Upload promoting tools for affiliates.

Choose the file you want to use as a banner, then add a URL that links to your site or dedicated landing page. Finally, choose the category under you want to place the banner. Each uploaded banner should be placed under a certain category (e.g. holiday discounts, special offers, etc.) This way you will be able to manage your promoting tools as efficiently as possible.

Recommendations

Try not to display the site’s URL or phone number for orders inside the banner because, there will be some affiliates that will not use them. Banners should be as well targeted as possible for selling, they should also be persuasive and, last but not least, they should send visitors to the page where the ad is promoting. For example, if your online store has a period of stock liquidations, you can take advantage of this opportunity and create banners containing messages like “We have over 20,000 products with 50% discount! Choose your product!”. Most used banner dimensions are:

• standard: 300×250, 728×90, 160×600, 300×600, 120×60;
• nonstandard: 468×60, 120×600, 125×125, 200×200, 300×300.

Caution! Banners must not exceed 2MB/file! An affiliate program in 2Performant can be started with at least 3 banners, but our recommendation is to add as many banners as possible. Therefore, it is advised to provide between 5 to 10 banners with different dimensions (variables) in order to maximize their potential. As a recommendation, focus on products or product categories rather than on branding or awareness. Create banners with products that you know they have most competitive advantages, best selling articles from your site or with products that can be found at discounts. Our recommendation is to add clear information about promotions/prices for maximum visual  impact.

Ways to increase the click-through rate (CTR) of an affiliate banner:

• Special offers for a certain promotional period of time (Christmas, Easter, special events);
• Bonus gifts or discounts for a minimum purchase (e.g. 10% discount for orders of at least 100Euro).
• Visible discounts in the banners;
• For animated banners: do not use more than 2-3 frames. Place the frame with the most important information at the end: discounts, Call to Action message, etc.
• Use Call to Action messages: Find Out Now!, Try It Out! Order Now!, etc.
• Use words like Free, Discount, Super Discount, Promotion, Offer, etc.
• Use incentive questions like What are you wearing to the party?, Do you like cocktail dresses? Are you a party addicted?, etc. The answer to the questions should be found on the landing page the banner is showing;
• Don’t link all banners with your main menu from your site;
• Link your banners with relevant landing pages. The offer, promotion, discount, product or anything you are promoting inside the banner, should be found in the dedicated landing page and should also be made visible, so that it can be found easily.
• The message should be short and accurate. Users must be inspired and attracted to your banner.

Product Feeds

A product feed is a CSV or XML file that includes all  the  products on your site, along with details about these products, such as: product description, price, image, etc. Although it is not mandatory when launching an affiliate program in 2Performant, the product feed is an important tool for affiliates, especially for the ones who run special projects like aggregator sites or price comparison sites. For this reason, a product feed is a tool that advertisers should definitely provide to all affiliates.

The biggest advantage for using a product feed is that affiliates have access to products and their changes without checking the advertiser’s site. Therefore, an affiliate can create a coupon or discount aggregator site using the product feeds available in 2Performant, and if the advertiser modifies any attribute of a product (price, description, image, etc.) or even deletes one of the products, these changes are made automatically on the affiliate’s website.

The feed is generated by the development team that is working on the advertiser’s site. This feed must be found at an URL address on the advertiser’s site and must be updated automatically whenever a change was made to one or more specific products.

For example, if a site owner deletes a products, this feed should automatically change and the product should disappear; if ten new products are added on the site, the feed needs to automatically update itself and add those ten new products; if the site owner changes the price of a particular product and offers a discount for it, the feed should also update itself and change the product price.

Product feed blueprint

A feed is a .CSV file containing one item (product) per column, described by 13 rows, placed between quotation marks(“”) and separated by comma. Here is how a product feed should look like: “Title”, “description”, “short message (can be left blank)”, “price”, “category”, “subcategory (can be left blank)”, “url”, “image url”, “product id”, “generating text link (should always be 0), “brand (can be left blank)”, “in stock (0 sau 1)”, “other data in JSON or YAML formats (can be left blank)”

• Title: maximum 255 characters;
• Description: text description about the product;
• Short message: another short additional description or any other information about the product (it’s optional – if you don’t want to add a short message fill the row with “”);
• Price: there shouldn’t be thousands separator, but the decimal separator must be the point (.); to send both new and old prices, use the following format: old price/new price. Example 99/55.
• Category: maximum 255 characters;
• Subcategory: maximum 255 characters (it’s optional – if you don’t want to add a subcategory the row must be filled with “”);
• URL: the product URL in the following format http://www.site.com/product-url;
• Image URL: the URL for the image of the product in the following format http://www.site.com/images/imagine-produs.jpg (if you have more than one image, separated them by comma);
• Product ID: the internal product code;
• Generating text link (0 or 1):  this function is disabled, thus it should always be filled with 0;
• Brand: product manufacturer (it’s optional – if you don’t want to add the brand, fill the row with “”);
• In stock: is the product in stock or not? If it is in stock, fill it with 1; if not, fill the row with 0.
• Other data in JSON or YAML format: other information about the product in JSON or YAML format (it’s optional – if you don’t want to add this, fill the row with “”).

Important: the separator between rows is Enter (/n). We kindly advise you to respect the format above, as the lack of quotation marks, blank spaces before rows or other small errors will result in the inability to successfully upload the product feed in our platform. If inside the text fields you want to use quotation marks, they must be duplicated the following way: “description””product””example”.

Do not use HTML tags inside the product description because they will be interpreted and displayed as plain text. If you cannot generate a link for a product feed, you must know that a .CSV file uploaded in 2Performant must not exceed 10mb.

How to upload a product feed

1. Go to Tools → Product Feeds → New Feed (the right button on the page)

2. When generating a new page, you will need to fill in the name of the product feed (e.g. all products, cosmetics, books, ladies, shoes, etc.) and a brief description of the feed containing additional details (product availability, what products/category of products can be found in the feed, short description,etc.)