Archive for the Affiliate Tools Category
We recently completed an overhaul of our product search functionality (used primarily in our ProductSearch API module, but also as an accessory to some of our other tools like the Product Display Builder). As anyone who has tried to implement a keyword search of large amounts of data will tell you, the problem is not a simple one, and our solution is by no means perfect. But, having gathered feedback from our affiliates since the launch of our ProductSearch API over a year ago, we think we’ve made great strides toward improving the accuracy and performance of our offering.
To highlight a few of the key changes that were implemented in this revision:
- A complete ground-up rewrite of our keyword parsing and searching algorithm, resulting in performance gains of 200-300%.
- Improved handling of “exact” vs. “inexact” matches. Our original search algorithm differentiated between “exact” matches (where the keywords were all found in the product name) and “inexact” matches, and restricted search results to just the former if possible. While accurate, that behavior resulted in a lot of under-populated searches. The new algorithm scores matches differently and allows for a much broader (though still accurate) range of results for the same keywords.
- Simpler methods of specifying lists of merchant datafeeds to search. By default, the ProductSearch API will search through the datafeeds of all merchants for whom you are an active affiliate. If you have a large active merchant listing that’s a lot of data to search through which is undesirable for two reasons: (1) it results in a slower search, and (2) the chance of spurious search results is increased (for instance, by searching a wedding favors merchant for “backpacks”). To alleviate this, the API module has always supported specifying lists of merchants or lists of datafeeds to restrict the search to. As additional alternatives, it’s now possible to specify:
- a list of custom merchant group ids (see the “Account” -> “Merchant Tagging/Group Administration” page in your affiliate interface if you’ve never used custom merchant tags), or
- a list of merchant category ids (these ids correspond to the groupings like “Apparel” and “Outdoor/Recreation” that you see in our merchant directory).
- Better support for “interleaving” of merchant results. Interleaving is used when multiple merchants’ datafeeds are searched, to spread the results out evenly between the various merchants. In other words, if you searched merchants A, B, and C, the search results would probably be randomly ordered between the different merchants (e.g. C, C, B, A, A, C, B, B, etc.). Using the “interleave” option coerces the results into a more predictable order so that your results would alternate between each available merchant (e.g. A, B, C, A, B, C, etc.).
- Wildcard searching for small datasets. It’s now possible to specify a search term of % to indicate a wildcard search. This allows you to use the API to retrieve listings of products using all of the other filter criteria available in the module (e.g. department, category, pricing, etc.) in specialized circumstances. The number of products returned from such a search is capped (at 1500 records); if you want full product listings (and better performance) you really should configure a full datafeed subscription that you can download periodically and process locally.
According to some of the feedback we’ve seen already, these changes have made it possible to solve some problems that couldn’t be handled with the ProductSearch API previously. As always we welcome feedback from our affiliates on these changes - it’s that kind of input that helps us drive our offerings forward!
David & AvantLink
Last year we introduced reporting functionality for showing “Hit Trails” for sales. To summarize, a “hit trail” is the list of ad impressions and click-throughs that a visitor followed, leading up to an actual sale.
Recently, there was an ABW post that discussed this functionality and how to derive some useful statistics from the information. With that in mind, we’ve added a summary section to the “Sales Hit Tracking Trail” report that displays those very statistics!
Included in the summary are the calculated average, minimum and maximum values for each of the following:
- Time from last click through to sale: visitors may sometimes click through your affiliate links multiple times before actually completing a sale on the merchant site. This set of statistics measures the time between the last recorded click-through and the eventual sale.
- Time from first visit (impression or click) to sale: this set of values measures the full duration of the hit trail. In other words, it covers the span of time from when the visitor first viewed an ad on your site (if you are using ad impression tracking) or first clicked through one of your affiliate links, until the time of the sale.
The aforementioned ABW post by Donuts provides a good starting point for ways to use these statistics to form conclusions about your own traffic. As an additional example, it’s possible to use this information to partially validate the “referral days” (a.k.a. “cookie days”) value for a merchant (the lifetime of the tracking cookie that is set when a visitor clicks through one of your affiliate links). For instance, if a merchant allows only a 30-day cookie, then you should expect to see a maximum value for “Time from last click through to sale” of less than 30 days. The longer the lifetime of the tracking cookie allowed for a given merchant, the more likely you are to see higher maximum values for this statistic.
For those of you data mining affiliates out there, we hope this helps you in your research!
David & AvantLink
Why download a datafeed with 5000 records if only 5 records have changed since your last download?
Fortunately, if you’re an Affiliate in the AvantLink network you no longer have to. Last week we rolled out some changes to our datafeed download system that gives Affiliates the option to download only the incremental changes since their last download or a specified date. These new options can drastically reduce the size of your downloads and any subsequent processing time.
Here are the details on the additional parameters that you can add to your standard datafeed downloads URLs:
- incr - Use this parameter to trigger an incremental download. Options include the following:
- only-modified: This will retrieve all products that have been added to or changed in the merchant’s datafeed since a given date.
- only-removed: This will retrieve all products that have been removed from the merchant’s datafeed since a given date.
- all-status: This option modifies the layout of your download slightly by adding an additional “Status” column (or node, for XML formatted feeds). This allows you to simultaneously retrieve new/modified products (”Status” = “Modified”) and removed products (”Status” = “Removed”) in a single request.
- from - Use this parameter to set the date from which new/modified/removed products should be retrieved. Dates should be formatted as “YYYY-mm-dd” or “YYYY-mm-dd HH:ii:ss”. If you leave this off your request (but still use one of the above “incr” options) then our script will automatically determine the date you last downloaded this datafeed, and use that as the reference point.
If you have any questions or comments about this functionality feel free to contact us.
Scott & AvantLink
Late last week we rolled out new functionality that allows merchants to create specialty subsets of their existing datafeeds in AvantLink. For example, merchants can now build datafeeds for Affiliates that feature only sale products, top selling products, etc.
Merchants, please find the Specialty Datafeed Administration in the tools and management interface. It’s very simple to configure any unique specialty feed you want, so let those creative juices flow. Follow these steps to configure specialty feeds in minutes:
- Login, and click on ‘Tools’ from the main menu.
- Towards the bottom of the tool list, click ‘Specialty Datafeed Administration’, where it says “You can create specialized subsets of your datafeeds to help call attention to certain products (e.g. featured products, top 10 lists, etc.)”.
- This page will display your current configured feeds in AvantLink. Click the link next to the feed you want to work with that says ‘[Create new specialty feed]‘.
- At this point you’ll have the option of manually adding the skus you want to include in the specialty feed, or using the search tool we added that will allow you to automatically select products.
Affiliates, by all means share your ideas for specialty feeds with your merchant partners. I am sure they would be all ears! I’ll also mention that once a merchant you’re active with creates a new specialty feed, you’ll see that option in your configuration when setting up new datafeed subscriptions. You can also use special datafeeds to create more targeted displays with the Product Display Builder.
Please let us know what you think.
Gary M
About two months ago we added a new SEO friendly integration option to our Dynamic Coupon Feed, Product Display Builder and Deal of the Day tools. This option allows you to retrieve the HTML directly from our servers and display it on your site using a few lines of server side scripting code.
If you’ve used the RSS integration option, the end result is basically the same. You get the same benefit of always having up to date product information combined with SEO friendly HTML output. This option may be a little easier for some Affiliates to implement though since it gives you cut and paste sample code you can embed directly into your PHP or ASP pages and doesn’t require a separate library to parse the RSS XML.
To try it out just look for the “Dynamic HTML” integration option within the respective tool sign-up pages. Note: On the Deal of the Day sign-up page this option is referred to as “Datafeed: Customized Text/Html Ad (HTML)”
Scott & AvantLink
We have some exciting news coming to you live from 2008 Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas (where there was a great session we just attended this morning about the demand and effectiveness of video marketing!).
Introducing a new Ad Type on the AvantLink platform: Merchant Video Ads!
With the Video Ad Tool, merchants can now upload any video ad or product tutorial for their Affiliates using the following formats: .avi, .flv, .mov, or .mpg. Once loaded, the video ads will be available to Affiliates through the Affiliate tool center.
Affiliates, to access video ads follow these simple steps:
- Login click ‘Tools’ from the main menu
- Under Ad/Link Tools click on ‘Get Merchant Ads’
- Select the merchant, then ‘Video’ on the Ad Type drop down
If the respective merchant has video ads configured, the campaign will be returned with a preview selection and the ability to get html. Video ads will be served through one line of JavaScript that should go on your web page(s) where you want the video to display.
See live Video Ad Tool examples below from the merchants who now offer this advanced campaign functionality for Affiliates:
Backcountry.com
Moosejaw.com
ToolKing.com
Here is a summary of our Video Ad Tool functionality:
- Merchants can upload their own videos (any .avi, .flv, .mov, or .mpg formats)
- The videos are then converted to Flash format and hosted on AvantLink’s servers
- Merchants can specify a banner image to be displayed prior to the video playing (or we default to their merchant logo if they don’t specify one)
- All of the standard ad attributes (title, destination URL, keywords, expiration dates, etc.) apply to Video Ads just as with any other AvantLink ad campaign
- Affiliates will be able to select a video ad and embed it into a page with a single line of JavaScript (just as they would an image ad, for example)
- While the video is playing, clicking on it will send the user to the ad destination URL and set the appropriate tracking information to give the affiliate credit for any subsequent sales
- When the video finishes it comes back to the merchant logo or banner. If/when the player is clicked at that point the end user will go to the merchant site as well
Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. As always, we welcome your feed back.
You may have already noticed, but we rolled out some improvements to our already robust reporting tools in AvantLink. These improvements include visuals for an array of charts, sale item details & hit trail data.
Look for this icon: 
in our reporting interface to access available charts/graphs. Charts/graphs now available include:
- Daily Ad Impressions and Click Throughs
- Daily Sales (# and Dollar Amounts)
- Breakdown of Ad Impressions by Tool Type
- Breakdown of Click Throughs by Tool Type
- Breakdown of # of Sales by Tool Type
- Breakdown of Sales by Tool Type
Look for this icon: 
in our reporting interface to access report details. The detail icon shows up if there are detail/sub-reports available for that report.
Two more things to take note of:
- All mentions of “Page Views” in our reporting interface are now now labeled “Ad Impressions”.
- There is new row hover/click functionality that is a combination of stylesheet and some PHP code changes. These formatting changes makes reading your report data easier.
Let us know if you have any questions or comments.
We are pleased to announce the release of a notification center for both Affiliates and Merchants that will allow you to keep up on important account events. The notification center consists of several RSS notification subscriptions as well as a Firefox browser plugin.
The Firefox browser plugin displays your current days performance summary stats and has a pop-up menu that allows you to run several reports directly without the need to login to your account.
Current Affiliate RSS notification feeds:
- Merchant Emails - Feed of all merchant email announcements.
- Modified Ads - Feed of all new or modified merchant ads.
- Transaction (sale, adjustment, bonus) listing - Feed of all transactions that occur.
- Association changes - Feed of merchant recruitment offers, application acceptances/denials, commission changes.
- Network emails - Feed of all AvantLink network email announcements.
- New merchants - A feed of the newest merchants to go live in the AvantLink network.
- AvantLink announcements - General AvantLink news.
- AvantShare blog entries - Industry news, insights, and program announcements.
Current Merchant RSS notification feeds:
- Ad expirations - Feed of ads that are about to expire.
- Affiliate applications - Feed of all affililate applications.
- Transaction (sale, adjustment, bonus) listing - Feed of all transactions that occur.
- AvantLink announcements - General AvantLink news.
- AvantShare blog entries - Industry news, insights, and program announcements.
You can find the notification center in your account interface under ‘Account -> Notification Center’
Scott & AvantLink
Another Outdoor/Recreation merchant recently started to populate their Deal of the Day tool for Affiliates. The main requirement for eligibility, and use of this tool, is that the products featured must be minimum 30% off the retail price. Integration methods of Javascript, RSS, and datafeeds (CSV, tab-delimited and XML) are available. There are also options in the configuration interface that allows Affiliates to customize the layout of the daily deals they feature.
A quick reminder, Massey’s Professional Outfitters launched four distinct programs in AvantLink back in September. These programs include:
And let me add so far so good with these programs. How does 5.9% conversion rate on ALL Affiliate traffic sound to you?! That’s what we’ve seen with the MasseysOutfitters Affiliate program so far.
Remember, if you’re featuring dynamic daily deals for your customers, you can also promote RSS subscriptions to these daily deal feeds. Wrap your mind around that for a second. If you get one of your site visitors to subscribe through creative we give you, then you’re Affiliate cookie will be set on outbound clicks from that feed for the life of the subscription.
To see what I mean, login to your Affiliate account and follow these steps to get RSS subscription icons and syndication tools you can place on your site:
- Click on ‘Tools’ from the main menu.
- Click ‘Deal Of The Day Sign-up’ under the Deal Of The Day Tool.
- Select your Website, then Merchant, you want to configure the DOTD tool for.
- Select one of the RSS options, then click ‘Get Html’.
Once you click ‘Get Html’ we’ll return the RSS feed URL that includes the dynamic daily deal, in addition to code you can place on your site (much like banner code) that will display subscription icons from popular aggregators including Bloglines and Technorati. Here’s the messaging you’ll get from the tool center console once you configure an RSS version of the daily deal:
Add the following links to your website to allow your visitors to subscribe directly to your Affiliate encoded Deal Of The Day feed.
Best Practice: Place the dynamic deal of the day HTML ad on your site, then underneath the dynamic display add the subscription icons and a call to action to your customers like “Subscribe now and have these daily deals delivered to you!”.
Daily deals are hot on the web now, and these deals convert huge on a price driven requirement of 30% off retail. Please take a look at what Masseys and the other merchants using the daily deal tool have to offer. BTW, we also offer these syndication creative options for the Dynamic Coupon Feed as well. See the Coupon Feed Syndication tool for more info.
As always, contact anyone at AvantLink if you have questions or suggestions. Happy converting!
Gary & AvantLink
*Note the WeGotYourPack.com program has not launched their DOTD offer yet, but it’s coming soon enough!
I wanted to let Affiliates know that one of the merchants that make up our top Outdoor/Recreation category just rolled out a dynamic Deal of the Day campaign at AvantLink. Proboardshop.com will now feature daily discounts at least 30% off retail from the world’s best board sport brands. Proboardshop now joins The-House Affiliate program and several other stores who offer this unique online marketing tool for Affiliates.
Affiliates, to configure Proboardshop’s Deal of the Day login, click on ‘Tools’ from the main menu, and then ‘Deal Of The Day Sign-up’. Select your website, the merchant and integration method…and you’re off and running with a powerful piece of creative for your site page(s)! Optimize a page around outdoor gear deals, then utilize the RSS options of our tools and the end output result will be spiderable fresh daily content. Google food, if you will ;).
Login -> Tools –> Deal Of The Day Sign-up
Please note: We upgraded the Deal of the Day tool. We’ve now added the ability to customize the layout of the DOTD campaigns during the ad configuration. Fully customize the Text/HTML Ad (RSS), and the Text/HTML Ad (JavaScript).
Gary & AvantLink
RSS Feed
