LinkShare Merchandiser Data Feeds

Data Hygiene Best Practices

A product data feed is only as good as the data it contains. LinkShare works hard to make sure your data is delivered in the best and widest manner possible, but you as the advertising partner are responsible for the quality of the data you make available to publishers through LinkShare Merchandiser.

Assuring the quality of your data begins with good data hygiene, which is a fancy way to say keeping your data up-to-date and error free. It finishes with the tuning of your data to assure its placement on publisher sites is impactful and drives sales to your e-commerce site.

One of the biggest complaints of publishers who use merchandiser is the existence of product records in Merchandiser that are no longer sold by advertisers. It is very easy to place a product into the merchandiser file and miss removing it after it is no longer sold on your site. These deadwood product listing can remain resident in Merchandiser for months after they become invalid and continually give your partners problems when they try to use your data on their sites. This can result not only in click-throughs that do not convert and disappointed consumers, but can also discourage your publisher partners to use your data in future.

You can readily solve this problem by applying some simple data hygiene practices to continually clean out old records. There are three immediate ways you can avoid having data in your merchandiser files passed their prime:

• You should put robust processes in place to delete products from your merchandiser file when they are no longer sold on your site. When a product stops being sold from your site, you should automate or otherwise institute the inclusion of a deletion instruction into your next upload to Merchandiser. Too often retailers focus on the inclusion of new data into the file over the equally important task of removing old and invalid data.
  

• You can sign up with your own program and download your merchandiser file periodically to compare it directly with your standing product catalogue. This will allow you to monitor if any dead product links have slipped through your deletion controls for one reason or another. This exercise allows you to see if your data hygiene processes are working correctly, while allowing you to identify additional invalid records to remove via a delta file.
  

• Lastly, you can periodically work with your LinkShare technical contact to upload a full fresh full Merchandiser file to remove any deadwood product listings that have accumulated over time and make absolutely sure all of your data are update. This cleaning can occur on a monthly, quarterly, or annually depending upon the amount of change your product catalogue has. It is not recommended that this process occur on a daily basis due to the size that a full upload can be, but periodic full uploads are a great way of freshening your data from time to time.

Update Your Prices and Product Information

Keeping your data up to date also involves making sure the prices and other product data are correct. This is especially true with changing data fields such as price that are prime drivers of getting consumers to click on your links. Incorrect pricing data can result in consumers being disappointed upon landing at your site that price they expected is not the actual price today, or pricing that would have converted the consumer going unnoticed when it is not placed into your file. The same processes for removing invalid links can be expanded to assure the correctness of pricing and other changing information.

Good data hygiene additionally involves making sure that all data are in the correct format and are well-formed. It is not uncommon for the data used in merchandiser come from a variety of sources. This can result in incomplete data or data being encoded in any number of formats, which can cause your data to display inconsistently or problematically on publisher sites. Some of the most common formatting issues seen are:

• A mix of text encoding standards. Once you get beyond the simple 256 characters of ASCII, there is no one standard for computers to encode text. Data can be encoded in any number of encoding schemas ranging from Unicode to ISO-Latin. LinkShare prefers the use of Unicode text encoding, but it is not uncommon for data to be unloaded in a mix of Unicode and ISO-Latin (e.g. using directional ISO-Latin quotes “” in an otherwise Unicode file). This will result in the data not being properly displayed in a web browser expecting only Unicode text. It is recommended that your processing of information for merchandiser upload force the use of Unicode encoding.
  

• Missing Data Fields. There are many fields inside of merchandiser that are optional, so it is not uncommon to see data records with only partial data. This can cause problems with publishers who use data from these optional fields. When possible it is best practice to make your records as complete as possible to serve the widest publisher audience and make sure all your records share commensurate information.
  

• Inconsistent Formatting of Fields. Many of the publishers who user merchandiser data use it in an automated fashion, so consistency of data key to aid that automation. You should make sure that formatting of numbers, dates, etc… are standardised and compliant to standards outlined in the LinkShare’s Merchandiser technical guide.
  

It helps to perform sanity checks on your data to make sure the pricing and other information is correct. Recently, one partner mis-formatted their uploaded pricing data, which resulted in the publisher pricing for some of their products at 100-times their actual price. This problem and others data errors like it can be readily avoided by validating the data you upload using some simple rules (e.g. flag any records with a price >$1,000 or < $1). This will not avoid all problematic data, but it will remove the worst and most embarrassing mistakes.

It's Not Just a Price and Description - It's Advertising!

Lastly, you should understand that your merchandiser data are not just information on a product. They are advertisements for your products and store. The copy writing and data in these records can be optimised and tuned for effectiveness just like any other kind of direct response ad.

It is a truism of advertising that not all product copy and keywords are equal in terms of their ability to drive interest and conversion by consumers. The effectiveness of your merchandiser links will depend upon the value proposition presented by that link, the clarity of product information, and the ability of that record to be found by search technologies. You can readily influence the last two of these levers for effectiveness by the writing of better copy and through the selection of the best keywords to describe a product.

The tuning of the product copy should begin with a solid understanding of how your merchandiser publishers are using the data you provide them. Although it is easy, the use of product copy and keyword directly from your product catalogue may not be the best drivers of traffic to your shopping cart.

The best practices of optimising on-site conversion and traffic driving are often very different. Some conversations with your Merchandiser-enabled partners can be very enlightening about how you can best tune your Merchandiser text to get consumers to take notice of your products on their publisher sites.

Keywords can be tuned beginning with conversations with your publisher partners about the optimal number of keywords for their search technology and the nature of their inbound traffic. Keywords can be further enriched through an exploration of how organic traffic is finding product pages on your e-commerce site from search engines. There is a good chance that the keywords driving people to your e-commerce product pages will be strong choices as keywords to help consumers find your Merchandiser listed products on partner sites.

Some of the largest advertisers that use merchandiser have realised that returns they receive from Merchandiser are directly related to how up-to-date their data is and how well tuned it is as advertising. Therefore, they aggressively clean their data of old records, constantly keep their product data current and properly formatted, and tune their product messaging/keywords. This work does involve commitment on their part, but they have found that they are paid back in kind and then some for their efforts.

This work is especially critical for smaller advertisers whose brands are not well known. Merchandiser offers these advertisers a means to compete with better known retail brands on a more level playing field by marketing through the products they sell. This competition is only viable if the smaller merchant’s merchandiser data is accurate, clean, and impactful.