eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello Partners,

On August 4th the eBay Partner Network Dashboard will be unavailable from 8 am MST to 10 am MST due to scheduled maintenance. We are not expecting any interruptions to tracking or ad serving, however reports will be delayed. Upon logging-in to your account on August 4th, you will receive a message stating that the interface is temporarily down due to maintenance, with instructions of when you will be able to log-in again.

Thank you for your continued partnership.

Amanda
eBay Partner Network Team

As we mentioned in recent blog posts, we are making an effort to increase the transparency and accuracy of the referring URLs from traffic coming through eBay Partner Network links.   The referring URL is the address of the page that a user was on when they clicked a link. In other words, if a user is on Page A and click a link to go to Page B, the referring URL will be the address of Page A.

It’s important for us to understand where eBay ads are appearing so we can have a full picture when assessing the quality of traffic from each publisher.

We therefore ask for your help in making sure your websites or tools are sending accurate referring URLs to eBay when traffic is passed through affiliate links.

To help in this process, we are going to write a series of blog posts to help you ensure you are sending accurate referring URLs when people click on your links.

In this first post, we will focus on tips for a few use cases that may cause unknown referring URLs.  We are also going to point you to a few tools that you can use to verify that you are passing a referring URL.

1.    Browsers are not allowed to pass a referring URL from an HTTPS server to an HTTP server. So if you have links to eBay on an HTTPS site, the referrer will be removed. You can manually change the links to use HTTPS, or use Google Analytics’ urchin.js script to switch the click links from HTTP to HTTPS. Otherwise, try to place affiliate links only on non-HTTPS portions of your sites.

2.    In some browsers, opening a new window with a Javascript command (for example, window.location.href or window.open) will cause the referring URL to be dropped. Instead of using Javascript to open a new window, use the href of your link with target=”_blank” to open the eBay link and use an onclick event for any associated behavior you want the link to do (including click tracking, which is discussed below).

Here’s an example link: <a href=”http://www.ebay.com” onclick=”myFunction();” target=”_blank”>eBay Link</a>.

3.    For a variety of reasons, some publishers link to an intermediate page (e.g. http://www.mysite.com/redirect.php?location=www.ebay.com) before sending the user to eBay. This can cause two problems: 1) it can drop the referring URL, and 2) it makes all of the referring URLs that are passed look the same. To properly use an intermediate page, use a 301 redirect on that page to redirect users to eBay. Then you can use one of the techniques we will talk about below to verify that the referring URL is being passed along after the redirection.

4.    Many publishers use Google Analytics to track their site activity, but some implementations are causing referring URLs to be dropped. The best way to set up Google Analytics tracking is to use the href of your link to open the eBay link and use an onclick event to trigger the Google Analytics tracking calls.

Here’s an example:

5.    We have identified four tools that should help most publishers verify that they are passing referring URLs, but there are many more options available.

• HttpWatch (plugin for IE and Firefox) – follow these steps to get started with HttpWatch:

  

  

  

  

   

• Live HTTP Headers (plugin for Firefox only)
• Oxford Journals has a page that will show what referrer is being sent (instructions available at http://www.oxfordjournals.org/help/techinfo/ipcheck.html). If you redirect to the link on this page instead of eBay, you can see if you are passing a referring URL.
• You can redirect to your own test page instead of eBay and check your server logs for the referrer.

Look for more updates as we come up with more recommendations on how to improve transparency.

The eBay Partner Network team

Mistake #1 – You Get Involved in SEO Drama

Be very wary of getting dragged into the trap. There are some SEOs who @ people all day long in lengthy back and forths. Every minute you spend chiming in and reading their banter is one less minute you spent on scouring delicious for links or digging though analytics to improve your ROI. Just can’t stay out of twitter SEO banter? DON’T follow people who get in public disagreements, and also install leechblock a great firefox plugin which you can limit your twitter, facebook, youtube, etc, time. It’ll cut off your access to those sites immediately.

Mistake #2 – You Care About What is Fair

Stop the whining people! Matt Cutts announced that no-follows are less relevant is it smoke and mirrors, who knows and who cares? Instead of complaining about what isn’t fair, start working on sites to test the impact of no-follows so you know when (or if) that change ever does make an impact. But Google is NOT a democracy, they are a private business, they can do what they want, if you don’t like them start using bing.com.

I can’t tell you the countless times I see people talking about what is or is not fair, whether it’s the no follows, big brands ranking well, Google knol, SEO profiling. There will always be the “is it fair” distraction, that rarely has any value, avoid getting caught up in these, read them and extract value, but don’t participate.

Mistake #3 – You Get All Wrapped Up in Rankings

Sure you got some terms rankings well and are driving great traffic, this is the time to continue to hustle and NOT start patting yourself on the back. Are you monitoring bounce rates for those great keyword rankings – are you trying to connect the dots between rankings and conversions by testing out things like this? Do you know that if your term drops from 1 to 5 how that impacts conversions? If the answer is NO, take that hand off your back, and click on that link! (Beware, our tests are showing that ranking data in Google Analytics is VERY spotty).

Mistake #4 – You Overload Yourself With Too Much Information

Given that there must be thousands of SEO bloggers out there, who do you follow / subscribe to? Be very careful, reading too many blogs can paralyze your day. Sticking to the basics before you go after some advanced tactic you see elsewhere is smart! Getting very good at scanning content for valuable insights is critical. I tend to use Google reader on my iphone to filter through the SEO noise as I walk to the office, just looking at posts quickly, so by the time I sit down at work, I’ve starred the most important stuff to really sit down and read, you can do this while waiting for lunch, walking the dog, or sitting on useless conference calls.

I recently went through the process of removing several aggregator style SEO blogs that keep track of the industry as a whole, as twitter has kind of replaced them for that. SEO news sites that may post 5-10 times a day just kill my reader, so I assume that if I follow enough SEOs on Twitter that I should see really big SEO news come across my stream.

Mistake #5 – You Refuse To Change Direction in Your Strategy

SEO’s are so used to being right that admitting defeat is tough, however even I am victim of this. My last post here referenced an advanced tactic of sculpting pagerank flow though a site, and surely in true SEO fashion, that has changed pretty significantly in the 3 weeks since its been posted.

I am not seeing that tactic hurt, but it is becoming the general consensus that it isn’t helping much either, I guess this is the issue with advanced tactics, you never really know how long they are going to work, which is why this is much more important that you get the basics right first, because they don’t change nearly as frequently as the advanced tactics – here’s another way to sculpt pagerank if you must.

Given than Matt Cutts has said to keep around 100 links per page as a rule of thumb, most of you would be surprised at how many of you have more than 100 links per page, you’ll have to figure out how to use programming to limit the number of links that Google sees per page instead of the internal no-follow. If you want to count your number of links per page use a tool like link gopher, its quick and easy. You just might be amazed that after you include your dropdowns, tabbed sections, and other parts of a page how many links you just may end up having. Before you spend a second on advanced SEO tactics, please make sure you’ve got the basic blocking and tackling done.

The things mentioned in that post above are far from fads that will be strong today but weak tomorrow. Thanks for letting me share SEO tips and thoughts with you, feel free to reach out to me on Twitter @wilreynolds for more info on SEO.

Hello Partners,

We are excited to announce the release of a new eBay Motors widget!  You can now customize the color and title of the widget so that it can blend seamlessly with your site, creating the best user experience for your visitors.  The widget can be found here: http://www.carad.com/widgets/finder/.

Here’s a preview of the widget:

Although this widget is not currently in the eBay Partner Network interface, it is still 100% trackable, and all metrics related to the widget will be available in your ePN reporting.  Once you make your selections of what you would like the widget to display (shown above left), you will then be able to preview the widget.  The code for the widget you are previewing will be available in a text box below for you to copy and paste to your website.  What makes this widget trackable through the eBay Partner Network interface is your Campaign ID.  To find your default Campaign ID, or to create a new Campaign ID so that you can better track the performance of this widget, please follow these steps:

•    Log-in to your eBay Partner Network account
•    Click on the “Campaigns” tab at the top of the page
•    Here you can find your Default Campaign ID, or you can click the “Create Campaign” tab to create a new Campaign ID

Again, entering an accurate Campaign ID is what will ensure proper tracking of this widget, so please be sure to enter a valid Campaign ID that corresponds with your ePN account.

Please contact Motors-Affiliates@ebay.com with any questions.

To your continued success,

Amanda
eBay Partner Network Team

Hello Partners,

In addition to the policy updates that you have read about, we are also making a few updates to the eBay Partner Network Platform that we want to review with you.

Domain Validation
In order to ensure the quality of traffic in our network, we’re going to continue to work with our partners to get greater transparency into where your traffic is being sent from.  Beginning July 20th, all new applicants to the eBay Partner Network will be required to validate at least one domain during the registration process (this is standard practice in other large international networks like affilinet and Tradedoubler).

To validate a domain, you will have to upload a text file with a unique identifier we give you to the base directory of the domain.  You can find more detailed instructions on how to do this in the e-mail you will receive when you register or in the help documentation.

Although existing publishers are not required to validate their domains, doing so is a good idea, as it will help us know which domains you are sending traffic from and serve as additional information helpful in conversations with customer service or confirming your identity if your account has been compromised, etc.

Dashboard Updates
We are also making some updates to the dashboard that you will notice when you log-in to your eBay Partner Network account, based on feedback from some of our publishers:

•    The table on your Dashboard tab will now show stats “By Day” versus “By Program”.   Thus, the table on your Dashboard tab will reflect the most recent 7 days of a Month to Date report.  Please note that the “Total” line will reflect the Month to Date totals (not just the sum of the seven days on the dashboard).  A link will be available to see the full Month to Date report.

•    We’re also  addressing an issue we’ve had when showing you EPC in the past.   Click information is updated in the interface typically every few hours.  However, transaction information is only posted once a day.  In order for the EPC we show you not to be distorted by this, when calculating the Month to Date EPC, going forward we will only use only the most recently posted transaction data and the corresponding click total for that time.  In other words, clicks for a given day won’t be included in the EPC calculation until the next day when the transaction information for those clicks is posted.

•    Finally, we heard feedback from publishers that they would like to save their preferences in the dashboard for what variables are graphed by default after logging in.   We are introducing this capability in our new release.  When you choose your two axes to graph from the pull-down menu under the graph, and then press “Go”, your preferences will be saved with your account and be the default next time you log into eBay Partner Network.

Special Business Models
Until this new release, there was no one easy place to manage your requests and approvals for promotion through special business models.  Going forward, there will be a special business model approval console in eBay Partner Network.

If you have selected a special business model, you will be required to fill out a Special Business Model Form.  Special business models include Loyalty and Incentives, Downloadable Software, Electronic Communications and Other.  The Special Business Model Form will be available in your Account Information section when logged-in to your eBay Partner Network Account.

You will need to fill out a request for every different type of special business model promotion you plan to do.  The eBay Partner Network Team will review your form to determine your eligibility to promote eBay using these methods.  You will then see in the console whether the request was approved.  For more information, please refer to our help documents.

Click Filtering
Since the launch of eBay Partner Network, we have filtered certain clicks generated by bots and other invalid activity.  These filters are calibrated to make sure that only valid clicks are included when you see your metrics and when we calculate certain variables like your EPC.  Invalid clicks are usually the result of automated or non-human activity that typically does not have any transactions associated with them.

We have been working with industry leaders to enhance our capabilities and further adopt industry best practices.  In the last two weeks of July, we will be launching some enhancements to our click filtering technology to include a larger list of known bots and improved detection of automated sources of clicks.   This will cause the click counts of some of our publishers that are impacted by invalid activity to drop, while others may not be affected.

As always, we thank you for your continued partnership in creating a high quality Network for all of our partners.

To your continued success,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hello Partners,

As we advanced in our blog post in early May, we are making a few changes to the accepted business models in eBay Partner Network and we are making changes to our compensation model.

Our new Terms and Conditions will officially reflect these changes, as well as a few other updates to our policies that we want to make sure you are aware of. Our new Network Agreement, Code of Conduct and eBay Advertiser Terms and Conditions (“New Terms”) will be live to site on July 20, 2009. They will be applicable to new users who register on or after July 20, 2009. For existing users, the new terms will take effect on August 1, 2009. Please make sure you read through and understand the amended terms because the changes affect your rights and obligations. If any term in the Agreement is unacceptable to you, you must terminate the Network Agreement by closing your account through the eBay Partner Network Interface before August 1, 2009. If you continue your participation in the eBay Partner Network after August 1, 2009, you are representing and warranting that you understand and agree to the New Terms.

Network Agreement Updates
As mentioned in this previous post, we are adjusting our minimum payment threshold from 5 to 25 (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP, or AUD), depending on your country’s currency.  This month’s payment disbursement, occurring Monday, July 27th, will have no payment threshold.  This means that as long as your eBay Partner Network account is in good standing, you will receive your outstanding balance paid in full, even if your balance due is less than 5 (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP or AUD).  Any and all unclaimed funds will be surrendered to the state according to the guidelines set forth by the state in which each publisher resides.  Please note that you do not need to take any action for this update.

We have also updated the language in the Network Agreement to make it clear that our partners may not use promotional methods that violate intellectual property or proprietary rights of third party trademarks.  This includes, but is not limited to, using a third party trademark (or a term confusingly similar to it) in your URLs.

Network Code of Conduct
Important updates to the Network Code of Conduct include the following:

•    eBay Partner Network does not compensate for sales that come from invalid click activity, which includes, but is not limited to the following:
-  clicks generated by a publisher clicking on their own ads
-  automated clicking tools/traffic sources/robots
-  activity generated by other deceptive software

•    Publishers may only place links and/or promotional content on sites they own.  Affiliate links on third party sites such as Craigslist, MySpace, etc. are not allowed.

•    You will not redirect any traffic to middle servers for the sole purpose of masking your referring source of traffic.  This includes the use of URL shortening services (including but not limited to tinyurl.com, short.to and cloakedlink.com).

Advertiser Terms & Conditions
Please note that direct paid search and direct paid placement are no longer allowed in any eBay program.  You are still able to do paid search campaigns that direct traffic to your own websites, you simply cannot direct link or forward campaigns directly to eBay landing pages.

Your earnings may vary from month to month, depending on eBay’s revenue generated by qualifying transactions.  Therefore, eBay Partner Network makes no guarantee that the level of clicks and impressions you drive and that may generate qualifying transactions will remain the same from month to month.

If you buy traffic to your sites through sponsored links, you must ensure that all campaigns add all eBay properties to their list of excluded sites.

Third party redirects for the sole purpose of masking a referring URL are no longer allowed.

Also, we are requiring that publishers submit a form through the interface before starting to promote eBay through special business models.  Special business models are considered to be Loyalty and Incentives, Downloadable Software, and Electronic Communications.

Finally, please read about some other updates coming in our July 20th release.

If you have any questions on this, please contact customer service.

Thank you,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hello from your U.S. team at ePN. We would like to announce that we will be attending the Affiliate Summit East in New York on August 9th-11th: http://www.affiliatesummit.com/. If you will be attending and would like to stop by to visit, we will be hosting a table at their largest event, the “Meet Market”. This event consists of rows and rows of tables with some of the top affiliate advertisers in the nation.

If you would like to meet outside the conference venue to discuss partnerships or business ideas, send an email to Affiliates-Program-US@ebay.com with your name, publisher email, and what you’d like to discuss.

We hope to see you there!

Kevin
eBay Partner Network Team

Hi all,

Following on from our post about investing in our affiliates, we’re very excited to announce that the European eBay Partner Network team has appointed NetBooster, a leading online marketing agency, to help support us in France, Italy, Spain and Belgium. 

The team at NetBooster will work closely with us to recruit new affiliates and work directly with more of our current affiliates to help make our programs in France, Italy, Spain and Belgium even more successful.  They will work for us in a similar capacity to R.O.EYE in the UK and PartnerCentric in the US, where we’ve seen that affiliates really benefit from having more direct contact with us.

Introducing the team

Our new NetBooster team, Yann, Andres, and Susanna, are all experienced in managing affiliate programs in their local markets. 

Yann Michon

 Yann is based in Paris, speaks French and English, and if you talk to him about Depeche Mode, you will have a new friend!

Susanna Boggia

 Susanna is based in Milan, speaks Italian and English, and despite being Italian, Susanna likes to drink cappuccino not only for breakfast! And guess where she bought her 7 collectible cappuccino cups?

Andres Garcia

Andres is originally from Spain, though you will never see him dance The Macarena song, because he prefers Rock and Roll!   He now works in the Paris office and speaks Spanish, French and English. 

Please join us in welcoming NetBooster to the eBay Partner Network Team,

Chris, Julia, Mieke, Peter and Paolo (the European eBay Partner Network team)

Many publishers can be put off by the thought of the API, but when promoting a site such as eBay, with its dynamic catalogue of millions of products and constantly changing prices, it really is too good a tool to be overlooked.

So what is it?

Good question – API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a facility to allow a program to request a service from a library – or simply put, it allows your website, widget or application to ask questions to the eBay database and get a response. Just think of the things your website could do if it had direct access to eBay’s database! And the best part is that if you’re confident enough to build your own website the API might not be as hard to integrate as you may have first thought…

Three simple steps:

The first step is to get signed up to the eBay Developers Program. You will be assigned an AppID, which is your unique token allowing you access to the API.  You will also get a Sandbox and Production Key.  If you are building a listing tool, you will want to test it in the Sandbox with dummy listings, otherwise you should use the Production Key directly – this gives you access to live eBay data that you see on the site.

The second step is to construct your API call. The most simple of these is FindItems, and can take the form of a simple URL. There is a great tutorial on the developer site which shows a simple step by step guide on how to construct the call.

The third step is to format the data you receive into something readable on your site. You can request the data in JSON, SOAP, XML or text Name Value.

If you are a product feed publisher, parsing the data should be second nature. If not, the same tutorial provides a simple JavaScript example.  You can use JavaScript, PHP or any programming language you’re familiar with to dynamically render the live listings on your page. Perhaps you can use the eBay API to import results directly into your SQL database – but remember if you choose this option, filter results to items which aren’t ending in very near future, to prevent you displaying expired listings.

What next?

The real power of the API however comes with what you do with the data. Remember, you have at your disposal a live link direct to the eBay database, so the limit is only that of your imagination.  A good example is http://www.watchcount.com which picked up an award in the 2009 eBay Star Developer Awards. It utilises the API to look at what the most watched items are on eBay. Check out the website for more great innovative uses of the API. Another example uses API results to calculate an average selling price for an item, and then highlights the displayed items which are cheaper.

And if you need a nudge in the right direction, here is our code for the above console comparison page, and also some more example code to create a very simple search tool.

James Skelland, Technical Solutions Manager at R.O.EYE

James will be writing another post on more advanced API tips later in the year.

Hello Partners,

We are taking steps to improve our payment processes. This month’s payment disbursement, occurring Monday, July 27th, will have no payment threshold. This means that as long as your eBay Partner Network account is in good standing, you will receive your outstanding balance paid in full, even if your balance due is less than 5 (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP or AUD).

Moving forward, we will remove the payment threshold entirely every November, once a year, allowing us to better serve you.

New Payment Threshold starting with August 1st, 2009

Beginning August 1st there will be a new payment threshold of 25 USD, 25 CAD, 25 EUR, 25 GBP, or 25 AUD (depending on your country’s currency). This will require no change on your part. The first payment with the new threshold will be on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009.

If your balance is 25 (USD, CAD, EUR, GBP or AUD) or more, and your eBay Partner Network account is in good standing, you will receive a payment from us as scheduled. If your balance is lower than this amount, we will hold it until you either surpass this threshold or until our November period, where we will pay out your accumulated outstanding earnings regardless of the size of your balance.

Note that as always, eBay Partner Network reserves the right to suspend payment temporarily if a Partner is placed under investigation for violation of our Code of Conduct or our Advertiser Terms and Conditions. In such a case, the Partner will be contacted.

Thank you for your continued partnership.

The eBay Partner Network Team