How to make sure your product feed is being shown to publishers
What are affiliate product feeds?
Affiliate product feeds are the lifeblood of publisher to brand relationships. They allow publishers to automatically link to recommended products from retailers/brands based on price, stock availability and commission rates – without having to manually check the price or stock availability.
The publisher adds a piece of script/code in the articles which decides what links/products to show based on what the consumer is most likely to purchase.
In simple terms: it’s a form of technology that automatically links to products so publishers can focus on creating the content, not updating prices or checking a link works. Two examples of how affiliate product feeds are used are outlined below:
Price comparison widgets
Price comparison widgets are the most popular use case of affiliate product feeds. It allows a publisher to review a product and then automatically link out to where the product is in stock and for the best price. To be included in price comparison widgets you must have EAN/UPC/GTIN data available in your product feed.
Single link generation
Auto single link generation is a more refined version of the price comparison widget and allows the publisher to select to only show one link to their preferred retailer. They may make this choice based on a variety of factors such as commission rate on that product, previous conversion rates, URL validity, stock availability or even personal relationship with that retailer. To be included in price comparison widgets you must have EAN/UPC/GTIN data available in your product feed.
Why aren't my products being shown in price comparison widgets?
The top answer to this question comes down to data availability.
If you do not have EAN/UPC/GTIN data available in your product feed, then you’re missing out on 99% of all available traffic. Affiliate product feeds do not rely on your own internal SKU for matching to other products, as these SKU’s can be changed at any point. Instead, EAN/UPC/GTIN data is used to help publishers and networks match products together for price comparisons.
For example, if Cycling Weekly is talking about a Castelli jersey, they will use a price comparison widget to display where the jersey is available to purchase. They will be provided programmatic data in spreadsheets from 10+ retailers for this product and all the retailers will have different internal SKU’s. The only constant in these spreadsheets are the EAN/UPC/GTIN numbers which are set by the original manufacturer and is what’s used to identify and match products together.
If you do not have this data available, then the computer program cannot match/understand that your product is the same as the others, even if you have the same product name, image or price. The computer program will automatically choose the retailer with the EAN/UPC/GTIN data and display those retailers instead.
Long story short: you MUST have EAN/UPC/GTIN data available for all the products you’d like to display. If you do not, you will not be shown in price comparison widgets.
How are affiliate product feeds generated?
Affiliate product feeds start life as an automatically updated CSV, XML or JSON file that contains all of your product information from your eCommerce store (like a Google Shopping feed). Affiliate networks then ingest this product information and add their own affiliate tracking links instead of you standard URLs, then provide the feed to publishers.
Publishers use these feeds to programatically serve product recommendations to customers in the form of price comparison widgets and links to websites, depending on the price, stock availability and the quality of information provided in the feed.
A workflow of how this works is below:
- Brand/retailer provides product feed to network
- Network rewrites feed, takes out any unnecessary information and adds affiliate URL’s
- Network passes feed to publisher/sub-network
Can publishers generate affiliate links as they go?
Affiliate product feeds are the lifeline and connection between brands and publishers. Whilst a website owner who publishers a few articles a month can easily keep on top of their outbound links, larger publishers like Future PLC, Metropolis and Our Media publish thousands of pieces of content per day and require an automated solution to manage these links.
That’s not to say that publishers won’t create single links, though. Product feeds are for price comparison and if a publisher has a piece of software that works to inject single links, they will. Some use cases for creating single links will be if a brand only sells D2C and has no retailers, or if a brand is small enough or uses an affiliate platform that doesn’t have affiliate linking functionality.
Publishers use affiliate product feeds to recommend products to readers based on a variety of data, including:
- Product name
- Product SKU
- EAN / UPC / GTIN
- Product description
- Image availability in a URL form (no broken images)
- RRP & sale price
- Stock availability
- Commission %
- Delivery cost
- Website ranking
Top tips to ensure your affiliate product feed is shown to all publishers
Unlike META and Google, we don’t keep trade secrets to getting your feed shown to all publishers. There’s some pretty basic steps you need to take to ensure your feed gets shown to all publishers.
- Keep your product information as detailed as possible. This is the most important thing and we recommend adding your EAN/UPC/GTIN to every single product in your inventory, or at least the ones you definitely want shown. Some publishers won’t even show your products in their articles if you don’t have these added.
- Make sure you’re offering a good level of commission across the board. Publishers, like everyone else, are in the game of making money. If you’re offering 1-2% commission whilst another brand is offering 5-6% on the same product, the publishers system will automatically link to the other retailer over you.
- If you’re not working with automatic feeds, then update your stock and price availability to match what’s on the system. Reliable data is the name of the game with affiliate product feeds, so get everything matching and you’ll be winning.