=0, $n=sizeof($prod); $i<$n; $i+=2){
            $product = Mage::getModel('catalog/product')
                ->setStoreId($this->getStoreId())
                ->load($prod[$i]);
            if(in_array($product->getStatus(),$status)&&in_array($product->getVisibility(),$visibility)&&$product->isSaleable())
            {
                $url = $baseUrl . 'catalog/product/view/id/'.$prod[$i];
                $name = $prod[$i+1];

I had to append the parameters to the $url string, and it got the job done. Never thought grep would help me more than the docs... :D