Technology-savvy players such as Amazon and eBay set the standard for technology and tools in the performance marketing channel. However, online retailers of all sizes can benefit from using product data feeds across multiple online channels to lower costs, drive efficiency and increase sales.
Rob Durkin, CEO at FusePump examines how new tools that simplify the creation of product data feeds, advertising units and widgets can help merchants drive sales online.
Affiliate marketers in the UK drove an estimated £5 billion in e-commerce revenue last year, with travel/flights and fashion/accessories being the most widely promoted sectors.
The market has come a long way from the days when affiliates could profit from simply buying URLs and driving traffic cheaply.
Today, they’re creating engaging content, building their own brands to attract and retain users and finding innovative ways to drive and monetise traffic using data feeds.
Data accessibility drives success online
As an advertiser with an affiliate programme, it is critical to make your product data available, accessible and easy to use.
The product-level information should be well structured, consistent in terms of hierarchy and labelling and updated regularly, depending on the type of product. This is where high quality data feeds make life simple.
Requirements differ from vertical to vertical, product to product and merchant to merchant. The fact there can be numerous parties in the value chain means there is plenty of potential for difficulties to occur– e.g. a change in format as the feed passes through the chain, use of non-ASCI characters, or data that has not been checked for accuracy.
Common mistakes lead to poor uptake or consumer dissatisfaction
More fundamentally, the quality of the data itself needs to be high; however this is where a lot of current data feeds fall down.
A major US cash-back affiliate for example, reported it was ingesting 70 million products on a daily basis but only using 16 million of them, with the rest discarded due to poor quality and missing data from the feeds.
All too often, key fields/attributes are missing or incorrect. Simple problems such as spelling mistakes, product names in caps, truncated fields, badly encoded text and broken links to products and thumbnail images makes the job of the affiliate considerably more difficult.
Missing fields/attributes impact on their ability to categorise products automatically and means the affiliate either ends up with poor search results or spends time manipulating the data.
Meanwhile, links that are broken or fail to take the consumer through to the correct page on the merchant’s website mean the opportunity for conversion is lost.
Thinking more creatively
Online retailers need to think much more creatively in terms of how they present their product data to partners.
Technology solutions make the process simple by providing affiliates with all the information, functionality and business intelligence they need to market products online and increase sales.
Using good quality data feeds, ad and widget creation tools for example allow affiliates to create dynamic advertising solutions that go beyond simple ‘banner advertising’ and enable consumers to engage with and select products within the banner.
Presenting their data feeds through interactive widgets and dynamic banners is a clever way to engage with affiliates that don’t have the technical know-how to work with large datasets.
It is of paramount importance that the merchant takes control of its product-level data and has a clear understanding of what affiliates need. Many merchants now provide their network of online affiliates with access to the latest information on their products, pricing and availability though a user-friendly portal.
Affiliate or performance marketing hubs, help affiliates simplify the creation of product feeds, advertising units and widgets, as well as ensuring an open channel of communication and bringing a real focus to affiliate marketing programmes.
Centralise your affiliate marketing and give your programme focus
An affiliate hub is an online platform that contains all the promotional materials needed for a successful affiliate programme.
Using an affiliate hub enables merchants to provide affiliates with comprehensive access to all of their product level data, as well as the tools enabling affiliate marketers to create their own data feeds and dynamic advertising units.
For e-commerce merchants and advertisers, an affiliate hub provides control of the inventory and advertising that their affiliate marketers download.
It can include deep linking and ad creation tools, APIs and ‘Best Offers’, while providing a single place for downloads among affiliates that is visible and easy to use. e-commerce merchants and advertisers can also add forums, blogs, and support sections, helping to engage new affiliates easily through the platform, while allowing them to monitor and analyse the downloads and performance of each affiliate.
Affiliates and performance marketers using an affiliate hub have the complete set of tools and content available in one place, enabling them to quickly and easily select and deploy what they need.
They can build and deploy bespoke feeds and content units in minutes, start earning commission straight away and keep up to date with new opportunities and promotional tools as they are made available by the advertiser or e-commerce merchant.
By improving communication and knowledge exchange between e-commerce merchants, advertisers and affiliates, a hub makes it much easier and more attractive for all parties to work together.
E-commerce merchants and advertisers are able to penetrate deeper into the long tail of sites and forge much closer ties with affiliates, who are much more likely to work with merchants offering a two-way relationship.
fusepump.com
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