Content
Content 2
Introduction 3
Search products 3
Browse categories 3
Advanced search 4
Unlimited list 5
Show code 6
Step 1 – Select site 6
Step 2 – Choose code type 7
Step 3 - Format 7
Step 4 – Number of products 7
Step 5 – Skip products 7
Step 6 - Generate 7
Restrictions and solutions 8
Use your own XSL-stylesheets 8
XSL parameters 8
Page selection functionality with JavaScript 10
Limitation 10
PHP/ASP/JSP - scripting 10
Caching 10
Reports 11
Appendix 1 – jsp script for automatic update 12
Statement of Confidentiality
This document is the propriety of TradeDoubler AB, and is strictly confidential. It contains information intended only for the person to whom it is transmitted. With the receipt of this document, the recipient acknowledges and agrees that (i) in the event that the recipient does not intend to implement TradeDoubler AB's affiliate network solution, these instructions will be returned to the address listed below, at the earliest possible moment, (ii) the recipient will not copy, fax, reproduce, divulge, distribute or in any other ways compromise the confidentiality of this document, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of TradeDoubler AB, and (iii) all of the information herein will be treated as confidential material with no less care than that afforded to confidential material of your own company. TradeDoubler AB has prepared this document.
TradeDoubler AB
Barnhusgatan 12
111 23 Stockholm
Sweden
Introduction
The product feed functionality is an easy way to get access to your advertisers products and promote them on your website. So instead of a banner or a text link you will have hundreds of product links that could result in a sale. Used in a correct way, product feeds could be a win-win situation for both you and your advertisers.
Below you will find a description on how product feeds work, how you browse and search to create your list and how you can use predefined or your own XLS-stylesheets to present the products with the same look and feel as on your site.
Search products
To find the products you want to promote on your web site you can either browse per category or you could make a more detailed selection in the advanced search.
Browse categories
Browse your way down through the levels in a category to get the list of products or search directly on the product name. If you want to narrow down the selection you click on the advanced search tab and make your selection there.
At the top of the browsing page you will find a breadcrumb in which you can browse both up and down in the category tree by clicking on the category name.
Each page will show 100 products, if a category consists of more than 100 products you browse to the next page to see the rest of the products in this category.
In the advanced search you can narrow down the list of products, you’ve been provided through browsing, to better suite your needs. How to do this is described below.
Advanced search
In the advanced search you can search on product name, program, details name and value, description and max- and/or min price. When you search on: description or details- name and value you have to enter a search string that exactly matches the value in order to retrieve a search result. If you search on name; the search string you enter can be a part of the entire value but not a part of a word; so if you search on “car” – car phone will be displayed but not “carphone”.
If you choose not to designate a particular program, all programs will be applicable for the search, i.e. not choosing a program is the same as choosing all programs.
In the “details name and value” you will find details about this product if provided by the advertiser. There is no limit on the number of details per product. It is through these rows that the advertiser gives additional product information such as brand, colour, ISBN number (for books), extra image URLs, shipping costs etc.
You can also decide how many products you want to display per page in the results per page field. The skip pages field allows you to decide how many of the result pages you don’t want to be displayed. The maximum amount of products that will be displayed is 100.
If you want to exclude some of the products in the list you only have to tick the checkbox on the left hand side of this product.
If you not are accepted as a publisher for the advertiser that sells this product you will not be able to see the code for this product but you can click on ”Apply to this program” on the right hand side and be directed to the application page for this advertiser.
When you have a list of products that you want to promote click on “show code for this query”.
Unlimited list
The unlimited list option gives you the possibility to download the entire feed from an advertiser. To get access to this feature you need to contact TradeDoubler and you must be able to host the achieved file. In appendix 1 you will find a script written in .JSP that automatically updates the achieved product feed. This script will work on all product feeds and not only when you download the entire feed. Choose the advertiser you want the product feed from and click on “Show code”. You can only choose one advertiser at the time.
Unlimited list – show code
The show code page for the unlimited list is slightly different from the regular show code page.
Step 1 – select site
The first step is to select which one of your sites that you want to add this list to. Sites that are “Accepted” or “Under consideration” are possible to choose. If any of your sites are greyed out it means that these sites are not accepted, they are denied or under consideration, for any of the programs that provides the products in the list you have created.
Step 2 – Choose format
Here you can choose to download the productfeed as XML or CSV. The CSV file is now using pipe characters ( | ) and line break for separating each product.
Step 3 – Use zip
In order to save bandwidth you can choose to receive the file in a gzip compressed format.
Step 4 – Download
If you click on the download link the result will be displayed in the browser. Our suggestion is that you right-click the link and choose save as in order to download the file. You could also right-click and choose “copy shortcut” if you want to download the file with your own script.
Show code
Step 1 – Select site
The first step is to select which one of your sites that you want to add this list to. Sites that are “Accepted” or “Under consideration” are possible to choose. If any of your sites are greyed out it means that these sites are not accepted, they are denied or under consideration, for any of the programs that provides the products in the list you have created.
Step 2 – Choose code type
In step 2 you choose if you want the code in JavaScript or Iframe. Please note that the predefined stylesheets: text link and Box only with work properly with the Iframe selection. These stylesheets include a page selection functionality that will not work if you choose JavaScript.
Step 3 - Format
In step 3 you decide how the product list will be displayed on your web site. We have 3 predefined lists that can be used but you could also choose to use your own stylesheet or download the list as an XML-file and host it on your own web server. If you want to add your own stylesheet you have to enter a URL to where that stylesheet is placed. The stylesheet has to be placed in a public place and not on your hard drive or other places in order to be displayed. You could also receive the product feed as CSV. If you want to change the order of the values, or remove some values in the CSV you can download the it and save the modified version on you on web server and enter the URL for your own stylesheet in show code. Examples on how you can create your own XSL-stylesheets will be provided below.
Step 4 – Number of products
Here you can enter the number of products that you want to display on your website. This option is only available for publishers that have access to the entire product feed. To get access to the entire feed you need to contact TradeDoubler and be able to host the file.
Step 5 – Skip products
In the advanced search you can decide how many product you want to be shown on each page and how many pages you don’t want to be displayed. In the show code window you also make this decision. The maximum amount of products per page is 100.
Step 6 - Generate
The last step is to copy the code and place in on your web site. The first time a user enters your site and is exposed to the product list the query is run and the data is collected directly from our database then is generated from your site. The second time, and onwards, the query is cached. Thereby increasing the speed with which the list is served and considerably diminishes the load on our servers and database.
Updates of product information, such as price, new products, availability etc will automatically be transmitted from the advertiser to us and to your site through the XML link.
Restrictions and solutions
The maximum amount of products that will be displayed when you do a search is 100. The limit of 100 products is a way for us to make sure that this functionality not will slow down our system. Another restriction is that each publisher website is only allowed to make 1 request/second.
We have to set up these restrictions in order to make sure that the performance of our system not will be affected in a negative way. There is a solution to avoid these restrictions so that you can have the entire product feed and not only 100 products and were you can have more than 1 hit per second.
The solution to this is that you download the XML or HTML and save it on your own web server. To save the XML or HTML you make a preview on your search and choose “save as” in your browser. You can then save this on your web server and include it on your web site. This way the download time of your web site will not be depending on our response times and you will have full control over how the list will be displayed. This list can then be automatically updated through the script that is provided in appendix 1.
To get access to the entire product feed you need to contact TradeDoubler.
Use your own XSL-stylesheets
In step 3, at the show code page, the last option is “use your own stylesheet. By doing this you can present the product data any way you want. XSL-stylesheets are used to format and convert output. You can create your own stylesheets or you could download the ones we have created and modify them in a way that make them fit in to your web site. In our examples we read an XML-file and convert it into a HTML output formatted in a different way for each example.
TradeDoubler provides an XML-output as a result of the search made. The XML can be converted to other formats than html. For example they can be used to convert the input into plain text-files, some SQL statements or even another XML-file. You can save the XML-file on your web server or in a database and transform it yourself. This file can then be automatically updated by using the script provided in Appendix 1.
XSL-stylesheets can be very powerful tools if used right. If you want to learn more about XSL you can find a tutorial on XSL at: http://www.w3schools.com/xsl/
XSL parameters
When you create your own stylesheet or want to modify one of ours you have some parameters that can be used to change the look and feel. Below we will try to give you the necessary instructions for you to create your own stylesheets.
It is possible to send values to an XSL-stylesheet in the URL to the product list, which can look like this:
http://pf.tradedoubler.com/pf/pf?a=1234567&categoryName=Books&xslUrl=http://www.myserver.com/mystylesheet.xsl
You may append some parameters that can be used by the XSL-stylesheet to create various effects. In the examples "Text link" and "Box" provided by TradeDoubler you can see that the URL looks like this:
http://pf.tradedoubler.com/pf/pf?a=1234567&categoryName=Books&xslUrl=http://img.tradedoubler.com/images/xsl/xsl1.xsl&xslParamName1=page&xslParamValue1=0&xslParamName2=pageSize&xslParamValue2=10
This means that we use an XSL-stylesheet that is located at the URL:
http://img.tradedoubler.com/images/xsl/xsl1.xsl .
To that XSL-stylesheetxsl1.xsl we send two parameters and a values corresponding to these each parameters:
xslParamName1=page&xslParamValue1=0&xslParamName2=pageSize&xslParamValue2=10
These parameters are "translated" by the TradeDoubler servers and passed to the XSL-stylesheet as: page=0&pageSize=10
In the example there is code that can read these parameters(ParamName and ParamValue) and then use them to determine which page the viewer is to be shown and also how many products should be shown on each page.
You may send your own parameters to these stylesheets or stylesheets that you have created yourself. It could for example read the parameters "color", "width" and "height". You actually can send as many parameters as you like, as long as they follow the format:
xslParamNameX=
xslParamValueX=
xslParamNameY=
xslParamValueY=
xslParamNameZ=
xslParamValueZ=