Dark Blue Affiliate Product Data Feed Guide

Table of Contents

• Dark Blue Affiliate Product Data Feed
• The Data Feed URL Parameters
• Optional Parameters for the Web Interface
• The Feed Format
• The Columns

Dark Blue Affiliate Product Data Feed

Dark Blue at DarkBlue.com is a small U.S. affiliate network that looks at first glance more like a CPA network, because the majority of offers available at the network are CPA and not revenue share.

It is easy to assume that they don't have anything such as product data feeds, but they actually do have this option available for advertisers who can and want to use this feature.

You can see, in the "Get Advertisement"/"Advertiser Detail" page right after the screen shot and basic advertiser information a box that states "Content feed available" with a link that takes you to a page where you select your site(s) where you want to use the product data. It then takes you to a screen where you can decide if you would like to see the content feed data online and browse it view a web interface to get link codes for individual products or to see the raw feed data in delimited format.

The URL to pull the feed looks like this.
http://www.darkblue.com/index.htm?area=gaFeed&site=111111&link=222222&refData=&query=&csv=1

You can tell that this fearure is not important to them, because it is burried within the site, of low quality and no reference or documentation that provides help and answers exists anywhere on the site (unless it is even better hidden than the product feeds, because I could not find anything).

The Data Feed URL Parameters

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

URL Param	Value	Comment
area	gaFeed	required, don't change that
site	[yoursiteid]	the affiliate id that identifies your site. I will use 111111 for my ficticious affiliate site in the examples.
link	[uniqueidforfeed]	the unique ID for the data feed of the advertiser. It is not the advertiser ID and you can't really guess it. I will use 222222 as my ficticious feed ID for examples.
csv	1	raw and tab delimited feed data
	0	web interface
refData	empty/SID	this seems to be used for custom tracking like CJs SID
The default URL for a product looks like this http://dbbsrv.com/refer/111111/222222/?feed=999&feedcid=88888&feedh=1a2b3 If I pulled the feed with refData=ccutrack, the product link changed to: http://dbbsrv.com/refer/111111/222222/ccutrack?feed=999&feedcid=88888&feedh=1a2b3
query	empty/anything	empty = 0, if set to anything, but nothing or 0, then the "?" in the product URL will be replaced with "[queryvalue]&". I have no idea what the purpose of this exercise is.
Default URL with refData filled up, but value for "query" left empty (default): http://www.darkblue.com/index.htm?area=gaFeed&site=111111&link=222222&refData=ccutrack&query=&csv=1 The product URL would like like this: http://dbbsrv.com/refer/111111/222222/ccutrack?feed=999&feedcid=88888&feedh=1a2b3 If the value for "query" is changed to "1" then URL url changes to this: http://dbbsrv.com/refer/111111/222222/ccutrack1&feed=999&feedcid=88888&feedh=1a2b3 The length of the value for "query" is NOT limited to one character.

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Optional Parameters for the Web Interface

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

Optional parameters for web interface (csv=0). They don't work for the delimited feed requests (unfortunately).

URL Param	Value	Comment
path	[category]	filter product data by product category (optional, works only if csv=0)
search	[keyword]	keyword, phrase to filter products results by
go	go	only required for keyword search

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The File Format

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

The feed data are directly returned in the browser, no file is created to download first, which means that you can do feed requests via XMLHTTP and process the results on the fly without the need to mess around with files on your hard drive.

The column delimiter is the TAB character (character (9))

The line break (row delimiter) is a carriage return + line feed (character (13) + character (10)), which is typical for windows, but not what UNIX or Linux folks would expect (line feed only).

The file includes the column names in the first row.

Character string values within the feed content are not enclosed in double quotes or any other special characters to indicate that the value is a text or characters and not something else.

The feed has a fix number of columns, which is SIX.

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The Columns

Return to Network Specific Implementation Guides and Documentations or to Affiliate Datafeeds Resources.

The Dark Blue data feed or content feed (that is what they call it) contains 6 columns.
The maximum length of any character values is unknown, but you can apply common sense here

#	Name	Type	Comment
1.	name	character	product name
2.	description	character	product description without line breaks, because that is the row delimited
3.	price	numeric	numeric with always 2 digits after the digital point which is "." and not ",". xx.xx without currency indicator
4.	category	character	product category name
5.	link_url	character	product detail link
	http://dbbsrv.com/refer/111111/222222/?feed=999&feedcid=88888&feedh=1a2b3
6.	image_url	character	thumbnail image url
	http://dbbsrv.com/image/111111/222222/?feed=999&feedcid=88888&feedh=1a2b3

Note: The query parameters after the ?, namely "feed", "feedcid" and "feedh" are information like the merchant product ID and things like that. Each of the parameters has different values within a single feed.

You might notice that the Dark Blue product data feeds do not contain a unique product identifier, which is bad for you, because that means that you do not have a lookup key to find out, if you have a product imported in the past already or if it is completely new.

I suggest that you parse the Dark Blue internal parameters from the affiliate URL and use those values as key. They should be unique.

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Other Data Feed Guides, Articles and Resources for Affiliates and Advertisers Resources - Affiliate Datafeeds Resources, Affiliate Program APIs and Web Services Article - Merchant Product Datafeeds for Affilates - 101 Article - XML Datafeeds and Webservices for Affiliates Resources - Web Services Development Resources for Developers Guide - CJ Advanced Links Tutorial and URL Encoding for Adverisers/Merchants and OPMs Guide - Kolimbo/MyAffiliateProgram by Inuvo, Inc. - Raw Datafeeds 101 Guide - LinkConnector Product Data Feeds for Affiliates 101 Guide - The Linkshare Merchandiser Service - Datafeed Access to Linkshare Feeds - Tips and Tricks Guide - Linkshare Merchandiser Delimited Product Data Feed Format Guide - LinkShare Merchandiser FTP Commands Reference Guide - ShareASale Product Datafeeds for Affiliates and Merchants Guide - Orange Links by the Google Affiliate Network (DoubleClick Performics) - A Primer for Affiliates Guide - DigitalRiver - Data Feeds Provided to Affiliates by OneNetworkDirect Guide - DigitalRiver - OneNetworkDirect Web Services API for Affiliates Guide - PepperJam Network Product Data Feeds and Store Builder Guide Article - AvantLink Product Data API Introduction Article - What Makes a Good Data Feed? Tips for Merchants - Slides Transcript

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