eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Hello Partners,

Did you know that in 2007, billions of dollars were paid out to affiliates globally? Join us at Content Revenue Strategies, as we discuss why we believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Our own Will Martin-Gill will be on a panel called Affiliate Marketing: A Better Alternative? (Nov. 5th at 11am), where experienced affiliates and advertisers will discuss the ins and outs of affiliate marketing, highlight the key areas of opportunity and offer tips and best practices to help new affiliates achieve maximum ROI. Joining Martin-Gill on the panel will be moderator Steve Schaffer, CEO of Vertive and President of the PMA, Shawn Collins, Co-Founder of Affiliate Summit, Peter Bordes, CEO & Founder of Media Trust, and Brook Schaaf, CEO of Schaaf Consulting.

What is Content Revenue Strategies?

Formerly known as Ad:Space, the re-named Content Revenue Strategies (CRS) is the first and only conference and expo dedicated to AdSense and contextual advertising. Publishers can gain useful knowledge and insights into performance based marketing at CRS. The first CRS conference was a huge success and this year is expected to be even bigger! Check out their website for additional schedule and speaker information.

Conference Details:

CRS is co-located with Ad:Tech New York. CRS attendees will have access to 2 full days of the Ad:Tech New York expo floor which includes a dedicated CRS exhibit zone and lounge. They also have access to 250+ Ad:Tech exhibitors, Ad:Tech special events and Ad:Tech keynote presentations.

Registration

As an eBay partner, you are eligible to receive $100 off the registration price! Act quickly, as this discount ends Friday, October 9, 2009. Simply register here with code CRSeBay.

We hope to see you there,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hello all,

Starting October 1st, we will require that users have an active eBay Partner Network account in order to make posts to the eBay Partner Network discussion boards.  We’re making this change as a result of feedback from a number of publishers.  In people’s experience with other networks, limiting the boards to publishers in the network has been helpful in encouraging constructive and helpful conversations on the boards.  In addition, if specific issues or bugs are reported by publishers, we’ll be able to better follow up as appropriate by looking into specific accounts.

Linking your accounts is easy!  If you have not already done so, please link the eBay User ID you wish to post with to your eBay Partner Network Publisher Account.  From your Publisher Dashboard, click on Account, then choose Business Information.  You then scroll down to the link that says Link to eBay Account, and follow the directions.

Also, we now offer the functionality to create multiple users associated with a single publisher account.  You can create a new user by clicking on the Account Tab, selecting Users, then click Create New User.  This new feature also allows you to link an eBay User ID to each additional new user you create for an account.  Here are the instructions to link multiple eBay User IDs to a single account with multiple users:

From your Publisher Dashboard, click on the Account tab, then click on Personal Settings. You can then register your eBay User ID by clicking on the “Link to eBay Account” and signing in using the eBay User ID you want to use on the discussion boards. If you have already provided an eBay User ID in the Business Information section, then this eBay User ID will be automatically linked with the Super User on your account and it will be eligible for use on the discussion boards without any additional updates.

Thank you for being a part of the eBay Partner Network Community.

Sincerely,

eBay Partner Network Team

While the announcement of Quality Click Pricing was only made recently, R.O.EYE, the UK based agency that supports the European team with account management in the UK and Ireland, already has a few months experience working with the model, liaising with a number of publishers from different business models to fine tune activity. During this time we have been able to identify what works and what doesn’t work in terms of achieving a profitable EPC.  From this experience we will offer some advice on how to take full advantage of quality click pricing and ensure you are achieving the highest EPC possible with your campaigns.

Targeted traffic
One of, if not the most important factors in Quality Click Pricing success is the targeting of your traffic. You are much less likely to succeed under Quality Click Pricing if the majority of your campaigns are promoting the eBay brand and linking to the homepage.  From our experience, the publishers that are set to gain the highest increases in commission are niche content, shopping comparison or review site publishers who direct link to the related product and category pages or publishers who surface some of eBay’s great deals or products available in a user’s area.   

From an incremental value point of view, directing a potential eBay customer to the homepage of the site with the hope that they will be able to find what they are looking for by themselves adds little value.  Good quality traffic should already be qualified with the customer already intent on making a purchase.  To give you an example of how traffic can be made more targeted, we worked with a price comparison site that previously just linked to the eBay homepage through a simple text link. While the other merchants being listed on the page had live accurate prices, the eBay option was simply an invitation to visit the site.  Customers were linking through to eBay without even knowing if the product was available, and whether the prices were competitive. Unsurprisingly, bounce rates were very high and the conversion rates were compromised. By simply replacing the homepage link with a Custom Banner widget, customers were able to view items and prices prior to click through. The knock-on effect was uplift in conversion rate and more importantly a higher EPC and earnings.

User experience
Publishers can add a lot of “value” by assisting with and influencing the customer decision process and you can do this by promoting the best and most relevant products that are available on the site, but also eBay as the best merchant from which to purchase. There is no point in disguising the fact that the products you are promoting from eBay.  A good publisher’s site will offer all the information that is required to decide on the purchase, before actually having to click through to eBay. If we look at the example of a laptop content site, a model specific page outlining specifications, pictures and reviews, combined with live listings from an RSS feed will undoubtedly result in a more qualified customer being driven to eBay. Publishers we have worked with have built out the functionality of their sites further by using the eBay API. Features such as showing the average selling price and plotting the location of “pick up only” items on a map added to the user experience.  Having a good user experience is what will encourage repeat visits from a customer base which is an important factor in your traffic quality. 

Relevancy
If you have gone to the effort of setting up Custom Banners, RSS feeds or even an API integration, make sure that the items that are being displayed on your page are as relevant as possible to the content. With the Custom Banner ensure that your keywords are as specific as possible e.g. model number, colour, brand to ensure the best match. This will ultimately lead to higher click through rates and conversions. Relevancy is even more important when working with the API as there are a lot of functions which will allow you to filter out products at almost every data level. We will be following this article up with another blog post in October with some advice on optimising Custom Banner and API integrations.

Utilising the reports
Because the EPC is calculated at campaign level, it is very important that your activity is broken down into separate campaigns. Depending on the size or number of your sites, this can either be done by category or domain.  With campaign level reporting, you will be able to identify both the successful areas of your activity and the activity that is diluting your EPC, as the EPCs are calculated and reported separately. We have worked with one publisher who used to run all activity through one campaign ID. Although the task of splitting down the activity into separate campaigns was initially deemed a laborious process, it resulted in highlighting that the publisher had been spending most of their resource developing sections which made them the least money.

Paid Search
One of the major positives of the new Quality Click Pricing system is that the beta publishers were able to manage their paid search budgets much more efficiently. Because the EPC is calculated the next day and the amount is locked (unlike the old revenue share a model which could change after the event date) budgets can be amended much more quickly in response to spikes in demand and product popularity. Whereas previously a spike in EPC may be discounted as a blip, only for the EPC to crash the following day, the QCP reporting makes it easier to identify trends across products that are performing well or poorly. Consequently the paid search campaigns can be altered in order to minimise losses and maximise gains from market changes.

Finally, by reading this blog article you may have realised that to take full advantage of Quality Click Pricing a level of proactive development will be required from you, the publisher. Regardless of your technical expertise, eBay Partner Network offers a range of tools that will help you improve the quality of your activity and increase your earnings.  In our experience with beta publishers, people that are willing to commit to the programme and work to better optimize and target their campaigns can improve their performance, which leads ultimately to higher commission.

The eBay Partner Network R.O.EYE team

Now through September 18th Dell will be holding a sale on a great selection of BRAND NEW items through their Dell Clearance Store on eBay.  All of these items are also being offered with FREE SHIPPING!  See below for more details on how you can cash in on promoting these great deals from Dell.

Start promoting popular Dell deals in these categories: Laptops, Desktops, Accessories, Gaming, Printers & Ink, Monitors, Televisions, Cameras & Camcorders, Projectors, Carrying Cases, and Computer Speakers.

Some options to integrate these deals from Dell on your site include:

Simple Text Link: http://stores.shop.ebay.com/Dell-Clearance-Store (Place in the Link Generator, Custom URL Field to generate the code).

RSS Feed Generator: just put in a search term to narrow down the results (i.e. laptop) or simply enter a space in the search term box to include all items, then enter dell_clearance_store under Advanced Options -> Seller ID.  You can incorporate the RSS Feed results directly on your site, or choose to create a widget using Widget Box by clicking the Widget URL.

This process will also allow you to create a Custom Banner, Editor Kit, or eBay To Go integration that fits your site best.

Thanks for your help in promoting this Dell sale,

eBay Partner Network

Steve Wilson has found that bargain hunters can be big winners with eBay’s new Quality Click Pricing model. Steve runs a number of web sites, including specialized eBay search sites www.localbargainfinder.co.uk and www.localbargainfinder.info (USA). He initially jumped into affiliate marketing a few years ago to monetize his ecommerce forum. Most of his sites are content-based, promoting niche products such as electronics, toys and animal care. The sites attract about 4,000 unique visitors per day – half of which are repeat visits from saved bookmarks.

Steve developed his sites using in-depth affiliate tools, weaving the content around them. “My goal is to make the sites appear less like adverts or billboards for a specific product, and to be more interactive for the visitor,” he says. Having been an eBay seller, Steve focused most of his affiliate efforts on eBay Partner Network.  He test-drove Quality Click Pricing on one of his more prominent sites, www.localbargainfinder.co.uk. The site tracks down low cost but high value items in the visitor’s area.

Steve says eBay’s CPA model worked for him, but because his visitors purchased low cost items, the revenue share didn’t reflect the quality of traffic he sent to eBay. His highly engaged visitors went on to spend more time browsing items and categories, and regularly came back to check for new bargains.

With Quality Click Pricing, things changed.  It became clear to Steve that he wasn’t only being paid for transactions, but he was also being compensated for how targeted and engaged the traffic was that he was sending to eBay. This encouraged him to focus on making his site pull up a broad range of freshly changing items, and ensuring that his visitors kept coming back to check for more bargains.  Tweaks to a few search parameters and display options made the site easier for viewers to use and more likely that they found something of interest to bid on or purchase. Steve also worked on bringing in new traffic, knowing he had a high ratio of repeat visitors who would continue to visit and spend money with eBay.

“As long as my site continues to deliver fresh and varied yet targeted results, I will maintain a good level of consistent and regular customers,” says Steve. “Rather than target for short term gains, I can focus on strengthening the ratio of repeat visits to maintain a high quality score for the long term success of both myself and eBay.”  Steve appreciates the more consistent earnings and finds the new reporting more conducive to analyzing reports and statistics. Earnings are reconciled quickly, with very little or no retrospective corrections prior to payment release, both in comparison with the previous method and compared with other affiliate providers, he says.

For Steve, the new system has been a real positive, from the simplified structure to the consistent results and higher rewards. His success with QCP shows that quality counts, and that it doesn’t take big-ticket sales to be a top earner with eBay.

Hi Everyone,

eBay Partner Network has worked with Widgetbox to give eBay affiliates the ability to create customized widgets from any eBay RSS feed. As of Wednesday, September 9th, at 2pm PST, new functionality right in the eBay Partner Network Tools tab will allow you to take an RSS feed that you have created and turn it into a widget you can customize using Widgetbox’s Blidget and Blidget Pro.

With one click access to the Blidget Editor from the eBay Partner Network’s RSS Feed Generator, you can have a custom Blidget up and running in no time. You’ll be able to choose from different layouts, backgrounds, patterns, colors, and headers. For advanced customization, go Pro and take your widget to the next level! This new RSS widget functionality works for all eBay programs on eBay Partner Network in all countries.

What do you need to do? It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3!

1) Create your account: You’ll need to have accounts at both Widgetbox, and eBay Partner Network .
2) Set up your RSS feed: In eBay Partner Network, go to the “Tools” tab and click on the “Widgets” section. Within RSS Generator, fill in all the details and press the “Generate RSS Link” to create an RSS link.
3) Make Blidgets! Once the link is created, click on the link next to “Widget URL” to turn your RSS feed into a widget you can customize in Widgetbox. You will be taken to a Widgetbox page to complete your customization settings.

To your continued success,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Update

Since the Quality Click pricing announcement and the launch of the preview reports, we’ve been talking with our affiliates, whether that be at the webinars, on the discussion boards or in person. As we expected, there have been a lot of perceptive questions asked and so we have collated the most common and added answers to them to the FAQs. These include information on whether the category of an item or the type of link has an impact on the EPC and how to view the time between click and purchase. The new questions or those with additional info are marked.

Hi all,

We know you will all have a lot of questions about the launch of Quality Click Pricing, so we have prepared answers to some of the questions most frequently by our publishers who were on the beta.

QCP FAQs Updated

We hope that this document will answer your questions, but if you would still like some points clarifying, you can always contact our customer support team or visit our discussion boards, where we’ll be monitoring and replying to your comments regularly over the transition period.

The eBay Partner Network team

Hi all,

The European team are going to be clocking up the air miles over the next few months, with visits to London, Paris and Cologne to attend upcoming industry events. 

• September 23rd and 24th, DMEXCO, Cologne, Germany
• September 29th and 30th and 1st October, E-Commerce, Paris, France
• October 13th and 14th, a4u, London, UK

We will have stands at all the events, so if you’re going to be at any of them please come over to have a chat, as it’s always great to meet our affiliates face to face.  Chris Howard and Julia Nisted will be speaking at E-Commerce and a4u, so please come along to support us and ask questions.  The presentation is called “How incremental is affiliate marketing and other difficult questions… or, why eBay Partner Network introduced Quality Click Pricing!”   In particular, they’ll be talking about why eBay introduced Quality Click Pricing, what affiliates can do to improve the quality of their traffic and what QCP could mean for the rest of the affiliate industry.

Finally, a4u have kindly given us 15% off the price of a ticket for the first 50 of our affiliates to register using the code ‘AW0915.’   To take advantage of this great offer, go to the a4u registration page and the 15% will be deducted automatically.

Looking forward to seeing you somewhere in Europe soon!

Chris, Julia, Mieke, Peter and Paolo

The European eBay Partner Network team

Harmjan Heeling likes knowing that every click counts with Quality Click Pricing, eBay Partner Network’s new quality-based payment structure.

Heeling operates several niche content sites promoting collectible items and vintage photography, averaging about 2,000 visitors and 3,000 clicks per day. While he belongs to a number of affiliate programs, Heeling says eBay Partner Network stands alone among them in its quest to reward affiliates for both quality and quantity.

Heeling started testing the Quality Click Pricing model on May 1.

“Immediately I saw an increase in revenue,” he says. The instant boost in earnings motivated Heeling to tweak both his paid search campaigns and his sites to drive the numbers higher. He gave them a nicer look and feel, with an eye to providing a better user experience.

For example, Heeling experimented with using fewer eBay ads on each of his sites. His sites looked cleaner and people had fewer ads to click on, but when they did click on the ads it was more likely that they really wanted to buy something on eBay. As a result, his clicks went down but the quality of his traffic went up. Heeling says that if you are going to do this, though, to make sure to tweak your product feeds because with fewer ads it’s more important to show the most relevant listings.

Another helpful change: Heeling improved his success measures by creating dozens of campaign IDs, providing detailed insight into the keywords that work and those that don’t. He can now accurately link eBay Partner Network revenue to AdWords campaigns.

In one instance, Heeling improved his ROI on a single campaign by more than 50% by refining his AdWords keyword phrases. Obviously he’s not sharing the exact keyword phrases, but he recommends testing 2- and 3-word phrases to see what works best. By linking specific keywords in the paid search campaign to his eBay Partner Network results, he can see what has worked best. Then, if the traffic from a campaign is underperforming, he can make adjustments or just delete the campaign.
Under the previous CPA model, Heeling says big differences in commissions per item made quality measurement tricky, and he wound up sending thousands of visitors without compensation.

The new Quality Click Pricing reporting has helped Heeling stay on top of his sites as well as his paid search traffic, showing which parts are working well, and which might need some work.

“With the Quality Click Pricing system, I get paid for all my traffic, and that’s the way it should be!” he says.

With his focus on optimizing his sites and improving his user experience to send more qualified traffic to eBay, we hope he keeps the quality clicks coming.

To your continued success,

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hi all,

Today we have opened four new programs on eBay Partner Network and the biggest of those is for the German site, eBay.de.  We really want to encourage you to promote the German site, which is eBay’s biggest site outside the US, and so is a great opportunity for you to earn extra commissions.  To help you, we have created a Beginner’s Guide to Germany, with some interesting and fun facts (some more useful than others!) about the country and the site, as well as some top tips for running successful affiliate campaigns for eBay in Germany.  Finally, please remember that the German program will open on the Quality Click Pricing payment model.

10 facts about Germany

1. Germany’s population is over 82 million, the second biggest in Europe (after Russia) and the 14th biggest in the world, which means there are a lot of people out there to visit your affiliate site.
2. The official language is German.  This is an obvious one, but did you know that German is spoken by 105 million people across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, so it’s definitely worth getting your sites translated.
3. The GDP in 2008 was €2.9 trillion, the 5th biggest in the world and its population have a very high standard of living, with a lot of disposable income to spend on sites like eBay. 
4. Since 2002 the German currency has been the Euro and is the world’s second largest reserve currency, making cross border trade across Europe very easy, which is lucky as Germany is the world’s biggest exporter.
5. The capital city is Berlin, but unlike many European countries, there are many other big cities, 12 of which have a population over 500,000, so affiliate sites promoting local eBay listings could work very well here.
6. 55 million, approximately 67% of the population, are internet users and broadband penetration is very high. 
7. It really is true that on many of the German Autobahnen (freeways), there is no speed limit.
8. Germans answer the phone with their last name, rather than saying hello or hi!
9. The average German consumes 30 kilos (yes, that’s a huge 67 pounds) of sausage per year – half an average German’s annual meat consumption.  You can even buy sausages on the eBay site!
10. Germans like beer so much that they even have an expression using it: “Das ist nicht mein Bier”, meaning “That is none of my business!”

5 facts about eBay in Germany*

1. eBay.de is Germany’s number one e-commerce site, with 21 million unique visitors and over 14.5 million active members.
2. There are more than 30 million listings available on the site at any one time.
3. An average German eBay user spends over 2 hours a month on eBay – that’s a massive 12.6% of the total time they spend browsing the internet!
4. German business sellers traded over 3.1 billion Euros on eBay.de between April 2008 and March 2009.
5. The German site was founded in 1999 and celebrated its 10th birthday this year.
(*Nielsen/NetRatings, July 2009, home & work usage)

3 Top Tips for promoting eBay in Germany

1. Remember to use our geo-targeting functionality, so that the tool or creative will detect which country a visitor to your site is from and show them listings from the most appropriate eBay site.  This is especially important for sites in German, as many shoppers from Austria and Switzerland, as well as Germany, may visit the site.
2. Instead of Custom Banner, we have a tool called Relevance Ad in Germany and Austria, which you will find in the Tools section in the eBay Partner Network interface.  Like Custom Banner, it showcases live listings and there are various formats and templates that you can choose from to customise the widget’s look and feel.  There is also a contextual option, meaning the widget will show the listings most relevant to your site’s content.
3. In Germany, as in the US, UK and Australia, the eBay site offers daily fixed price offers on great value products, along with weekly auctions starting at 1 Euro, on the WOW! Angebote page.   There is also a dynamic creative coming soon, which is very similar to the one for the US, which will help you promote the deals.

If you’re interested in finding out anymore about the new DE program, the European eBay Partner Network team will be at DMEXCO in Colgone, Germany on 23rd and 24th September and we will have both English and German speakers present!  And if you have any tops tips of your own, please share them with others by commenting on this post.

Mit besten Grüßen

The European eBay Partner Network team