If you work as an Affiliate Manager for a retailer on ShareASale, you’ve probably seen the word “Datafeed” before, and may be wondering … What is that!?
Datafeeds account for a full 5-10% of all conversions tracked on ShareASale… which means that if you aren’t providing your Affiliates a detail-rich datafeed with which to work, you are leaving sales on the table.
So what is a Product Datafeed?
The easiest way to explain it is that a datafeed is just a giant excel spreadsheet with line-by-line product descriptions and data (such as price, image, category).
But, why are they so important? For 2 main reason:
1. They allow Affiliates to target specific products when sending you traffic. If a blog features a post about washing machines, for example, you want them to link directly to the washing machines on your retail site… not a generic home page. Conversions go up!
2. You get listed in a bunch of ShareASale tools that Affiliates use – namely our “Make A Page“, “Widgets“, “Videos” – and you are more easily found by potential Affiliates who search for programs based on products as opposed to Merchants.
Datafeeds are critical to the overall success of a retail based Affiliate Program. They allow Affiliates to market specific products or sub-sets of products with up to date and rich data.
Download the following free “Best Practices Worksheet” on how to create, and upload your datafeed to ShareASale – and once you do I think you’ll start to see the benefits of adding in one of the key elements to any retail Affiliate Program.
so where is the documentation for your feeds ?
Your system wants a zip file instead of the excel file when I try to download my datafeed. HELP!
Where is the documentation for your datafeed?
Holly – yes, you will need to zip that file up in order to upload – the full instructions are at https://shareasale.com/m-productmanagement.cfm
If we have a datafeed of apparel with different SKUs for each size, would you recommend uploading 10 different products, which are essentially the same product but different sizes? Or would you recommend just shortening the SKU and uploading one product and eliminating the sizes? Thank you!
Thanks for your comment – we will reach out to you with some ideas on the datafeed.