This is a guest post from Jason Dodd from the Affiliate Marketing Training Portal Affilorama.com
Boost your sales with data feeds
Getting a lot of click-through but few sales? The secret to improving your conversion ratio could lie in using data feeds. Data feeds are particularly important for affiliates selling a lot of product from the same merchant. But before you can start using data feeds you need to know what they are, where to get them and how to use them.
Now I know talking about a data feed sounds a bit geeky but don’t let that put you off. When you learn what a data feed can do for you, you’ll embrace its glorious geekiness with open arms.
So let’s spend a few minutes trying to get to the bottom of this and figure out how you can take advantage of data feeds to boost conversions, sales and improve your search engine ranking.
What is a data feed?
A data feed is basically a file that can be imported into a database and contains information that matches fields in the database. When supplied by a merchant the data feed may include information such as product names, product description, image links and prices.
The file is usually tab or pipe delimited and can easily be viewed in most spreadsheet programs.
Why use a data feed?
Increase sales conversions – Data feeds have been proven, in many cases, to double the number of sales conversions. Often this is because it saves customer clicks. Rather than your affiliate link simply connecting the customer to the merchant’s homepage and risking losing the sale, they find exactly what they want on your site and click directly through to the product order page.
Faster site building – Imagine having to manually create a page for every single product you promoted? If you promote a lot of products, that adds up to a lot of work. Now imagine you only have to create one product template page, and the data feed automatically, and dynamically, creates all the product pages.
More search engine love – With a data feed building hundreds of product pages, you’ll get indexed more often and more thoroughly, ranking for lots of product-specific keywords. Long tail product keywords are also known to be an excellent source of sales, since searchers are usually much closer to actually making a purchase.
Up-to-date product information – Say goodbye to dead product pages or incorrect detail. By regularly updating your site using the merchant’s data feed you know that what is on your site is current.
What does an affiliate need?
If you think your affiliate site would benefit from using a data feed, there are a few things you need to do.
Does your merchant supply a data feed? – Firstly, contact your merchant and ask them if they offer a data feed service, and if so how much it is. Most data feeds are free but it’s better to ask upfront just in case. If they don’t offer a data feed there’s no point proceeding any further other than approaching a new merchant.
Request a sample data feed file – It’s good to know what you’re dealing with and exactly what information (data fields) the data feed will give you before you start designing your product page. A merchant may even provide a link to a demonstration site to illustrate how the data feed file can be used.
Build your site – To build a site that uses a data feed requires knowledge of a script language such as Perl, CGI or PHP that can interface with a web database. If you don’t feel up to the challenge, employ a PHP programmer or web designer experienced in PHP, or other database languages. There are also pre-written data feed pages which you could install and customize for your own site.
What does a data feed site look like?
While the same data feed will be provided to all affiliates, this doesn’t mean all the sites need to look identical. The data can be presented in hundreds of different ways. An example of a data feed site is http://www.buy-here-and-save.com/, which makes use of a data feed from Amazon.com.
The example below shows how the data feed file is used to create a web page.
The data called from the database for each product record may include information such as an image link (1), product name (2), product description (3), logo (4) and a product order link (5).
Other information that can be provided includes a product category and keywords.
There are lots of different ways a data feed can be used to create web pages. You could choose to just show all the merchant’s products, perhaps with a search option. Or, using a data filter, only show products that relate to an article on your site.
For example, you might have a site that offers advice to parents and have an article discussing tips on buying shoes for children. On that page you could display just kid’s shoes from the merchant’s data feed.
The great thing about data feeds is that you have complete control over how and where you display specific products. This allows you to maximize your sales opportunities.
Keep it current
Lastly, once you’ve created your site with your data feed product pages don’t forget about keeping it up-to-date. You’ll quickly lose customers if your products are stale or prices are wrong.
Unless your merchant automatically FTPs their data feed to your site and you have created a scheduled import routine, you’ll need to manually update your database whenever your merchant alerts you to an update. Depending on how many products your merchant offers, this may mean transferring some large files so make sure you have a good internet connection.
And remember, updating your product pages regular not only keeps your customers happy but is great for your site’s search engine optimization as the search engines love new and fresh content– just one of the many reasons to use data feeds to build your next affiliate site.
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:35 am
Was the example above generated using Easy Content Units? It sure looks like one of our units, but I couldn’t see any mention of ECU in the post?
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:41 am
I thought the same lammo looks like your Buy Now Icons and the formatting looks like ECU
September 23rd, 2009 at 12:57 pm
looks like ECU and that website stated is a crap example.
“With a data feed building hundreds of product pages, you’ll get indexed ” really? not if the content is all the same and nothing is changed , this all sounds rather simple but thats easy to say.
Kirsty , i love reading your blog and YOUR posts but who is this guest blogger?
worst post of the year im afraid
September 23rd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
I am sure that the provided information will surely be good for many affiliates looking forward to take a step further with regards to how they include products and offers on their website.
But one of major issues is how to keep the product pages alive, even when the product is no longer available on the merchants website/product feed.(I am taking a case, where the pages are automatically created using the product feeds). It is for sure that refreshing the product feeds will remove the old data from the database and will insert the new products into it from the datafeed. Won’t this affect websites in terms of SEO friendliness as it will constantly result in many pages getting throwing “a page not found error” and a negative impact on both users and search engines.
What do you suggest in the above scenario? Or what other (sucessful)ways do you recommend while playing around with the product feeds?
Cheers,
Mike…
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Hi, We have started using data feeds and find them a right pain to be honest. We might be doing something wrong or targetting too small a niches but the merchants don’t seem to standardize data feeds so have difffernt number of columns in different orders and don’t categorize properly so you end up needing to manually pull stuff out of the feed or use highly selective SQL statements to get the right products out. This makes the automatic updating of simply downloading the latest feed and importing not easy. Just my initial thoughts. Could be lack of experience on my part though. Thanks for the post anyway.
Cheers
Paul
September 23rd, 2009 at 2:32 pm
Wow…. datafeeds have been under my radar for far too long. This is definitely something for me to research although I’m a little concerned about the server side programming learning curve. I’ll add it to my “to do” list!
September 23rd, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I have been using data feeds on 3 or 4 of my sites. However, the biggest problem seems to be the duplicate content filter. In many cases Google traffic completely dried up and it seemed like a filter that marks the site as a thin affiliate site – even though I have plenty of normal content.
So, how do you work around the duplicate content issue?
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Mike, if you wish to keep removed product pages alive you could do the following. Whenever a feed is imported (ideally via a cron job), store the date of the update against each product. When the import script has finished, query all products with a date prior to today’s date. (I like to leave 2 or 3 days gap in case of a datafeed error), then modify those records to remove details such as the price, affiliate link, etc. That way you get to keep the page without having a deadlink.
Paul, I agree, the quality of datafeeds is very variable, and can make working with data from multiple merchants very frustrating. Working in a small niche should make it a bit easier to set up some automated categorisation rules. You could set up general rules to apply to all datafeeds, and merchant specific rules for those with exceptionally messy data.
Chris, duplicate content is definitely a problem if you want to rank for the product name on your product pages. You could try adding a review section to your product pages so that your visitors create unique content for you
September 23rd, 2009 at 11:16 pm
Not sure where the example image has come from, I’m not familiar enough with ECU to have picked up on it being used as an example in the post (shame on me John!)
September 24th, 2009 at 3:59 am
@Lammo – After scrutinizing the source of this snapshot further, it appears that the website this shot was taken from is directing links through “easycontentunits.com” to office.co.uk, which I presume is ECU which you are referring to. My apologies for not quoting the source of this snapshot – It is from http://www.babychamtrainers.co.uk/ – but this site does not mention ECU at all. Hope this clarifies why ECU was not mentioned, and once again, sorry.
@Mark – regarding your quote – I’m trying to raise the idea that by using data feeds, you can keep your website content fresh, encouraging the spiders to return more often. I neglected to mention that in addition to data feeds one should compliment the feed with additional content, ensuring key pages have unique titles, meta descriptions, page headings, image alt tags and all main on-page elements known to effect search engine ranking. These page elements should be built after careful keyword research related to the products in the feeds you are using. It goes without saying that building high quality links back to your deep pages is essential. Focusing on one niche is a faster and more effective strategy to get into affiliate sales using data feeds. The data feed can be used to supply in-house software with the key, up-sell elements for an affiliate site like price, image, product name and the basis of a description (covered in more detail further down my reply). I originally saw it out of the scope of this post to go into the above points – my apologies, and I hope this clarifies my statement. I’m happy to clarify any of the points just made further, if anyone has any questions.
@Mike – A feed in most cases can be used how the affiliate chooses. Obviously there are occasional restrictions – and it’s best to explain how you would like to use the feed to the supplier before integrating in your software to ensure you are not breaching any conditions. One successful strategy I have used is by writing software that will go in and populate a customized CMS type system. This way I can tweak each product in the feed individually. If a product becomes unavailable from the original feed merchant, I simply edit the affiliate link to forward the visitor to a new merchant. In the unlikely case that the product is unavailable from any merchant with an affiliate program – I’d recommend, 301 redirecting the visitor to the product’s parent category.
So essentially the key points are:
Ensure product pages created from a feed can be updated with customized information that will not be removed, or updated when the feed is fetched (including what was mentioned in my reply to @Mike)
Keep an eye on merchants for products becoming unavailable.
Keep additional merchants on hand in case the product becomes unavailable at one.
@Paul – Agreed. If you’re using feeds from multiple sources the only answer is to write an import script for each source. As idea is to get your scripts tweaked to get common fields – then supplement the incoming data with the required information. When a new feed is parsed, it only updates fields that have not been manually updated (usually price and image, occasionally name, url)– in other words if human changes have been made, these are kept. The solution to categorization is to manually port the categories on the first feed and then future feeds from the same source can follow this same rule.
@Chris – Hopefully I’ve clarified this in my above replies. The answer is to compliment the feed with additional content which you’ve created.
September 24th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Hope you don’t mind me giving Easy Content Units a gentle plug here Kirsty
Duplicate Content – By default (on the free version of ECU), ECU’s can’t be read by the search engines, so there’s no issue there. On the Pro version, you can make them visible to the SE’s, which could open up the doors of duplicate content. That’s why we offer the ability to add custom descriptions to merchants feeds, meaning you still get the automatic benefit of updated product information, deeplinks, product images etc, but can rank for your own unique content.
Dealing with out of stock/removed products – We’ve built a tool into ECU that not only shows you at a glance what products are no longer available, but also sends you an email to let you know that there are missing items, and if you wish allows you to continue to show the product with an “out of stock” image.
Standardisation – Yup, this has always been an issue with feeds – We’ve done all the mapping with ECU so that all the feeds pump out the same information via ECU – no need to map anything yourself.
September 24th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Plug away John, it really is a great product!
September 25th, 2009 at 11:02 am
This affiliate import stuff is growing rapidly and saturating the internet. I think the key is to also use csv import plugins like CSV 2 POST which has other niche tools to help manage the whole thing like content re-writing etc.
But even then you need to know what your doing before you make a lot of money doing this!
September 28th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
I’m using both ECU and my own php generated product pages on my latest site. Had I known the paid version of ECU was seo friendly, I’d have gone with just that. Setting up the product pages was a proper pain in the backside and I ended up spending around 8 hours work in excel just getting the product feeds how I needed them. Time to upgrade to the paid ECU package methinks.
September 29th, 2009 at 3:51 am
Great article and great comments. I would add that it’s important to use the datafeeds in new and different ways. Remember that each affiliate has the opportunity at the same datafeed and displaying/compiling the datafeed in exactly the same way won’t differentiate you from competition nor add a unique value proposition, and you as stated in comments above, you may enter into some duplicate content issues.
I do recommend Popshops for both the sophisticated affiliate as well as the beginner.
As an affiliate agency, I’ve seen affiliates with datafeeds do amazing work, increasing sales by tens of thousands a month.