FAQ – Is there an interface to do the field mapping for my product datafeed?

Yesterday I presented the full functioning Feed Assembler to a prominent network.  I really enjoyed showing our solution to a very common problem to a super smart group of people.  I love showcasing the Feed Assembler!  They asked me a few questions that I’ll be elaborating on here over the coming days and weeks.  The first one was a great one.  “Do you have an interface or a dashboard where the customer can or has to map their data to the feed specified fields required?

Great question right?  The simple answer is no, we don’t.  Could we?  Most definitely we can.  But why not now?

Well, we wanted to solve a specific problem with this tool.  Creating  feed when there are no tech resources or skills available to create one and make the results available any any network format.  I used myself 15 years ago as an example of the ideal client.  I was an affiliate manager at a very large women’s apparel retailer.  While I was handy in the tech area for a marketing guy, I was not a developer nor would I have been given access to that realm by the tech team.  The tech team also had hundreds of projects that were ahead of my datafeed requirements and it took me over a year to get a datafeed, and then I got one comprehensive feed, no customization or categorization of feeds.  I got what I got and that’s all I got.

I would have killed for a tool that allowed me to create a feed without any involvement from my entire company outside of submitting a payment option and providing credentials to upload and distribute the feed.  Ok, I don’t think I would have killed or even maimed, but I probably would have given good money for it.

So because of that, we didn’t want to provide an interface to do the mapping.  We wanted to do it for you.  So we do.  Clients of the Feed Assembler do not have to figure out what fields go where, what requirements each network has and what needs to go into those required areas.  We do that during the mapping process that takes a little over a day, share that first feed output with you the advertiser, then set up the crawl and distribution schedule.  After that you receive notification emails that the feed has started, it has completed, it was sent to the network(s) and it was accepted.  And then the receipt when it is done.

We tried to make this as simple as possible for you to have a fully functioning datafeed!

And I’m so excited to see you use it!