BCL Performance Marketing: Ethical Affiliate Marketing Australia: Do you need to provide a datafeed?

Here are some ways that affiliates use your datafeeds. It's up to you to decide which of these are in your interests and whether you should make datafeeds freely available to all affiliates, to select affiliates or no affiliates.

• Price comparison sites. Do you want your offering reduced to price? Perhaps yes for a discounter, and no for a quality brand.


• To keep information up-to-date. Datafeeds from travel merchants provide an important way for publishers of sites like BCL to keep listings of hotels and tours up-to-date, although we also have a policy of not including prices to avoid the issue of old prices appearing on our pages. If your affiliates include prices, both you and your affiliates need to develop processes to ensure that the prices are kept up to date.


• To create content. We use datafeeds to create some display ads - again not including prices. At the other extreme, some affiliate sites are nothing but datafeed mash. They use your datafeed to automatically create masses of pages with your products often surrounded by other advertising.

1. Don't provide a datafeed and accept (or be pleased) that some affiliates will not bother promoting you.


2. Provide a datafeed only to those affiliates who meet criteria that you set.


3. Provide a datafeed that includes limited data (no prices).

If you've already provided datafeeds, have a look at some of your affiliates' sites and see what they've done with it. Which methods provide value to your business?