Datafeed Marketing: Getting the Most out of Online Catalogues

05 Jan

Posted by admin as Marketing

As you learn more and more about the affiliate industry by perusing affiliate forums, network creative offerings and simply chatting with other affiliates, you’ll notice that the term “datafeed” comes up more and more. But what exactly is a datafeed, and how can it benefit your affiliate marketing plans?

What are datafeeds, anyway?

A “datafeed” (also referred to as a “product feed”) is code offered by affiliate programs that enables you to display an automatically generated and updated product guide on your website. This product guide generally features a small image of the product, a brief description of the product and a price. Datafeeds are often broken down into categories and SKU numbers, enabling you as an affiliate to display only products by the categories or SKUs of your choice.

What are the benefits of datafeeds?

For Merchants
Datafeeds offer many benefits, both from a merchant perspective as well as an affiliate’s. Merchants that benefit the most from datafeeds are generally retail in nature and offer a large number of products in a number of categories and are regularly adding to their product roster. One perfect example would be a ticketing merchant such as Celebrity Seats, who add hundreds of tickets to their database and datafeed on a daily basis.

Merchants that are regularly updating pricing (through regular sales, etc.) can also benefit from the datafeed. The datafeed allows merchants to include all of their products as potential offerings to their affiliates through the maintenance of a feed, as opposed to relying on product-specific banners or text links.

For Affiliates
One of the main benefits of datafeeds for you as an affiliate is their dynamically updating nature. You simply need to customize the feed to suit the needs of your page design and traffic. By offering your visitors a targeted and up-to-date selection of products, you have a higher chance of converting your traffic than by simply sending your traffic to a merchant website. Datafeeds eliminate the extra step of clicking through to the merchant – the product selection is made directly through your website.

Datafeeds also provide you with the opportunity to combine multiple feeds from multiple programs, thereby offering your visitors the chance to compare features and pricing. This will increase your visitor loyalty by having them regularly return to your site as a place to easily compare products before making a final selection.

Another less obvious benefit of datafeeds is the SEO linking opportunities they present. By adding a new page to your site for every product in your feed, you are not only increasing your link population, but also exponentially increasing your odds of being linked to from the outside, which is always a good thing.

Though datafeeds may not be for the technically faint of heart, they address some crucial affiliate marketing issues – site updates, product selection and product targeting. Consult your affiliate manager and he/she will be able to refer you to some excellent resources that can get you on your way to integrating datafeeds into your site.

Share Results offers a number of frequently updated feeds from retail merchants such as Real Networks (online music), Celebrity Seats (concert and sports tickets), Love Toner (printer toner cartridges), American Medical ID (medical bracelets and jewelry), and My Celtic Jeweler (Celtic jewelry and wedding rings) among others.