eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello Partners,

As previously mentioned in our Quality Click Pricing announcement, you now have access to a Quality Click Pricing Preview Report when logged in to your eBay Partner Network Account.  The Quality Click Pricing Preview Report will provide you with a preview of your Earnings per Click and earnings under the new Quality Click Pricing (QCP) payment structure. In this report, you will see your current earnings compared to what your earnings would be under the QCP payment structure at the campaign level. This will allow you time to understand how you would perform in the new pricing system and begin to optimize your campaigns. Please note, as stated in this earlier post, if you joined eBay Partner Network before September 1st, your actual earnings will continue to be based on your current payment structure until October 1st, 2009.

A link to the Quality Click Pricing Preview Report will be available in the “Useful Links” section of the Dashboard. You can also access it by clicking on the Reports tab and selecting “Quality Click Pricing Preview” as the Report Type. From there you can select the month and program report filters and click on the “Run Report” button to see a preview of your QCP earnings.  If you have a large number of campaigns or require additional sorting and filtering, we recommend downloading the report to a spreadsheet using the “Export All Data” functionality. Note that this report will only be available for your programs that are not already on the Quality Click Pricing payment structure. Once you are on the QCP payment structure, you can run a By Day or By Campaign report to see your EPCs and earnings.

The preview EPC and earnings will be made available daily for each of your campaigns that had activity on that day. Similar to your current reports, this is calculated for activity from the previous day.

Here are a few other tips to keep in mind:

• The report is available for one program and one month at a time.  As a reminder, the August report begins on August 18th

• Here’s how to read the “Total” row:  Total QCP Earnings are the sum of all the earnings of all the campaigns and days in the report.  Total QCP EPC is simply your total QCP earnings divided by your total number of clicks

• QCP is calculated for each campaign, for each day.   You will see that the QCP Earnings Per Click (EPC) multiplied by clicks will always result in the earnings for that campaign and day

• A campaign will only appear as a row for a certain day if there were clicks, impressions, or earnings for that campaign and day

• The small group of publishers staying on CPA will see all zeros for the QCP columns in the report.  Most publishers in this situation should already have been contacted by e-mail or will be contacted shortly

• By default, the report will be sorted by day.  You can also sort the report by Campaign or any of the metrics in the report.  For more advanced sorting and filtering, you can also download the report into Excel

To your continued success,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hello all,

Last Friday we conducted a live webinar that many publishers attended where we went into more detail surrounding our Quality Click Pricing announcement.  We also gave publishers the opportunity to ask questions that Steve and Will responded directly to.  In case you were not able to attend the event, or would just like a replay, here is a link to the video recording: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/intercall1/view?id=Aug21&role=present&pw=view

Because this proved to be a successful way to communicate with publishers we plan to hold another webinar on Tuesday September 1st at 8:30am Pacific Time.  We realize that publishers will have more questions on the Quality Click Pricing Preview EPCs and this will be a great opportunity to join in the discussion.

Here are the details, and we plan to send this out via email as well:

Attendee Direct URL:  https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/intercall1/join?id=Sep01&role=attend&pw=Attend

Alternate Web Login
Conference Site URL:  http://livemeeting.intercall.com
Meeting ID:  Sep01
Attendee Entry Code: Attend
U.S. Attendee Phone:  US/Canada Dial-in #:  (877) 252-8217
     Int’l/Local Dial-In #:  (660) 422-4755
     Conference ID: 26202103

We look forward to having you attend and answering any questions you might have next Tuesday.

Thanks,
eBay Partner Network Team

Hi all,

As we expected lots of you have had questions about Quality Click Pricing and we’ve been busy on the discussion board answering them as they come in.  There’s also been a lot of debate in the wider affiliate industry, which we’ve been reading with great interest and there’s one article in particular that we’d like to share with you from the Niche Store Builder blog entitled  “3 Tips To Understand and Succeed with ePN Quality Click Pricing.”

Mark makes some great points, particularly about what he calls the “Visitor Intent Factor” and there are also some great tips on increasing your “Intent Conversion Rate” and ultimately your EPC.  Also, take time to read the comments too, particularly the tip about using the transaction level reports.

Over the past year, we’ve taken several steps to improve the quality of traffic driven to eBay sites through eBay Partner Network, and we’re pleased to report that our efforts are paying off.  Today we’re announcing Quality Click Pricing, a new payout structure designed to further reward the affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay and who send value buyers to our sites. We’re also unveiling a number of resources, tips and data to help publishers become even more successful under this new payment model.

What’s Quality Click Pricing?

Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads.  With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions.  The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive.  Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic.  

What does this mean for you?

Quality Click Pricing (QCP) will have several positive impacts for many publishers:

• QCP simplifies the commission structure.
• As the payout will be more closely aligned with traffic quality, we will pay more than we do today to publishers that are driving us high quality traffic, regardless of the size of the publisher.
• Publishers will be rewarded for multiple sources of value in addition to sales, such as revenue from advertising on eBay pages and PayPal transaction revenue.
• The EPC will be visible the very next day and will be more stable on a day to day basis.  Publishers will not have to wait up to seven days to see if clicks convert to sales, or 30 days for new users to sign up after a click.

The impact of Quality Click Pricing on publishers’ earnings will vary according to the quality of the traffic each publisher is driving to eBay’s sites. For many of you, this change will mean that your payout will increase. For others, you may make less money than under the previous payment structure, and will need to make some changes to your campaigns in order to see better rewards. All publishers will have the opportunity to increase the amount of money they make under Quality Click Pricing by sending ever more engaged, targeted traffic to eBay sites. Again, we have lined up extensive resources to help all our affiliates earn more under the new payout model.

When will this change take place?

We launched and successfully ran a 3-month limited beta of Quality Click Pricing starting May 1st.   We paid 25 publishers successfully through the new system and we have already made a number of improvements based on our beta testers’ feedback. 

We plan to phase the introduction of Quality Click Pricing to ensure existing publishers have enough time to understand how this affects them. 
• New publishers that join the eBay Partner Network as of September 1st will be paid out under the new system.  This includes all publishers joining as they transition from TradeDoubler and affilinet. 
• Publishers that joined eBay Partner Network prior to September 1st will remain on the current pricing system until October 1st, when they will begin to be paid under the new Quality Click Pricing payment structure.   Before October 1st, and starting the last week of August, existing publishers will have access to a preview report to see how their new payouts compare with the existing payment structure for them.  More information about this report will be available as a blog post when it launches.

How can I find out more about this change?

We are committed to helping affiliates succeed with Quality Click Pricing. We know you may have a number of questions about this change. Therefore, we have put together several resources to give you more information about it:

• New set of pages on eBay Partner Network are available later today that explain how QCP works in more detail, including FAQs
• Two new videos that explain the concept of Quality Click Pricing (one available today and a second that will explain new reports on September 1st). 
• In addition, we will hold two live webinars to explain the change and give publishers the opportunity to ask questions.  The first will be on Friday 21st August at 9am PST and the second on September 1st.  See our blog post about the webinars for full details.

We will also be on the boards more frequently over the next few days to answer publishers’ questions. 

Why now?  What are we hoping to accomplish with this? 

We are very excited about the launch of Quality Click Pricing, as it will allow us to reward publishers who are driving engaged and incremental traffic to eBay.  This move reflects eBay’s overall approach to quality in the marketplace.   High quality affiliate marketing and promotion to potential buyers off eBay will contribute to high quality buying experiences when those customers come to eBay. 

We published a white paper in February sharing early positive results of our Value Based new user (ACRU) pricing model, which was our first step at better rewarding publishers who brought us high quality users in the US.  Many publishers that had been getting paid $25 per new user went to getting paid $28, $40, and even $50 per user.  Since February we’ve seen even more positive results due to the change and that’s why we’ve decided to take the initiative a step further.

We are committed to continuing to invest in helping our publishers succeed with eBay Partner Network, and to ensuring that everyone is rewarded fairly for the value they generate for eBay.

We look forward to working with you on this new endeavor.  Thanks for your continued support!

Sincerely,

Steve Hartman,

eBay Partner Network

Hi all,

A question that we expect to come up a lot following the announcement of Quality Click Pricing is how can I improve the quality of my traffic?  As a publisher you have a huge influence on the quality of the traffic you direct to eBay.  The business model you choose, the user experience on your site, how you drive traffic to your websites, and the landing page to which you direct your visitors, all have an impact.  However at its most basic it comes down to two things: always put the shopper first and test, test and test again.  If you do both of these, you should start to see the quality of your traffic improve and therefore maximise your commissions.

Here are some of our top tips:

Pick the right business model
• The sites which work best are those that get people interested in buying and they tend to be sites which are part of the shopping process or product oriented.  Examples of types of sites that work well are those where you can read reviews, compare prices, discover great deals and niche content sites.
• The sources of traffic to your site should be of high quality, whether you pay for it or it is organic.  If you have good quality traffic coming to your own site, this is likely to result in high quality traffic to eBay, but the reverse is also true.  Therefore, if you buy traffic to your site, ensure that is well targeted and try to optimise your site for SEO.  (Wil Reynolds has written a series of great guest blog posts on SEO, which we recommend you check out.) 

Create a good user experience
• Develop relevant copy and regularly update it to keep your users interested.
• Encourage user-generated content, such as product reviews – this keeps people coming back.
• Integrate eBay listings into your site, as this generally performs better than static creatives or text links by themselves, unless text links are embedded into relevant content.
• Use the data you have about your visitors’ demographics and interests to showcase the most relevant listings.
• Always inform a user they are going to eBay.
• Do not offer your visitors an incentive to click on an eBay link.

Landing page optimization
• Use the geo-targeting functionality to ensure your traffic is directed to the most relevant eBay site.
• Consider which landing page on eBay you direct your traffic to carefully, as the eBay homepage is not always the best option.  For example:
o If you are showing products using one of our tools, such as Custom Banner, try deep linking to the View Item Page.
o If your content is about model cars, try linking to a model car search result page.
o Use Advanced Search options to further target your landing pages.
• Also, look out for more information on landing page optimization coming soon, where the eBay Partner Network will be helping you to further improve your traffic’s conversion.

Continually optimize and test, test, test!
• Try to give each placement or site a different campaign id, so you can monitor the metrics for each.
• The EPC at campaign level will be a great indicator of your traffic’s quality, so use it to focus on campaigns that are performing well and optimize those that are of lower quality.
• When testing new approaches, remember to set up a new campaign and start with a small volume of traffic, so you can check that the quality of the traffic is of a high enough level.  Only when you know a new approach works, should you roll the changes to the rest of your site(s).

If you have any top tips of your own, please let us know by commenting on this post.

The eBay Partner Network team

Hi all,

From 1st September, we are opening four new affiliate programs on eBay Partner Network for the eBay sites in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland.  The payment model for these programs will be Quality Click Pricing. 

Germany is our biggest market outside the US, so promoting this site is a massive opportunity for you to increase your earnings.  We’re sure it will be well worth the effort to have your site translated and we encourage you to think about how you can adapt your campaigns for the German market.  To help you get started, we’ll be posting a “beginner’s guide to Germany” article on our blog in the next couple of weeks.  And if you set up a German campaign, don’t forget to also set up campaigns for Austria and Switzerland, as there is a lot of cross border trade between the three sites.

We’re also announcing that after 8 successful years, we will be closing down the eBay Germany, Austria and Switzerland programs on affilinet on 31st October and all publishers on these programs will be asked to migrate to eBay Partner Network, starting September 1st.  affilinet will continue to provide support for eBay’s in-house European affiliate team on recruitment and account management, in a similar capacity to Partner Centric, R.O.EYE and NetBooster in the rest of the world. 

Promoting the Irish site will be a great way to earn some extra commissions and it will be very simple to set up a new Irish campaign, especially if you already have an English language site.

Finally, a top tip when setting up your new campaigns for all four new programs is to remember to use our geo-targeting functionality.  This ensures users are directed to the most geographically relevant site, for example someone in Dublin will be automatically directed to the eBay.ie site, even if coming from a US site.

To join up to the programs in Germany, Austria, Switzerland or Ireland, please go to the Programs tab in the eBay Partner Network interface and click to apply.  However, if you are currently promoting eBay in Germany, Austria or Switzerland on the affilinet platform, please refer to your email dated 20th August about how to migrate to the eBay Partner Network.

The eBay Partner Network Team.

Hi all,

As many of you will be preparing to migrate your campaigns from our affiliate programs on affilinet and TradeDoubler to eBay Partner Network, we thought this would be a great time to offer up a few hints and tips on how to complete your application form for eBay Partner Network.

Before you start, you should be aware that the information you provide on your application form is absolutely vital in determining whether or not your application will be accepted.  It is therefore important to make sure that you take the time to fill out the application as completely and as accurately as possible.

The first thing you will be asked to do when you apply to eBay Partner Network is to read and accept the eBay Partner Network Agreement; the eBay Partner Network Code of Conduct; and the eBay Partner Network Privacy Policy.  These Ts and Cs govern what is and is not acceptable on eBay Partner Network, for example the ways in which you are allowed to promote eBay.  Tempting though it can be to accept these sets of Terms and Conditions without reading them, you should resist that urge, as they will tell you whether your website complies with these rules.

The next step is to enter your contact information.  It is crucial that you enter valid contact details into your application form.  While we understand the desire many publishers have for privacy, we require accurate details from all publishers in order that we can contact you in the event of any issues.  Entering false details into this section is a very easy way to get your application to eBay Partner Network rejected!  If the email address you used to register for the eBay program on affilinet or TradeDoubler is still valid, we would recommend that you use the same address so that we can more easily associate your past promotion of eBay with your new eBay Partner Network account.

On the same page, you will also be asked to enter a description of your business.  Please provide as much relevant information as possible here – in particular, anything related to the sources of traffic to your website, the content of your site and how you plan to integrate eBay into that content will be very helpful for us as we evaluate your application.  Any key stats about your site, such as the number of monthly visitors, will also be useful.  Remember – the more relevant information you can provide, the more likely it is that your application to eBay Partner Network will be successful!

You will also be required to select your main business model.  As with all your other details, please be sure to enter this information accurately.  Understanding your business model is important to us as it allows us to better tailor the service we give to you, for example highlighting relevant tools to make the integration of eBay into your site even easier.  Please note that to promote eBay using certain promotional methods requires additional approval – for example, distributing downloadable software, using email or instant messenger programs or offering coupons or incentives.  If you use one of these business models to drive traffic to eBay, you are required to submit an additional form within the application and have this business model approved by the eBay Partner Network team prior to engaging in promotion via this method.

Finally, when applying to join eBay Partner Network you have to enter the URL of the website(s) you are using to promote eBay.  You will also be asked to validate that you own that website domain by adding a small text file to the domain’s base directory.  We ask you to do this in order to help us to ensure the quality of the sites in the eBay Partner Network.

For more tips and a publisher’s perspective on applying to eBay Partner Network, we can also recommend TheNicheStoreBuilder.com’s “7 Tips for Getting Accepted into ePN – eBay Affiliate Network”, which offers a number of great hints on becoming a new eBay Partner Network member.  For further information you can also check out our FAQs.

The European eBay Partner Network Team

Hi all,

Here are all the important dates you need to know for Quality Click Pricing. 

From the last week in August:
• Existing publishers will be able to view a report in the eBay Partner Network interface showing what earnings per click and total earnings will be under Quality Click Pricing.  When the reports are available, we will put up a blog post with more information about them.

From September 1st
• All publishers that join eBay Partner Network after September 1st will be paid on the Quality Click Pricing payment model.
• eBay Partner Network programs will open for eBay Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland.  Publishers will be paid under the Quality Click Pricing payment model for these programs.    Learn more

From October 1st
• All existing publishers* (publishers that joined prior to September 1st, 2009) will move to the Quality Click Pricing model. 

Throughout the transition period, we will be monitoring the boards regularly to answer any questions that come up and we will regularly post related blog articles.

We recommend that you take the time from late August for existing publishers on October 1st to familiarize yourself with the new reports and take the opportunity to analyse the quality of existing campaigns.  During this period, you will be able to test out new approaches to see what impact they will have on your EPC, without it affecting your payout. 

The eBay Partner Network Team

*Note that cashback/loyalty sites will remain on the current pay per action model. Half.com is not changing to Quality Click pricing and will retain its pay per action pricing.

Hello Everyone,

With the recent announcement of Quality Click Pricing this Wednesday, and the amount of new information we’ve made available on the site, we’re hosting a live webinar to provide a forum to further discuss the change to Quality Click Pricing and to hold a live question and answer session with our publishers.

If you’d like to join the webinar event here are the details to participate:

When: Friday August 21st at 9am Pacific Time
Attendee Direct URL:  https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/intercall1/join?id=Aug21&role=attend&pw=Attend  
U.S. Attendee Phone:  US/Canada Dial-in #:  (866) 478-6394

Alternate Web Login
Conference Site URL:  http://livemeeting.intercall.com
Meeting ID:  Aug21
Attendee Entry Code: Attend
     Int’l/Local Dial-In #:  (660) 422-4755 – Session will be in English only
     Conference ID:  24785491

Also, if you are not able to make the event live we will offer a recording available next week for you to watch.  Plus, we are planning on holding a second webinar on September 1st to go into more specifics then.  We hope you’ll find this method of communication convenient and helpful.

Thanks and we look forward to speaking with you in the webinars!

eBay Partner Network Team

Hi all,

Impression pixels are used to track the number of times a link or advertisement is served on your webpage. The number of impressions will tell you the number of times a user viewed your link and can help you optimize your traffic, ad placements, and commissions.  We recommend serving at least one impression pixel per Campaign on every page that has eBay links. However, the best practice is to serve one impression pixel for every ad on every page.

Some tools already include an impression pixel. However, if you are using links created prior to May 1, 2009 with the Link Generator, RSS Feeds, Data Feeds, or API calls, you are probably not using an impression pixel.

If you are using one of these three tools, you should check to see if you are using impression pixels. To check if a page has an impression pixel, look for image tags like this:

<img style=”text-decoration:none;border:0;padding:0;margin:0;” src=”http://rover.ebay.com/roverimp/1/NumericRotationID/1?ff3=1&pub=YourPublisherID&toolid=NumericToolID&campid= YourCampaignID&customid=&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]“>

The important part is that the image tag’s “src=” field starts with http://rover.ebay.com/roverimp/1/

If the image tag does not meet the above criteria, you should generate a new impression pixel with the wizard in the tools tab in the eBay Partner Network interface (log in and look for “Impression Pixel Generator” at the bottom right). More information on how to create an impression pixel.

The eBay Partner Network Team