Product flow management
Optimized management of your product flow enables you to activate new types of publishers, access new locations and thus reach new users and increase your sales. For Effinity merchants, on average, 30% of traffic is generated from product feeds.
Good product flow management has two major benefits:
Enable diversification of the affiliate mix: by making a product flow available to a network of affiliates, you have the opportunity to activate new types of publishers and recruit more partners.
Increase your traffic: a product feed is an essential visibility tool for your affiliation campaign. It gives you access to new sites and distribution networks.
A single product feed for multiple distribution
As part of an affiliation campaign, product feeds have to be specifically tailored to meet the publishers’ standards. But adapting your product catalog to the requirements of each site, then updating and enriching it regularly, can quickly become a tedious task.
At Effinity, we’ve developed tools that meet the needs and expectations of our partners, advertisers and publishers. Our Feed Center makes it easier for you to manage feeds, as you no longer have to deal with the technical specificities of your partners. What’s more, this tool ensures optimal update frequency and corrects potential errors via rewriting rules.
FeedCenter
Preparation phase
Broadcast
Affiliate marketing and Ads
FeedCenter
Analysis phase
The performance levers available with a product flow
Media & Content commerce
Buying guides
Search engines (shopping)
Comparators
Wishlist
Display & retargeting
Email retargeting
Overlay
Increase your sales with good product flows
Product flow standardization
Adapt your data to any channel format
| Challenge: meet the unique technical requirements of each of your partners
Each comparator, shopping guide or advertising platform has its own standards in terms of required information. If you decide to work with several of them, you’ll need to create different feeds. |
First step: Standardizing a flow means meeting a partner’s needs and standardizing all flows for all partners available in the Effinity network. In concrete terms, this involves managing a multitude of technical aspects: format (XML, CSV or TXT), encoding (UTF-8 or ISO-8859-15) and compression (ZIP, GZIP, bz2 or none) Second step: publishers can select the content of their feeds themselves: up to 71 different attributes are available (EAN, GTIN, Price, country of delivery, weight, stock, color, etc.)! Publishers can also select the product categories of their choice, to optimize product distribution. |
Update your data
| The challenge: getting the right information to publishers
Our product flow management experts use your update frequencies to optimize the delivery of product repositories to your partner publishers. Retrievals are performed every 2 hours. Editors are informed of the exact time of the last update thanks to an optimized retrieval system. This saves machine resources for all parties. |
For sales and special offers: we comply with current regulations, and your product feed will only be updated at 8 a.m.
As other commercial periods & consumers are not to be neglected during the rest of the year, precise product attributes ensure clarity of promotions, prices and stocks in the distribution of your partners. |
Error correction with rewriting rules
| Setting the right rules
The Effinity Feed Center lets you create rules to make your feed usable by everyone:
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Rules are applied one after the other. You can therefore combine several rules to optimize a field.
The rules apply globally, so that everyone can benefit, but they can also be applied specifically to a publisher, to meet its particular needs. |
Segmentation of your product catalog
Challenge: create customized flows for your partners
With the Effinity Feed Center, our agency creates personalized, dedicated feeds for your partners, selecting the relevant product categories according to their activity.
Personalization can be based on product selections, data or product presentation (sizes, colors…).
Product flow optimization
Adapt your flows according to product performance, margins or availability
| Challenges: guaranteeing the profitability and visibility of your products
Once your product flow has met your distributors’ requirements, it’s important to adopt an optimization approach as quickly as possible, so that your actions become and remain profitable. To achieve this, our product flow experts set up performance rules to activate or deactivate the products in your flow, according to well-defined parameters such as acquisition cost, inventory, margin or conversion rate. |
The second action is to guarantee the visibility of your products. To achieve this, you need to enrich your product feed data with attributes. These correspond to the various characteristics of a product (title, photo, description…). The more information you have on a product, the greater the chance that it will benefit from good visibility. It is possible, for example, to optimize a product by working on the length of the item name, or by highlighting an advantage in the description that other merchants would not have. |
Optimize your feed for maximum visibility
| Challenge: ensure that as many fields as possible are completed to facilitate indexing of your products and their dissemination during searches by Internet users.
We apply rewriting rules to discounted prices, the validity dates of promotions or products with free delivery, to enrich them. For example, it’s possible to optimize a product by working on the length of the item name, or by highlighting an advantage in the description that others don’t have. |
Attributes can help optimize a product flow. Attributes correspond to the various characteristics of a product (title, photo, description, discounted prices, promotional validity dates, free delivery, etc.).
The more information we have about the product, the more likely it is to be highly visible. |
Prioritize products according to their potential
| The challenge: smart product distribution
Complete distribution of your catalog is impossible: your feed contains too many products for your budget, you don’t want to communicate on certain products (especially in retargeting), etc. So we have to prioritize and determine which products we will and won’t send. |
Set up deactivation rules on :
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Deactivate products that don’t convert
| The challenge: smart product distribution
Tailor your feeds according to the performance of your products on each comparator, to reduce clicks on products that don’t convert and focus investment on products with the highest rates of return. Implementation of product deactivation rules based on conversion rate (number of sales divided by number of clicks).
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These rules are generally established on two time scales:
Like the rewrite rules, they are applied one after the other, so the effects are cumulative, guaranteeing profitability. |
Adjust CPCs according to your budget and profitability targets
Challenge: Adapt CPCs for each publisher to maximize investment in clicks that are more likely to convert.
Set up directly in the feed if the publisher allows, or from the platforms.
Adaptation according to :
- of the category: for example, by placing higher CPCs on categories that convert better
- the device on which your products are distributed: for example, by reducing CPCs on cell phones, where the transformation rate is lower
- the conversion rate on the site: for example, by increasing CPCs if the product is a “top seller”.
Product flow performance analysis
Get a clear, rapid view of performance, to optimize your product strategy
The Reporting Center combined with our Feed Center allows you to centralize in one place all the performance linked to clicks on your products.
Our product flow management experts analyze performance on a macro level: by type of publisher or editor. Before conducting a micro-level study: by category, sub-category or even product.
On several time scales: the last 7 days, the current month, last month or the quarter.
Thanks to this analytical work, we identify opportunities and areas of risk that guide our work according to your objectives, so that we know how best to prioritize your investments.
Analyze the performance of your campaigns to make budgetary trade-offs between different types of publishers, partners, categories or products.
The Feed Center gives us a vision:
- by partner
- by category
- by product
With filters to enable us to analyse further.
This is how our product flow management experts identify :
- call products: those that generate traffic to the site
- products that convert: not necessarily the same ones
Depending on your objectives (traffic, conversion, profitability, etc.), this is the indicator we’ll use to prioritize investments, for example.
