This week we’ve released a few new features in our ProductSearch API module, aimed at improving the control affiliates have over how the search is actually performed.

First, there is now the ability to specify multiple search terms within one API request.  For instance, suppose you wanted to search for two kinds of snowboards, say the “Technine Icon Series Snowboard” and the “Rossignol Alias Snowboard”.  The best option, the one that gives you the most control over what results to show to your users, was – and still is – to do two separate API requests, one for each type of snowboard.  However, you now also have the option of making one search request, using “OR” syntax, e.g. “search_term=Technine Icon Series Snowboard OR Rossignol Alias Snowboard”; the API will automatically perform both searches separately and then combine the results for you.  To enable this functionality you must turn on an advanced syntax option for the API by adding the parameter “search_advanced_syntax=1″ to your request.

To see the effects yourself, take a look at the following search results for those two snowboards, with and without the new advanced syntax option turned on:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_layout=list&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_term=Technine+Icon+Series+Snowboard+OR+Rossignol+Alias+Snowboard&search_advanced_syntax=0
[Without advanced syntax, search terms are not processed separately, and results tend to be dominated by just one group.]

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_layout=list&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_term=Technine+Icon+Series+Snowboard+OR+Rossignol+Alias+Snowboard&search_advanced_syntax=1
[With advanced search, each search term is treated separately, and results are more evenly spread.]

The next addition, also requiring the use of the advanced syntax option, is the ability to flag portions of your search term as required in all matches, or as “stop” words (terms that if found, should exclude an item from your results).  You can use the “+” and “-” characters to indicate terms that must or must not be present in your search results; you can even enclose groups of words in parentheses and then preface the whole group with a “+” or “-” character to quickly modify a whole series of keywords.  As an example, suppose you were looking for a particular jacket from The North Face; you might start off with a very simple search of “The North Face jackets”:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_advanced_syntax=1&search_term=The+North+Face+jackets

But then you decide that you’re really only interested in the “Khumbu” style of jacket, so you can add “+Khumbu” to your search to require that “Khumbu” be present in each result, e.g

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_advanced_syntax=1&search_term=The+North+Face+jackets+%2BKhumbu

In case you’re wondering what that “%2B” business is, that’s the encoded equivalent of the “+” character; if you’re using PHP the urlencode() function can do this for you easily.  Finally, suppose that you’re interested only in Boy’s or Men’s versions of the jacket; you could add “-Girl -Women” or alternatively “-(Girl Women)” to your request to further filter the results:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_advanced_syntax=1&search_term=The+North+Face+jackets+%2BKhumbu+-(Girl+Women)

The third, and last, of the improvements to the ProductSearch API does not involve the advanced syntax option, but rather adds the ability to specify which pieces of information (“input fields”) should be considered in a search.  Ordinarily a product search will consider all of the available, searchable information, specifically: product SKUs, names, UPCs, brand name/manufacturer details, and categorization data.  If you want to perform a very specific type of search however, you can use the “search_input_fields”  parameter to restrict your search to use just one or more of these pieces of information.  A common example would be if you were doing product name lookups only, and did not want brand name or categorization data to factor into your results at all.  Consider the following example to see the differences in a normal versus a field-restricted search for “GPS Running Watches”:

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_results_options=interleave&search_term=GPS+Running+Watches
[Searching all available fields can sometimes yield seemingly unrelated results, often due to categorization data which mentions some of the search keywords.]

http://www.avantlink.com/api.php?affiliate_id=101&module=ProductSearch&output=html&website_id=77&search_results_fields=Thumbnail+Image|Product+Name|Merchant+Name&search_results_options=interleave&search_term=GPS+Running+Watches&search_input_fields=name
[Searching only product names yields a much more tightly restricted set of results.]

If you get a chance to try out these advanced features on any projects of your own, be sure to let us know!

-David & AvantLink

P.S. Don’t forget about the API Request Builder (available from the “Tools” page of your affiliate account) – it can be a big help with learning about and experimenting with our API modules and their parameters.

We recently completed an overhaul of our video ad support here at AvantLink.

First and foremost, we’ve switched over to using the Flowplayer video player for displaying our videos.  We feel that Flowplayer provides a better user experience than our previous player, and it offers a few more features than we had access to previously, like built-in support for viewing videos in full-screen mode.  The initial load-time of the player, prior to clicking the “Play” button is faster than our old solution as well, which is a welcome change.

Additionally, with this upgrade we were able to add scripting to make click-through behavior much more obvious to users.  Moving the mouse pointer onto the video screen now triggers the display of a message stating that you can click on the video to visit the merchant site.  As always, such click-throughs are properly enabled for affiliate tracking, so videos are monetized just like any other text or banner ad.

Take a look at this video below from Brownells.com about their “Uplula Universal Magazine Loader” (a pretty nifty accessory for those handgun users out there) if you want to see these new features in action.

As always, let us know if you have any comments or questions.

-David & AvantLink

A while back we did a review of our merchant datafeeds to see how consistent product image sizes are from one merchant to the next.  The results were less than impressive.  There were huge variations in both width and height for small (a.k.a. thumb/thumbnail) and large images between merchants, and in some cases within single merchant datafeeds.

For those of you affiliates who build cross- or multi-merchant solutions this likely comes as no surprise – it’s always been that way, right?

Well, we talked over the results internally and decided we weren’t satisfied with maintaining the status quo any longer.  So we began building a solution that would let us scale (resize) product imagery as part of our normal datafeed processing, resulting in feeds that more closely resemble our standard recommendations, namely:

• Small Images – 100×100 pixels
• Medium Images – 200×200 pixels
• Large Images – 300×300 pixels

But part-way through implementing this, it was brought to our attention that our standard recommendations don’t quite suit everyone perfectly, and that there might be some value in allowing affiliates to have some say in the matter.  To that end, we’d like to announce the ability of affiliates to configure their own datafeed image preferences.

If you log in as an affiliate at AvantLink.com, and go to the “Account” page you’ll see a new link to the “Datafeed Image Preferences” page.  From there you can set up how you’d like to see product images, either for your entire affiliate account or individually for specific websites.  Take a look at the following screen shot to get a better idea of what’s available:

For each of the three image sizes (small, medium, and large) you can specify whether to leave the image as we supply it, or to modify it to fit your desired width/height/image type (.png, .jpg, or .gif) preferences.  Additionally, in the case where you have custom processes in place that work best with the original/unmodified image directly from the merchant, you can choose to include that information in your raw datafeed files (or substitute it in place of the normal large image).

It is important to realize that the preferences you configure apply only to product imagery from merchant datafeeds, and can affect the following tools:

• Raw Datafeed Files
• Web Service Datafeed Client
• RSS Product Feeds
• Product Ad Widget
• Product Display Builder
• Additional Product Content Widget
• ProductSearch API

Ad/Link tools (e.g. merchant banner ads) and Dynamic Coupon/Deal tools (e.g. Deal of the Day) are not affected by these settings.

Changes to your image preferences take effect immediately across AvantLink.  So something as simple as a grid-formatted product search request will show an improvement on the very next request once you’ve implemented standard image preferences of your own.  Note that there is no HTML image sizing involved in the screenshots below; the product images are all being displayed at their native sizes:

Product Search API Results – Default, “as-is” product imagery

Product Search API Results – Standardized product imagery

Of course, we’re going to continue working with merchants to improve the quality and standardization of their datafeeds from our end as well.  We want to to provide the cleanest, most usable datafeeds – by default – in the industry.  We are the datafeed people, after all.

Questions and comments are always appreciated.  Let us know what you think!

-David & AvantLink

Due to some early design considerations, AvantLink.com historically has had a “one login per affiliate account” policy. Over the years we’ve received a few requests here and there from affiliates who wanted to have additional logins for their account, but with restricted access, e.g. without the ability to configure payment information. We always understood the benefits of such an arrangement but the demand was never high enough that we considered it a top-priority project. Well, recently various events conspired to move this project into active development, and the timing couldn’t have been better. Since we started implementing these changes, we’ve had almost as many requests come through for this feature as we had seen in all the years prior! Happily, we were able to complete the re-engineering in short order.

So let’s take a look at what functionality is available. When affiliates are approved into the AvantLink network they are automatically granted one login to our web interface. This is considered to be the “primary” login for the account, and it has full access in our affiliate interface. In other words, logging in as that user allows you to configure contact and payment information for the affiliate account, view reports, and configure tool subscriptions. Additionally all email-based communication, from both merchants and AvantLink, is directed to the email address associated with this particular user.

What we’ve added now is the ability for you (the affiliate) to create additional, “secondary” logins to your account. You specify an email address and password, enter the new user’s name and voila! – another person has access to your account. There are a few built in limitations to these “secondary” logins however:

• they cannot ever access the portions of our interface that allow changing the contact or payment information for the overall affiliate account
• they cannot apply to new merchant programs or in any way change the association with existing merchant programs
• they cannot add websites or update website information that is associated with the affiliate account
• they cannot themselves create other additional logins to the affiliate account
• no email-based communication, from either merchants or AvantLink, will be automatically directed to these users

Further, by default these additional logins cannot access or view reporting data (through our web interface or through our API), nor can they configure any tool subscriptions (e.g. Raw Datafeed Files, Product Ad Widgets, etc.). However, unlike the restrictions listed above, these limitations are configurable. That is, when you create one of these additional logins you can specify whether or not to allow this type of access, as shown in the screenshot below:

I have a feeling that someone, somewhere will ask why there is a “View reports” role that allows access to reports and payment history, rather than a separate option for the latter. Well, all of the information that our affiliate payments are based on is contained in our reporting interface.  If you can view reports, you can see the commissions that have been earned over time, and thus determine the payments that have been made. So separating out an access role just for viewing payment history would be redundant.

Oh, and last but not least, if you’re interested in using this functionality, look for the “Manage Additional Logins” link from the “Account” page of your affiliate account.

As always, comments are appreciated!

-David & AvantLink

Affiliates, did you know that in addition to publishing promotional-related (dynamically updated) content on your sites, you can also promote RSS subscriptions to those feeds? Think about that for a second. If you’re site visitors subscribe to one of these RSS feeds from AvantLink that you promote, then your tracking details are embedded in all links within that feed…for the life of that feed subscription!

(Note: You can easily promote RSS subscriptions via the tools highlighted below by grabbing popular reader icons just like you would a banner, and pasting that in your site along side the feed itself with a call to action like “Subscribe to this daily deal from Patagonia!”. We also provide a standard RSS icon embedded with tracking code as well as the RSS URL itself.)

Fast forward months later, and to that RSS feed sitting in someone’s reader or live bookmarks after the 60 day cookie from the click is long expired. The shopper you enticed to subscribe sees a killer deal from one of our retailers, clicks the link directly from their RSS reader or live bookmark, and there you have it; your Affiliate cookie is set again for another 60 days (or whatever cookie life the particular merchant offers). This gives you, the Affiliate, an additional level of ownership over that customer that goes above and beyond the cookie duration defined on a standard click.

We call this Affiliate Link Syndication, and it’s  been around since we opened our Affiliate network in 2005. I talked about it previously here, but the post was a little long winded (which I’m notorious for), so I wanted to bring it up again to be sure everyone knows about this RSS promotional option.

And if you take this one step further, think about the possibilities in terms of syndication to other sites. Of course, you should check the terms of use for content syndication to any site you don’t own. But for the purpose of this article I’ll use Squidoo.com as an example (their TOS allows the syndication of any content to their site). Squidoo offers an RSS module for use. So take one of the RSS URLs we provide with various campaign subscriptions, paste that into your Squidoo RSS module, and you’ll have content that’s not only dynamic but parsed to static HTML. Gourmet Google food indeed…

Check out the following tool offerings for Affiliate Link Syndication using RSS available from AvantLink.com (note you can find any of these by clicking “Tools” on the main menu once you login):

• Dynamic Coupon/Deal Tools
  • Dynamic Coupon/Deal Feeds (RSS integration option)
  • Coupon/Deal Syndication Links
  • Deal Of The Day Sign-up (RSS integration options)
• Datafeed Manager
  • RSS Product Feeds

Thanks for reading and as always comments, questions or suggestions encouraged. Gary M

In early March 2009 we released a tool called the Additional Product Content Widget (PCW): a JavaScript library that makes it easy for affiliates to retrieve useful information (and lots of it!) for a given product.  Quite some time prior to that we created the Affiliate Link Encoder (ALE): similarly a JavaScript library, but in this case one to encode direct links and keywords as affiliate-enabled links.  It was a long-term goal of ours to combine those two projects and produce a new tool that could automatically mark up an existing web page with product-specific links and content.

Well, we’ve finally achieved that goal with the most recent updates to the PCW.

The functionality we’ve added allows you to specify particular tags (e.g. <h1>, <span class=”prodName”>, etc.) that you use in your web pages to identify product names or keywords.  The PCW can then scan through your pages and automatically convert any text within those tags to a link that will pop up pricing/availability information (using our ProductSearch API).  If you’ve ever seen the ALE in action then this will probably seem pretty familiar, but an example or two is always helpful.

Suppose you had a blog where you wrote about some products, say the Venture Storm Snowboards and Wedding Napkin Rings. Maybe it’s an outdoor-themed wedding . Those of you reading this post should see those product keywords (“Venture Storm Snowboards” and “Wedding Napkin Rings”) underlined as links, even though if you view the source of this page you’ll see they’re just plain text within <span> tags, e.g.:

<span class="productKeyphrase">Venture Storm Snowboards</span>
<span class="productKeyphrase">Wedding Napkin Rings</span>

If you click on the links you should see the results of searching through AvantLink.com’s product databases for each of those products. Not bad for a single line of JavaScript – which is all that is required to use the PCW in a page. You can confirm that for yourself if you view the source of this page. The only reference you’ll find for the PCW is the following call to include the library:

<script src="http://www.avantlink.com/apcw.php?ti=1317" type="text/javascript"></script>

Aside from this automatic linking of product names/keywords, you can also use this functionality of the PCW for more targeted content. Perhaps you want to show pricing/availability information for your products in the body of your pages rather than as separate pop-ups. You can achieve that by creating a div, and then using a custom call to the PCW library to populate the div as in:

<div style="width: 414px;" id="pcwContent"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
avPcwShowInlineFromSearch('pcwContent', 'Baby Jogger Elite Strollers', '');
</script>

As with all of the content in the PCW tool, what you show and how you show it is customizable at the subscription level. So you can decide for yourself if you want to show merchant logos or product imagery, product names, prices, etc. along with all of the formatting and layout that you want to apply to each element.

If you’re interested and want to get your hands on your own copy of the PCW, log into your affiliate account, go to the “Tools” page and see the section for the “Additional Product Content Widget”. And if you have any questions or comments, let us know!

-David & AvantLink

Over the course of the past few days David has built, tested and rolled out new functionality for handling inactive merchant links that result from merchants deactivating Affiliates, or leaving the AvantLink network altogether. Affiliates have always had the option of sorting to, and browsing “My Inactive Merchants”, but now there is an option on that page to “Configure inactive link handling” as well. From the configuration page for Inactive Merchant Link Handling:

When a merchant terminates their association with your affiliate account, or leaves the AvantLink.com network altogether, any affiliate links you have to that merchant will cease functioning. For large sites with many deep links to relevant content, it can be a time consuming operation to fully target a new merchant, and while this conversion is in progress your site visitors experience will be less than ideal. This page can help you control how those links behave while you update your site to advertise for other merchants…

By default, if Affiliates do not define specific actions for inactive merchant links, an error message like the following list of similar merchants will be displayed as a result of an inactive link.

You can also control the behavior of that click through message in the following other ways. Configuration options for handling inactive merchant links include:

• Show a listing of similar merchants (default click-through handling)
• Send traffic directly to an alternate merchant (when you use this click-handling option you’ll select which “Alternate/Replacement Merchant” and “Destination URL”)
• Send traffic to a custom page of my choosing (when you use this click-handling option you’ll select ”Destination URL”)

To control the click-through handling for any inactive merchant links in your account follow these simple steps:

1. Login to your Affiliate account and click “Merchants” from the main menu.
2. Sort Merchant Status to “My Inactive Merchants” and click “Get Merchants”.
3. At the right of each inactive record you’ll see a link “Configure inactive link handling”.

Look for help notes a long the way. Questions, comments, suggestions always appreciated.

We’re proud to say that we’ve recently rolled out a massive list of improvements to one of our flagship affiliate tools: the Web Service Datafeed Client.  Before getting into the exact details it should be noted that all existing deployments of this tool will work perfectly with the new improvements (some of which will be immediately noticeable) – however, to gain the full benefit of all of the changes you should download a new copy of the files that get installed on your local server (more on this later).

Following are the main highlights of the changes that have been made:

• Improved the built-in searching functionality.  The search feature now uses the same library as our ProductSearch API module, resulting in more accurately targeted results.  In certain situations, we also make available a feature to expand search results to include more generic results.  Several bug fixes and performance optimizations were included in these changes as well.
• Better construction of page keywords (normally used in meta tags) to more uniquely identify pages throughout the site.  As a basic example, pagination results (“Page X of Y”) are included in the keywords to properly differentiate large category listings or product search results.
• Improved/simplified the use of local template files (“template.html” or “template.php”).  Originally, whenever you modified a local template file to change the formatting of your datafeed client, you had to manually clear the page cache using a specialized URL that we provide through our affiliate interface.  In new installations however, changes to the template file are detected and the page cache is cleared automatically.  In short, sprucing up the appearance of your datafeed pages should be a lot easier now.
• Completely revamped the communication between your local server and the AvantLink.com web service.  Original deployments use the SOAP protocol to transfer data back & forth; new installations use a REST-style methodology that is simpler, more light-weight, and better performing.  This means less of a CPU and bandwidth drain on your local server, and faster page load times for your visitors.
• Added support for XML-based sitemap functionality in accordance with published specifications of the sitemap protocol.  This feature is available once you upgrade your local installation of the datafeed client files.  At that point, if your datafeed client was located at, for instance,
  • http://www.your-site.com/xyz/shop/shop.html

  then you could browse to the following to see your sitemap index:

  • http://www.your-site.com/xyz/shop/sitemap-index.xml

  This same URL could be submitted to search engines like Google to improve the spidering/crawling of your site.  Within the sitemap-index you’ll see reference to several individual sitemap-*.xml files that list the details for specific pages within your datafeed client.

As mentioned above, to gain the full benefit of all of the above changes you should download a new copy of the files that get installed on your local server.  Before proceeding, make a backup copy of your “template.html” or “template.php” file – these do NOT need to be modified in any way, and you should take care not to overwrite them with our default versions of these files. When you do download the new install, you may notice that there are far fewer files to upload to your server than originally; this is intentional.  There is no longer any need for an “avant_includes/” directory on your local server, and instead only the following files/folders are used:

• cache/ – This folder stores local cached snapshots of pages to improve performance
• .htaccess – This file instructs your web server (Apache) how to handle your datafeed URLs
• shop.php – This file handles communication with the AvantLink.com web service
• Cache_Lite.php – This is a library file that we use to cache pages for performance improvement
• template.html or template.php – This is the file that handles the formatting of your datafeed pages

Hopefully this shortened list of file dependencies will simplify the upgrade process and any new installations in the future.

All in all, we feel that the Web Service Datafeed Client makes a big leap with these changes, but of course it’s your opinion and experience that ultimately matters.  So please let us know your thoughts as you work with some of these new features!

-David & AvantLink

Since the BETA release of our Product Ad Widget (PAW) a while back, we’ve had a number of questions from affiliates asking about the future of it’s predecessor, the Product Display Builder.  In particular, many people are concerned about the lack of RSS support in the new tool.  While it’s true that we do not have plans to incorporate RSS feed functionality into the PAW, that doesn’t mean that this functionality is unavailable – even outside of the legacy Product Display Builder.  On the contrary, our API has provided the ability to produce RSS product datafeeds since the inception of the ProductSearch module.

Now, the large number of options available in that particular API module may be overwhelming to new users.  So, we’ve recently added a simpler configuration page to your affiliate login: the “RSS Product Feeds” configuration page (accessible from the “Tools” page, under the “Datafeed Manager” section).  When you click the option to “Create an RSS product feed” you’ll see a configuration page that’s actually very similar to the old Product Display Builder setup.  Here you can choose a particular merchant datafeed, restrict to a department/category/subcategory, and set various product-level filters (brand name, keywords, pricing, etc.).  You can also customize whether or not to include product images, abbreviated/short descriptive text, and merchant names in the RSS item content.  The end result is a fully tracking-enabled RSS feed URL that points to our API, such as this example for FetchDog.com.

Keep in mind that the “RSS Product Feeds” configuration page simplifies the use of the ProductSearch API module by actually hiding some of the available functionality from you.  As you gain experience, you may find yourself using our API documentation and examples to customize your feed even further.

-David & AvantLink