Hi Kirsty,
Jason Dodd posted a data feed article here last September and I’m curious as to your thoughts about using such.
It does not appear your lingerie site utilizes a data feed. Do you have any sites that do use a data feed?
Pluses would certainly be the quantity of products and possibly an easier setup, plus their would be fresh content.
The negatives I see would possibly be poor product selection, leading to poor CTR, etc. Though you can categorize the products shown, I don’t believe you
could have complete control. Another might be the commission structure. I would bet that you get better commission rates with those product vendors that do not
have data feeds available.Thanks.
-Scott
Hey Scott,
Actually my lingerie site does utilise a feed, they all do.
I don’t feel though that a data feed provides fresh content. It provides valuable choice for your visitors which I reckon improves your chances of getting a conversion by giving them lots of choice / a sense that the site they’ve arrived on will have what they want. As all the information in the feed is syndicated to lots of other sites I can’t really see it adding “fresh content” type value. However, if you do something clever with your datafeed and combine it with other useful information you would certainly achieve that aim.
I think the trick with data feeds is to choose which ones you use on your site very carefully. Make sure that the merchant has a really good selection of products, or use a fusion of feeds to create your own resource which will add value to your site and users. The only thing you have to monitor when doing that is conversion rates of the various merchants you feature. If you have one or two in your feed section that convert badly you will leak traffic to them that would probably otherwise have gotten you a sale. As for people without product feeds having better commissions – I’ve never seen this anywhere. Feeds are generally provided by most merchants. They’re a valuable tool to really increase visibility of their products and in my experience as an affiliate manager they can have a profound effect on profit levels on your programme. There are some mighty clever chappies out there doing interesting and creative things with feed sites that gives merchants access to traffic they’d never have gotten otherwise.
One of the negatives you’re dead on about is the issues with feed categorisation. This is the absolute bane of most affiliates who use feeds. Often feeds are very poorly categorised with merchants not taking care to break products down into logical sections. It can also be hard to get multiple feeds working properly together thanks to different merchants categorising products in subtly different ways. However, this problem can be used to your benefit if you’re clever enough and take the time to work out a solution. It means you end up with a far better resource than other affiliates who took one look and chucked the task straight on the “too hard” pile.
One good example of something very clever being done with affiliate data feeds is the Easy Content Units system. They’ve done all the hard work for affiliates and have created a highly flexible system that has helped lots of affiliates do the clever things they’d like to do with their feeds but lack the technical ability to achieve. Definately well worth an experiment.
April 22nd, 2010 at 10:41 am
Feed categorisation is an issue which we have particular headaches about. Merchant’s categories tend to be based on their own website/database structure, and as mentioned, they will obviously never be the same from merchant to merchant – and we can’t really expect them to be!
From a network point of view, they provide their own category trees; however these tend not to be that detailed, as they have to be a “one size fits all” solution for all of their merchants across many many verticals.
I think to improve this situation, it’s down to the networks to provide a far deeper and richer categorisation tree, and then for the merchants to play their part by spending the time on correctly mapping their categories over.
Only then can I get rid of my massive Excel spreadsheet, full of macros and 20+ lookup tables, which is now far too complicated for me to remember how the hell it works!!!
James
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:03 am
1 thing I think may confuse lots of people, especially those starting out, is the ambiguity of the word ‘feed’.
Lots of people (especially networks) say ‘feed’ when, to me, they really mean, a ‘widget’. The publisher usually adds a little Javascript to their page where they want the widget to appear. When this is loaded by a browser the Javascript gets executed, which usually loads some data and formatting from the merchant or network, which is then rendered into the page by the browser, so the user sees the result.
On the plus side these widgets are very easy to integrate into a site. The negatives are that search engine spiders won’t execute that Javascript, so won’t see the result, so won’t count the widget as ‘content’ at all (fresh or not), and that the publisher’s control of what gets rendered can be minimal. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong).
To me a ‘feed’ is a data file published by a network or merchant containing some sort of product information, often including price and availability. Usually the publisher downloads this ‘behind the scenes’ and loads it into their own database, they then publish it as they see fit.
On the plus side this means massive flexibility – the feed is the raw material to build whatever you want. However this takes programming ability and server resources, it’s not an out of the box solution.
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:12 pm
Hello Kirsty,
Could you recommend a resource to learn how to use feeds?
Thanks
April 22nd, 2010 at 5:04 pm
Hi guys,
I manage the feed system here at buy.at
A big thing I always try and press on affiliates is that you can very rarely just plug a bunch of feeds straight into a database and your site will instantly convert.
The varying backend systems and procedures of each merchant means its very rare for them to be able to provide a perfect fit. We run a lot of bespoke modifications across feeds which work on issues such as product name normalisation, re-categorisation of products, vertical specific naming and feed structures, removal of HTML from descriptions and data cleansing. Unfortunately there is only so much we can do as sometimes as the data literally is not available.
While I am all for a completely standardised format and making things easier for everyone, its also worth noting that different verticals have different attributes; to accomodate this we have a different recommended structure for each of the main verticals.
The best uses of feeds I’ve seen are when the affiliate takes small sections from a variety of feeds and mixes it with their own content and/or other technologies. An obvious example would be the travel sector where feeds are integrated with Google maps and there are also some excellent mashups between ticketing and music retailers starting to appear.
On the subject of categorisation, most of you will know that merchants categorisation varies massively. To try and accomodate this, we (and other networks) have our own internal categorisation system. We go through the merchants feed on a category by category basis and match the merchants choice up to our own internal structure. This is illustrated well in the Create-A-Feed tool our buddies at Awin have; I am very jealous
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:07 pm
Ooh product feeds! Don’t get me started
They are great and they are a right royal pain in the posterior. As Kirsty has pointed out, when the merchant does them well and categorizes their products they are superb and using SQL statements to pull them out, even using UNION to merge different queries together to get exactly what you want is brilliant. However, a lot of merchants don’t do this and in that case you have to be really creative with your statements to pull out exactly what you need and only what you need. Worth perservering with as if you can get it right it can really enhance your site. We use mainly data feeds and believe me it certainly improves your SQL skills.
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:43 pm
For those interested in Datafeeds and WordPress. I did a post on our blog a while back – How to pull product datafeeds using PHP and MYSQL and display into your Webpage
April 23rd, 2010 at 10:15 am
1 more thing – always take a good look at the data quality in a feed before investing in coding up the downloading and processing of it.
In my experience feeds direct from the merchant are better quality than those regurgitated by the network. I’ve seen network supplied feeds with invalid formatting, data months out of date and purchasing deeplinks that 404. Junk basically (& this was a major UK brand on a big network).
Remember too a feed can get pulled by the merchant at any time, don’t place a big bet on any one feed unless you have a specific agreement with the merchant, and always have a back up plan.