In affiliate marketing, one of the greatest tools an affiliate can be offered is a product datafeed. A datafeed is a compilation of a merchant’s product line which allows you to display their products directly on to your site. I have many datafeeds in use across quite a few sites and go through many lengths to put them to best use. Unfortunately, however, working with certain merchants can provide more headaches than value and I’ll tell you why.

Lack of Structure

A typical datafeed will offer, at the very least, a unique product ID, the name of the product, a possible description of the product, a thumbnail image of the product and a large image of the product. And the last thing you want is a typical datafeed. While in rare instances that little bit of product information may be useful, it leaves very little to work with and may not produce tremendous results. Whle I’m limited with the networks I work with, the ones I do work with offer a lot more possibilities to expand a datafeed beyond those few fields.

ShareASale (SAS), for instance, offers several extra fields including five custom fields for use by the merchant. If you work with a merchant, or affiliate program manager (APM), that gets it then you’ll have a lot more information given to you that will allow you to build a nice, functional site. These custom fields are populated with a breakdown of the product that allow you to define what products you want to pull and where you want to show them, for example: Custom1 -> Rings, Custom2 -> 14K Gold, Custom 3 -> Diamond, and so on. With that information, you can build an entire site for Rings, with menu options for 14K gold rings, sterling silver rings, white gold rings, do they have diamonds, or emeralds - well you get the picture.

If you as a merchant, or APM, do not offer this extra information, then you’ll be one of the last to get any exposure on my sites. And I certainly will not be using your datafeed. And I hope you don’t think I’m the only one with that mindset.

Changes in Structure

While structure is nice, a merchant and/or APM that constantly changes the structure they have in place can be a real nuisance. I understand the need for changes, especially for improvement sake, but these changes can often bring an affiliate site to its knees. Going back to the SAS custom fields, let’s take the current Custom1 designation out of the equation for the moment. A feed is developed with Custom1 including 14K Gold rings, 18K gold rings, etc. The coding of my page(s) pulls that distinct custom field in order to display the relevant products on that page. A month later you decide to add that broad category of Rings to the Custom1 field and shift the fields that did exist in Custom1 over to Custom2, what do you think that does to my site?

My code explicitly says: select from the database/table where Custom1 equals 14K Gold Rings. Well with these new changes made to the datafeed, my code is still referencing that field, it’s looking for 14K Gold Rings, but since 14K Gold Rings no longer exists in that field then I’m left with nothing but a nice empty page. This hurts us both as my site ends up looking bad and we both end up losing potential sales as a result. And in the end it costs the affiliate more work having to go and edit their website code.

And making these changes without any notification to the affiliate is just bad practice. You’re basically leaving it up to us to discover down the road when we otherwise could have been notified, been able to immediately make the necessary changes and limit disruption to our site(s).

Broken Images

I think this is just about my biggest pet peeve with datafeeds. Any time I upload a new datafeed to one of my sites I almost immediately, after managing my other tweaks, browse through the pages of the site and check for broken images. For each one I find that product gets pulled from the site. I will not spend the time going and finding if the image does exist and may just have a wrong URL in the feed and correcting it - that’s not my job. It’s the job of the merchant and/or APM to make sure the datafeed is complete.

At the very least, if you do not have an image for a product, but still want to list that product in your datafeed, create a “No Image” image and include a URL to that in the datafeed. I would much rather see that than a red X and I will possibly still include that product on my site. Broken images, again, make my site look bad. Too many broken images and I will just pull all of your products from my site and replace them with a competitor who understands the needs of an affiliate.

Final Thoughts

There are many things I could get in to that I find aggravating about datafeeds, but these three things pretty much top my list. Other things I run across I have developed my own tweaks to address them - most of them out of personal desire not necessarily fixing something that’s wrong with the datafeed (I may want a category named X not Y). If I could get the above issues out of the way then it would leave me a lot more time developing my sites and promoting my merchants rather than having to follow behind my merchants and clean up after them.

Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Datafeeds

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 9:11 pm CST and is filed under Affiliate Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.