Affiliate Future: New Xenon Content Management Tools

Affiliate Future have announced :

the launch of Xenon; a product and content distribution platform that gives affiliates access to merchants’ inventory via a Web Service API, datafeeds, content generation tools and a white label product comparison system.

You can choose to have category or Merchant specific data delivered to you daily via; the Xenon tools, live URL, or FTP. A Web Service API is also available which gives you access to the entire dataset that drives the Xenon system.

Xenon Content units allow you to feature dynamic, relevant content and products on your website. Content is defined via keyword and category settings and is served from a pool of results that is most relevant. All content is tracked and deeplinks directly to merchant websites. You can now create search boxes or deeplinks that launch Xenon’s customisable product comparison system. Merchant data is constantly updated by Affiliate Future’s systems.

In my view, Affiliate Future has in the past lagged other Merchant Networks ability to create content units and their data feed systems were just frustrating … merchants that you would expect to have a feed just didn’t and Affiliate-Future appeared to have a random ordering of the feed URLs making it all difficult to find and use. 

Anyway, the new system looks much more engaging and user-friendly. If, like me you were not encouraged to promote via Affiliate Future, then you may want to step up your efforts, but be cautious.

Here is a sample of what they can do for you by way of a search panel. You can customise colour, title, category and subcategory searched as well as pre-populating the search term which should be good in theory for conversion :

Unfortunately, I have found the platform to be slow and buggy. Slow, you will see for yourself if you try the above search out … there doesn’t appear to be any caching employed. Each repeat search is as slow as the first.

And what about the buggy part …. well try the above search. At the time of writing, the search brings back products from multiple retailers that I am partnered with. If I filter on ‘Presents for Men’, then I do get a front page listing items matching, but I also get an indication of a number of pages more to be displayed displayed. Yet …. when I click on anything other than page 1, I then get told that there are no matches available.

I think I know what has happened in that the ‘Presents for Men’ items have been brought to page 1, but it hasn’t reset the product count on the new filter and therefore shouldn’t suggest that there are more pages when the tool is not prepared to show any.

So .. I say,’Good Start’, but must do better.

If product search is what you really want to include, you may be better including a Kelkoo search as follows:

However, Kelkoo will only pay you on a cost per search rather than commission on product sold. If you can second guess what a user might buy following on from your article, then you are probably going to find it more profitable to offer items that are complementary to the article, such as the following (to which I gave only a little thought):

The above content unit is created using the Affiliate Window content unit engine. Affiliate Window would be my first choice.

Tradedoubler offer a context sensitive ad service whereby the products are selected based upon content as follows :

But as you see, the content needs to be quite tight for the context to work. I therefore prefer handcrafting the content units via Affiliate Window wherever possible.

I think the morale of the story is that in a market where the tools are diverse and at different stages of maturity and accomplishment there must be compromises on your part (a) because not every network will have every feature that you wish, but furthermore, (b) the likelihood is that the companies you wish to promote will not necessarilly all be on the same Affiliate Network, meaning that you will need to use different tools for different merchants.

That said …. do check each company that you promote to see whether they are marketing themselves through multiple affiliate networks … you may have multiple tools at your disposal from different networks for the same vendor.