What is an Affiliate Datafeed ?
For our purposes, a data feed is a large file filled with lots of information. More specifically, information about the merchant’s products. A data feed can also be thought of as a database. Data feeds can contain anywhere from a handful of products, to tens of thousands of products. File sizes vary, and in uncompressed form can be anywhere from 500k up to 250MB or more! So those wanting to use data feeds for their affiliate sites must be prepared to handle these large files effectively. One of the most important things you’ll need is a tool like WebMerge or programming skills like PHP, perl and ASP to translate the data feed into pages that visitors can view, initiate purchases from, and be included in search results. More about WebMerge later, let's concentrate on what affiliate data feeds are used for.
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What are affiliate data feeds used for?
Affiliate data feeds are provided by merchants to affiliates to better promote and sell their products. Data feeds are converted into individual products and include descriptions, links for images, links for visitors to click, pricing and more. The affiliate can take the information in the feed and build individual pages for each product, or put multiple products on each page.
An affiliate data feed may also enhance a site that already has some sort of specific content. For example, a site concerned with business news, or advice for business might work well with the Betty Mills data feed. Utilizing an affiliate data feed, means your site will have more exposure on the web through search engine results, and the higher number of pages published.
Advantages of using a data feed.
Using a data feed means more exposure on the web. More exposure for your affiliate site, and more exposure for the merchant’s products. Making affiliate web pages by hand can only be done so fast, after some time this method does result in more pages to be spidered by search engines, but is still limited. How many pages do you think you can make by hand on a daily basis? One, five, twenty? What if you were able to make 20,000 in one day? Right now, you might have three-hundred affiliate pages published on the web. What if you had 100,000 pages published? Now imagine that most of them are in the Google database. Wonder how much traffic that would generate?
Some argue that using a data feed means that the results at the search engines will be flooded with worthless redundant information. This is a possibility – if everyone made their pages the same way. However, there are many ways in which you can make your web site not only stand out, but be of value to your site visitors, those using search engines, the merchants, and most importantly you. Later, we’ll cover some of the things you can do to enhance the value you put into your data feed based web sites.
How are data feeds delivered to an affiliate?
Data feeds can be delivered a number of ways, but usually involve the use of File Transfer Protocol (FTP). For example, many merchants have the affiliate log in to their (the merchant’s) server, and download the feed. BeFree and Overstock.com use this method. Performics actually delivers your feeds directly to your server, via FTP. Still other programs may e-mail the feed to affiliates. As of this writing, BackCountry Store updates their feed via e-mail every week, helping to ensure fresh content is being published on the web.
How much do data feeds cost?
Many feeds are free. Some aren’t. If you have a zero budget for feeds, don't worry, there are many merchants that supply free feeds. If we were to add up the number of products that free affiliate feeds represent, the number would reach above a million. Is that enough? Some of the networks charge for feeds, or require that your own affiliate performance be pretty high in order to get started. For example, Linkshare currently charges $250. as a one-time set-up fee. Once paid, all merchants that have feeds (and that you are an accepted part of their program) are available to you. CJ has a similar program, as does Performics. Although Performics may provide you with a free feed – it's worth a try. BeFree’s feed is free.
Many independent programs also offer free feeds, and some merchants that are part of the networks mentioned above have feeds outside of the their network. A good place to find out which feed is which (so to speak), is abestweb.com (ABW). If you are a serious affiliate, then you already know about ABW. Additionally, there is a WebMerge section, and a Data Feed section at ABW that offer more great resources to help you build your affiliate web sites.
What is actually in the data feed?
Records:
Remember, the feed is filled with products. Each product in the data feed is called a Record. Another way to look at it, is if there are 3,500 products in the feed, then there are 3,500 records – one for each product.
Fields:
Each record (product) has information associated with it. This information is found in individual “Fields” For example, if we look at a product from the Betty Mills data feed, we’ll see a couple of fields like the URL for the product’s image location “http://www.bettymills.com/store/images/product/CFRS2786.JPG”, and the main category for the product “Air Freshener & Odor.” Most feeds contain many more fields, and sadly not all of them are the same. Some feeds may have twenty or twenty-five different field names. Don’t worry, we’ll show you how to deal with that.
Field Names:
We also need a name to call the fields, these are called “Field Names,” and may look like this: “IMAGE_URL,” “MAIN_CATEGORY,” and “SALE_PRICE.”
So we have records, fields, and field names. It would be nice if these were organized into a table, so we could simply look at it like a spreadsheet, wouldn’t it? Well, that’s exactly what all this data information fits into – a table. One of the tools you will need that we’ll talk more about later, is a tool to view the information in the data feed. For example, MS Excel or other programs work well (note: WebMerge will have this functionality in a future release). But to give you a sneak-peak, and to show you visually what the feed looks like loaded into Excel, check this out:
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Only four field names are shown (they won’t all fit on this page). There are three records (shown), with twelve total fields.
How is the data in the feed separated?
If you open the data feed in something like WordPad, or your favorite text editor (Earlier versions of Notepad are usually too wimpy to look at data feeds), you’ll see all of the fields jammed together, so it will look like one big file full of stuff. If we look at just the first record in our text editor, it would look like this:
| http://affiliates.bettymills.com/ad/264528/CD252/ | FRS-300 | Large, plastic cabinets ideal for Re-Fresh Gel Air Fresheners (FRS 12-4G series) | Gel Air Freshener Dispenser | 3.98 |
Pretty confusing, isn’t it? Well fortunately, data feeds are formatted or Delimited where each field is separated by something called a delimiter. Many data feeds are “pipe” “tab” or “comma” delimited. The above example is “pipe” delimited. Maybe you can see the little vertical pipes between the different fields, they look like this | The pipe character should be on your keyboard at the extreme right, above the Enter key.
How a data feed is delimited is very important when we want to import it into Excel to clean it up, or when we use WebMerge to make our html files.
How to turn data into web pages.
Turning data feed information into a web page that visitors can view, deliver value to the visitor, and be found in search results at major search engines, can be accomplished a couple of ways. One way is to utilize a script located on the web server to convert the information on the fly. This method, utilizing scripting languages like PHP, Perl, or CGI is very fluid and configurable, but requires programming knowledge. Some scripting methods do not allow for easy spidering by search engine robots. We will focus on another method, utilizing a tool called WebMerge to build what are called static web pages that are uploaded to your server complete and ready to be spidered.
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