FAQ – How often can you create and submit my affiliate program datafeed?

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Frequency is an important aspect of your product feed management.  Chloe Feed Assembler is set up to handle this in several different ways.  Our automagic scheduler and distribution tool allows you to set up daily, weekly and monthly recurring feed creation and distribution to the affiliate network of your choice.  Beyond that, you have the capability to create your feed at any time on the fly.  When would this be appropriate?

When you:

  • Experience heavy traffic days/weeks and your inventory fluctuates frequently necessitating updated feeds frequently
  • When you have a huge selection of new products show up in your inventory and you don’t want your product datafeed to be innacurate in between scheduled feeds

How do you decide on the proper frequency?  That is a great question.  It really depends on the nature of your product and your organization as a whole.  One of our clients is a big retailer in the fast fashion category.  Their inventory levels can change multiple times a day, so they have a daily recurring feed and we update it twice a day manually.  We have other clients that have the same product year in and year out, we update that one quarterly just to be safe.  I don’t recommend going more than a quarter, even in a case like this.  Most advertisers see that a weekly feed update schedule is suitable.  But if you are not sure, a weekly or daily cost the same, so try each out, test and measure the results.  We are a huge advocate of testing and measuring, so give it a shot.  But in the end, it really depends on your product turnover.

In the past, the frequency of the feed depended entirely on your IT team’s willingness to get it done and the affiliate manager’s time and resources.  But, with the Chloe Feed Assembler, that isn’t a consideration any longer.

CJ by Conversant (Commision Junction) Product Datafeed Created by Chloe Feed Assembler

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Each week we like to highlight a new or prominent existing feature of the Chloe Feed Assembler that really makes it useful and different from our competition. No one has the ability to create feeds for all the affiliate networks like we do. And today, we feature our integration of the CJ by Conversant product catalogs (datafeeds). CJ by Conversant offers two ways to integrate their product catalogs based on the two ways advertisers can integrate tracking with CJ. These are Standard and Gateway integrations.

Standard Advertisers are advertisers who track every transaction on their website through CJ. They do not have any redirects or specific entry points that are unique to CJ by Conversant. They simply have all affiliate links go direct to the site, and only affiliate orders get tracked in CJ.

Gateway Advertisers are advertisers who do not display or track every transaction on their site through CJ. They implement a gateway url that only CJ referred traffic gets sent through that is designed to trigger CJ’s tracking mechanisms.

There are benefits and downsides to both, and that discussion isn’t appropriate here.

Basically, Gateway advertisers need to add that gateway url to the beginning of all the product urls in the product catalog.

And now Chloe Feed Assembler can export feeds in both formats! Need a CJ datafeed (product catalog) – we got ya covered!

If you need the specifications for the CJ product catalog, you can read all about them here – http://cjsupport.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/43. You’ll even find the actual specs on that page.

FAQ – Can you do multiple product feeds?

Posted on by Jamie Birch

Another question we received in about our product feed tool was whether we could create different type of feeds for the same advertiser.  What kind of product feeds could you have?  Well, hundreds of different types.  Like this for instance:

  • Comprehensive feed that includes pretty much everything
  • A slimmed down feed that only includes short descriptions and the vital, required information
  • Category specific feeds
  • Promotional feeds
  • Creative asset feeds

The answer is yes!  To be honest, I hadn’t even though of this scenario prior to presenting the Chloe Feed Assembler to one of the affiliate networks.  But it makes perfect sense and we are already to set that up!  We simply create different configurations for the feed, assign them to your account and then let the Feed Assembler do its thang!  I believe we’ll incorporate this package into the Unlimited package for $699/mo.  After you sign up, we’ll be contacting you for information that will include the type of feeds you want to push out and make available.

What else could we do for you?

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

Posted on by Jamie Birch

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!