What The F*** Do I Want A Product Feed For?
Product Feeds / Data Feeds
What ever you want to call them.
Historically product feeds are poorly formatted / infrequently updated / have incorrect information / have poor or no category structure. Wait - no that is actually still the case
These are now an increasingly important part of any affiliate program, from both the perspective of the affiliate and the merchant. Product feeds benefit both affiliate and merchant - for the same reasons as remember the affiliate only gets paid when sales are generated for the merchant.
Datafeeds help the affilliate in the following ways:
- Contextual advertising. The affiliate can take keywords from their article and use them to query their product database (built from one or more datafeeds) and use this to display products relevent to the article.
- Inclusion of merchants products in a site search.
- Price Comparison Applications. Still very popular with affiliates. This speeks for itself really.
- Store Fronts. Datafeeds are still used to produce mini webstores / minisites for portals. This is not a bad thing from the merchants point of view as the affiliate is not so much competing with you (with your content) but competing against your competitiors (and their affiliates) for that ever so crucial listing in the search engines. Often affiliates have a very good understanding of SEO and to allow affiliate to operate their own store front of the merchants store is alot cheeper and more accountable way of promoting products through natural listings.
- Novel ‘Mashups’. It is harder to talk about these - but with the availability of data an affiliate with a little inspiration can make sticky web applications that include affiliate links to products that the visitor is actually interested.
In short affiliates can be lazy and love to be spoonfed information. But when they can throw that information into a web application and send you 100s of sales a month - why worry. For the 10 minute job of a data export from shopping cart software a merchant can have loads to gain and very little to lose.
Advice for Merchants re Datafeeds:
Get it right. Look at your network’s recommendation for product feeds structure and encoding.
The MINIMUM fields that you will be expected to provide are:
Product Name, Product Price, Product URL, Product Image, Product Description, Product Category.
Regarding the product description - you may possibly want to use an alternative description of the product than the one that is used on your site. This is because search engines can give penaltys to sites that display content that is duplicated across the web
