Session Description: Product datafeeds are among the most powerful tools available to affiliate marketers. We’ll discuss the current state of datafeeds and industry progress, best practices, and moving toward standards. The panel consisted of:

• Scott Jangro, President, Mech Media Inc. (Moderator)
• Larry Adams, Product Manager, Google
• Shergul Arshad, VP Business & Corporate Development, StyleFeeder, Inc.
• Brian Smith, CEO & Founder, SingleFeed

The panel was really well organized.  Scott asked questions and then each panelist answered.  I did my best to note the questions Scott asked and who each answer came from.

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• Have you seen innovation in datafeeds?
  • Larry: Haven’t seen a lot of innovation on the advertiser side, but have seen innovation from publishers.  Deriving interesting information from feeds to actually provide some value.  Taking this huge library & simplifying it.  GAN is trying to figure out how to make the data more accessible & easier to consume.  Easier for the publisher to get what they want out of it.  The networks’ role is to be a facilitator.  They push advertisers to get highest quality data and make sure as many publishers who want the data can access it.
  • Shergul: 30% of the datafeeds they work with are truly excellent, 40% just acceptable, and the rest they have to mess with.  30% aren’t in the right format, and not just smaller programs but some are from big retailers.  They’re on a campaign to try to help improve this and they reach out to the merchants.  Sometimes merchants need to be shown what they’re missing by not providing accurate data.  It’s easier for people to take advantage of open source tools to innovate so more people want to access datafeeds to automate sites.  It’s hard to envision a one-size-fits-all datafeed.
  • Brian: Not much has changed, but in the last 18 months datafeeds have become more complex.  More attributes are being asked for from the merchants.  That’s a good, positive sign.  It does kind of screw things up for merchants trying to format new feeds in different formats.  Merchants are starting to recognize datafeeds are great, and they’re looking for the next great channel.  NOw they’re being forced to deal with datafeeds.
• There’s been more development of product APIs instead of downloading text files.  Is API going to take over datafeeds?
  • Shergul: API are more accessible when you’re pulling in fewer feeds.  Using thousands of datafeeds just isn’t scalable.  There’s a place for coexisting, but in general for speed and size constraints, they can’t shift towards APIs.
  • Brian: Some publishers don’t know how to use APIs, so it’s going to take awhile for publishers to move over there and mostly they’ll coexist for awhile.
  • Larry: The nice thing about an API is the data is fresher.  GAN integrated with Google Base because they have a nice API.  Working to provide more keyword targeted ads.
  • Scott: Data has never been more accessibly and most networks now offer free access.
• If someone is just starting out, how should they start?
  • Larry: Start small.  Deal with usefullness before scale.  Find out who has the best feeds and start easy.  Figure out how you’re going to use them & then you can figure out ways to imprve the bad data or ignore it until the advertiser provices high quality fdata.  Literally tens of millions of products are available to you.  You don’t need every single product on your site to have a good user experience.  There’s a fine line between copying and searching for inspiration.  Don’t do what your competitors are doing – but shop there and find what you like and dislike in the shoes of a consumer and improve upon that.
  • Shergul: It depends on what your site does.  It’s manageable to access the “right” 20 datafeeds to be comprehensive in your vertical.  Too man products can get too big and too overwhelming too quickly.
  • Brian: Go after high quality.  You might as well start with APIs and they have a wealth of information you can access.  Make some calls & learn more about them.  Start from there.  Look at the big guys pushing great data – Amazon, eBay, Shopping.com.
• What are the major hurdles in getting “good datafeeds” to a higher number?
  • Larry: That’s more of a merchant problem than a network issue.
  • Brian: The networks need to sell datafeeds better.  Case studies will work.
• Is there hope for standardization?  Can we?  What does it really mean?
  • Larry: The first thing that comes to mind is categories.  Building a common taxonomy that works for millions of products and thousands of merchants.

Points brought up during the Q&A

• Shergul: Positive examples of great datafeeds and data quality: Nordstrom, Shoe Buy, Target, CSN Stores.
• Larry: It can seem like a daunting task to improve a feed, but start small with one category to see if there’s a payoff on the work you’ve put in.  Then you can more easily convince your boss it’s worth the time.
• If you have duplicate products, would you suggest changing the descriptions to avoid dupe content?
  • Use your own analytics to pick the best product and dump the other one; there are enough products that you don’t need to worry about using both.

I hope I got comprehensive notes.  I was trying my best to pay very close attention, but I have to admit that I got lost in some parts.  By nature, it’s a dry subject, and though the presenters were doing their best to keep it lively, that early of a time slot might have not been the best. Here’s the presentation:

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Guest Post By Ryan Sammy

Everyone knows the importance of video marketing as well as the tremendous potential YouTube offers in creating a strong presence for your brand and company image. However, does everybody know how to use YouTube optimally to gain the desired advantage and leverage for your videos and thereby your company?

Just creating a good video of your company, or a video containing information intended for your target customers and uploading onto YouTube is not enough to get the desired results. There are many ranking factors behind YouTube that you should know if you want your video to score high marks in the popularity charts. Good VSEO takes into account these ranking factors to help build a good brand image and enhance the reputation of your company.

Apart from creating quality video content that information seekers will be willing to watch, there are other important factors that you can use to optimize your videos for YouTube and get higher rankings in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The first and foremost is not to be just a passerby, but a player. Create a presence in the YouTube community for yourself. Listen to others and be heard. The rankings on YouTube depend on various factors, just as the factors behind organic search results on Google or any other search engine. YouTube in itself is a major search engine now, and it adheres to its own algorithmic parameters to decide rankings.

YouTube ranks videos that are watched most number of times rank very high on its SERPs. So you need to make videos that have a strong viral capability to bring in more viewers for your videos. The more people your videos can bring in to watch, the higher in rankings your video climbs. Now, this does not mean that by simply uploading a video that will be watched by many people can get you top spot in rankings; the videos have to be acceptable and engaging to make people vote for the videos. The more times your videos get viewer votes; the higher the chances of you getting top billings in the rankings! Another factor that could push your videos up is the number of times your videos are bookmarked for attention. These are the basic factors that can help your videos to get maximum visibility, and your attention when making videos should be to make them in such a way that they satisfy all the conditions stated above.

Having good titles, meta-descriptions, tags, comments, flagging, shares, comments, channel views, subscribers, inbound links, and latency do matter, but if you stick to the ground rules and include some, or all the above factors, there is no reason why your videos should lag behind. That said, being an active member of the community will help tremendously, and using video analytics such as “YouTube Insight” and “TubeMogul” should help make your videos better and to stay constantly updated on developments. Make good videos and stay engaged; that should drive you to the top spot very soon.

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Session Description: This session is a quick moving brain dump of how to use the most advanced powerful tools to help you with SEO. Expect to learn how you can walk out and use several SEO tools to grow revenues today.  The speaker was:

• Wil Reynolds, Associate, SEER Interactive (Twitter @wilreynolds)

I’d never previously had the chance to hear Wil speak, despite meeting him a few times.  It always seemed poorly matched up against other sessions that were more relevant to me as an affiliate manager.  This time I made sure to make it to Wil’s session, and I was NOT disappointed.  He’s an SEO genius and did, in fact, give us tools that I used TODAY!

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• Tool: Google Insights
• Tool: Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (Formerly MSN adCenter Add-in for Excel)
• Watch your bounce rates, because even if keywords rank this is a problem.
• Always check Google Trends for the keywords.
• Evaluate bounce rates daily for each keywords (this catches problems quickly)
  • SEER did this for a client and caught a page 1 ranked keyword with a bounce rate sometimes as high as 80%)
  • Home page was ranked for the product search instead of a product page.
• Ranking is a big distraction.
• If you are analyzing search engine performance by where you rank you would never have caught the issue – analyze SEO by more than just rankings.
• Tool: Microsoft adCenter Labs Audience Intelligence – remember to search for singular keywords and plurals.
• Affiliates need to know research vs. commercial queries to help convert traffic.
• Marketers need to know what kind of message to put in front of people when searching.
• Plural tends to convert much better, but is not a hard & fast rule.
• Know the flaws before you use any tool so you know how far to trust the data.
• Yahoo Keyword Suggest is better than Google’s because it’s a general phrase match and not a character match.
• A 40 to 60 ratio isn’t enough to suggest a strong patter – go for closer to 30 to 70.
• Look for the queries highly skewed to one side or the other (commercial v. noncommercial) & look for high degrees of confidence from the engines.
• Test against your own data set on keywords that are currently ranking well before using the tool so you knoe how far to trust the data.
• You have to look at things through a marketing lens and not just take the word of the tool’s data.
• Affiliates need to take advantage of hot keywords because they can move much faster than larger corporations.
• Major competitive advantage: big companies move slow.  Their inability to act for mid/long tail/hot keywords = opportunities for you.
• Don’t look back too far because trends rapidly change.  Look at more current data sets, around 30 days old at most.
• Check out the Rising Searches area towards the bottom in Google Insights to see what trends are on the rise.
• Don’t go back more than a year data-wise, unless you’re looking for seasonal trends.
• How is a product getting hot?  How do you rank for it?
  • Try moving it up one level in the hierarchy of the site – possibly link from homepage in a hot product section.
• Top 200 products no more than 2 clicks from home page.
• Suits = slow = opportunity for you
• Google’s algorithm seems to be favoring large brands more and more; you’ve got to find ways to compete.  Lots of ideas at blogstorm.co.uk
• Link building is about exposure to stimuli.
• You can’t have all the ideas – you need a Spark.  Put yourself in a position to have great ideas.
  • Install Greasemonkey script in Firefox.
  • Install Twitter Search Results on Google for Greasemonkey
  • It’s about being exposed to things that will trigger your brain to a link building opportunity.
• Tool: Google Trends Hot Trends
• Paid Tool: SEOmoz Labs – has a graphical representation of links.
• Put plug-ins and stuff at the bottom of the HTML code in case they hang up loading so they don’t stop everything else from loading.
• Wikipedia links help.
• Paid Tool: Hub Finder from SEO Book
• Tool: SeoQuake
• Seed Keywords allows you to find scenarios if you’re having an interal battle over which keywords would work best.
• Google Universal Search’s thumbnail pictures will definitely start to influence clicks in search.

Questions were really peppered in throughout the presentation, and Wil didn’t get to all his slides but promised they’d be made available and any links would be shared through Twitter if asked.  It was a terrific session and I learned a ton that I’m ready to go back and start using now! For your benefit, here’s the presentation:

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