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4.7 Tools of the Trade
LEARNING OBJECTIVE
- Learn what tools are important to affiliate marketing.
Affiliate marketing today forms a fundamental part of most e-retailers’ strategies. So what tools does
a merchant need to have a successful program?
Any retailer should have a product feed, either XML (extensible markup language) or CSV (comma-
separated values). A product feed is a way to provide information about the products on a merchant’s
Web site in a way that breaks up the information easily and is standardized. A product feed will
probably contain the following information for each product:
- Product name
- Product URL (uniform resource locator)
- Product picture
- Product price
- Description
- Shipping price
- Stock status
Affiliates, particularly search affiliates, can use this to promote individual products.
A product feed is made available on a simple URL and displays content that affiliates can use in their
campaigns.
Merchants need to create a set of banners and buttons that can be placed on affiliate Web sites. At a
minimum, the following sizes should be available:
- 468 × 60 (banner)
- 125 × 125 (square)
- 120 × 60 (button)