Product Feed Introduction
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[-] Product Feed Guide for Advertisers
What is a product feed?
At its most basic level, a feed provides publishers with the raw building blocks they need to build a website and promote you. A feed tells a publisher about types of products you sell, how much they cost, what colour they are and various other specs that are relevant to your business. Without a good feed, a content or comparison publisher will really struggle to include your products on their site.
It naturally follows that the more information you can share about the products you sell, the better the quality of affiliate website that can be built to promote you. For example, an electronics retailer could have a feed containing their entire stock inventory, part numbers, spec details and compatibility information whilst a fashion retailer could have details of size, colours, material and so on. Any publisher wanting to promote either of these advertisers can then use this feed to quickly find or display the products they require on their website, instead of searching the retailer’s site manually (which many wouldn’t do).
Why is a product feed needed?
Feeds allow publishers to quickly find and display links without having to manually create their own deeplinks each time. It also gives them direct access to millions of product details and prices, allowing them to search and filter and display them in a variety of ways. From price comparisons and daily deals, to niche or general interest products, there are any number of ways that the data can be used to drive traffic to your site.
A good feed can contribute as much as 10% of your affiliate program’s sales so its importance can not be underestimated. A good feed is also fundamental in being able to attract all publishers types to your programme.
How can I provide a product feed?
In order to provide a consistent data-set for Publishers to use on their sites, submitted feeds have to conform to certain standards. These standards ensure that publishers can get product sets from multiple advertisers that meet the criteria which they deem to be relevant for their website.
Feeds can be submitted as either delimited text, or XML.