eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

If you haven’t seen it yet, the newly released “Internet Marketing From the Real Experts,” is great reading for affiliates. Edited by Shawn Collins and Missy Ward, the book includes more than 100 brief articles on all things Internet marketing from a group of 88 (the Gang of 88) experts in their fields, including Tim Carter, Brian Clark, Joel Comm, Jim Kukral, Ted Murphy, Jeremy Schoemaker, Mari Smith and our own Will Martin-Gill.

Easy to read between meetings, calls, and the myriad daily chores, the book is broken up into “three minute chapters,” highlighting ideas, advice, and insight most relevant to affiliate and Internet marketers. Those of you who went to Affiliate Summit West probably got a free copy. If you didn’t make it, you can buy one here or you can Tweet us your favorite affiliate marketing tip by midnight Tuesday night, March 2nd (PST) for a chance to win a free copy. Be sure to follow us on Twitter and use the hashtag #ePNTips. We’ll pick our five favorite tips and send the winners a free copy of the book.

Also, if you have some time this week for a good podcast on affiliate marketing, check out Susan Bratton’s latest DishyMix episode, where she interviews Shawn Collins about his thoughts on the hottest trends in affiliate marketing. He talks about where he sees opportunities for affiliates now – local, offline and video – highlights from Affiliate Summit West, finding the right affiliate marketing partner and a little about himself. Susan is a top-notch interviewer and it’s a great listen if you can make the time. It’s about 40 minutes long – perfect for your morning run or when you just need a break from the computer. Listen on iTunes or from the DishyMix website.

Happy Affiliate Marketing!

eBay Partner Network

We are pleased to announce that Narciso Rodriguez recently launched his first capsule collection exclusive to eBay! The collection features ten items in Rodriguez’s signature style, including a reversible trench coat, dresses, shoes and more. Rodriguez focused on the prominent color palette of black, white and red for this collection that starts at just $65.

The Narciso Rodriguez collection is a perfect fit for publishers with fashion related websites. You can learn more about Rodriguez, this collection, sizing and FAQs here.

Happy Promoting!
The eBay Partner Network Team

Hello Partners,

As you may know, a scheduled upgrade to the eBay Partner Network RSS Feeds caused a one-time mapping error that has now been corrected. The issue began on February 9th and was fixed on February 16th. Please note that only non-US publishers using the RSS Feeds were affected. A makegood will be issued with February earnings in the March payment to all impacted publishers.

Thank you for your patience as we worked to resolve this issue.
The eBay Partner Network Team

We all know that sales across the whole of the retail sector tend to be stronger in the run up to the Holiday season, when people are in the hunt for presents, and again at the beginning of a year, when they’re trying to bag a bargain in the January sales.  Sales also tend to be slower throughout the summer months, especially for online retailers, because that’s when vacation is traditionally taken and most people would rather be outside in the sun than sitting on the internet!

eBay is no exception to this and just as clicks naturally decrease across the year before ramping up in time for the holiday season, so does the conversion rate from click to sale, because although people still browse the internet, they buy less outside the peak buying periods.  And as the conversion rate plays a big part in determining your EPC under the QCP algorithm, this means that you will more than likely see seasonal fluctuations in your EPC, just as you would have done under the old CPA system.

Bid/Bin Rate per Visit as an Index for US site in 2009

Seasonal trends also vary by country, especially in the summer time.  Whereas the lucky people in France, Italy and Spain tend to take very long summer vacations across July and August, this is less true for the US, the UK and Germany, so the dip in sales and the conversion rate in those countries is less pronounced.  However, one of the good things about summer (apart from the weather!) that we know from our own experience in other Internet Marketing channels and from what we’ve heard from publishers, is that buying traffic often costs less across this period, as demand for advertising is lower, so although your EPCs may drop, margins are often stable.

Seasonality also depends on what type of products you promote on your site.  For example, if you have a site about fishing, a predominantly summer pastime, your metrics would look very different to those from a site about the year’s “must have” Christmas gift, with Zhu Zhu Pets (or GoGo Hamsters as they were called in Europe) being a good example from 2009, just as Wii Fits were in 2008.

Finally, when assessing changes you have made to your site, remember to take seasonality into account.  For example, if you made a change to a campaign at the beginning of January, it would not give you an accurate picture to compare your EPC in the period before Xmas to the period after, without making an adjustment for the natural drop off in sales.  To adjust for seasonality, you can either use the graph above or if you have been a member of eBay Partner Network for over a year, take a look at your own 2009 seasonal trends and apply the same trends to this year’s data.  Alternatively, if you have the capability to AB test, it will get around this problem by allowing you to compare like with like.  Another method to try if you have multiple sites, is to only make changes on one site and then compare results to those of the rest of your portfolio.

To sum up, there is a chance that you will see your EPC gradually decrease from March onwards, until it starts increasing again in September, though seasonal trends do vary by program and by the type of product you’re promoting.  Remember, there is always seasonality, whether with the old CPA model or QCP and the important thing is margin stability or improvement, so if you continue to optimize your campaigns, you could always buck the trend, so try looking at some of our articles on best practices for some ideas!

Hello Partners,

We have had a few reports that some of our affiliates have been experiencing issues with bots and other automated activity inflating their click numbers. We have been working on enhancements to our click filtering platform to help ensure that click counts in the eBay Partner Network are an accurate representation of valid clicks. We will continue to roll these out in the coming weeks.

Thank you for your continued partnership.
The eBay Partner Network Team

From Wednesday 10th Feburary, we will be adding some new parameters to the links generated by the RSS feed for publishers promoting non-US programs. Publisher links will automatically be changed to the new link structure.

For the vast majority of publishers, there will be no need to make any changes to the way you promote eBay or to how the RSS feed is configured. However, if you are using software or tools to further manipulate the RSS feed links (e.g. Build A Niche Store or PHPBay), you may need to check that your links still work properly after the change has been implemented. If you experience any issues, please contact your software or tool provider.

Below are examples of an RSS feed link in the current and new formats:

Example of current format RSS feed link:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/707-53477-19255-0/1?campid=5336450197&customid=&toolid=10005&
mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.de%2FElmo-Elchmeter-Bpz-Magicsport-Magic-Sport-2-2008-TOP_
W0QQitemZ220551167382QQcmdZViewItemQQssPageNameZRSS%3AB%3ASRCH%3ADE%3A102

Example of new format RSS feed link:
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-53200-19255-0/1?icep_ff3=2&toolid=10005&campid=5336450197
&customid=&icep_item=350310730839&ipn=psmain&icep_vectorid=238401&kwid=9020
99&mtid=824&kw=rss

In this fifth post in the ‘Successful Search Engine Marketing’ series, I’ll be giving my hints and tips on how to make sure you are paying the correct amount for the traffic you’re buying from search engines. Keyword, ad text and landing page optimization will all help you to run successful SEM campaigns, as will ensuring that you are buying your traffic from the right search engines. However, if you are not bidding the appropriate amounts for the keywords you are buying, you risk either missing out on valuable traffic, losing money on your SEM campaigns, or, in a worst case scenario, both.

General principles

The most basic rule of determining what you should be paying for SEM traffic is that it should not be more than the amount of revenue the traffic makes you in return. Failure to adhere to this principle can lead you to losing money on your campaigns very quickly! Having the appropriate tracking to enable you to monitor the revenue you are making and to associate this back to your marketing costs is therefore absolutely vital. Ideally, this link between cost and revenue should be maintained at the most granular level possible, so that you have the ability to see how a specific keyword is performing relative to its cost. However, when looking at cost versus revenue on a keyword level, always remember that you need to have enough data to be able to make a robust decision on the value of traffic from that keyword – 100 clicks is normally a good rule of thumb. This is a topic I’ll be returning to later in this post, and will pick it up again in the sixth and final post of the series.

On a related note, we have had many questions from publishers operating sites where eBay Partner Network is the major source of their revenue regarding how to tie SEM costs to Quality Click Pricing earnings. Under Quality Click Pricing, the lowest grain at which Earnings per Click (EPC) information is available is by Campaign. For most publishers buying SEM traffic, we would recommend setting up your search engine AdGroups to tie in closely with your eBay Partner Network campaigns, so that you can directly compare how much you pay for the traffic you drive to your eBay campaigns with the amount you earn from them. In order to optimize your CPCs for keywords within these campaigns, an additional technique you can use is to assign traffic which has been driven to your site from SEM a unique custom ID per keyword. You can then look in the Transaction Download report at the amount of revenue driven by each custom ID. Though the Quality Click Pricing algorithm contains many factors other than Winning Bid revenue, looking at this should give a pretty good indication of the relative performance of different keywords within a Campaign.

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Ryan Porter may spend most of his life chasing the perfect sports car but he also spends his fair share of time tuning and optimizing affiliate marketing and advertising campaigns for one of the largest automotive enthusiast communities on the web along with experimenting on smaller niche targeted sites.

Ryan’s tenure in affiliate marketing is only in its beginning years but it’s a passion of his that goes back to his first startup attempt in 2005. One thing that Ryan firmly believes is that you should never stop digging and selling.

Q: Why did you choose eBay Partner Network (ePN)?

A: It’s pretty plain and simple, eBay really is the number one place for automotive parts and accessories. CarDomain consists of automotive enthusiasts who are avid about modifying and tuning their cars. These guys aren’t buying their parts from the local auto-store, they’re shopping for parts on eBay and finding the best deals from fellow enthusiasts, after all eBay is a community too.

Q: How long have you been a member of eBay Partner Network?

A: CarDomain has been participating in the ePN for about 6 months now, although I’ve personally been participating in the ePN for almost 2 years.

Q: How do you evaluate the economics of different advertising options on your website?

A? Each site varies for me, but at CarDomain I’d say we have a unique perspective on the economics of the ePN versus traditional display advertising. Because of our high volume of content and natural search visitors, I’d say that we don’t always have what the user is looking for. We’re a site that is about showing off modified cars and we lack the marketplace for the products that our users are installing on their cars and while advertisers are pushing products via their websites, no one satisfies the ability to display a part for sale with a price and complete checkout like eBay does for us. So when it comes down to it, I’m really solving a bounce-back dilemma. Rather than losing the visitor 15 seconds after they arrive, eBay is helping me retain visitors and earn revenue off otherwise one-and-done visitors that I might not ever see again.

Q: How did you get started in affiliate marketing?

A: Affiliate marketing for me started with e-mail marketing. I’ve been managing a decent sized double opt-in e-mail newsletter for one of my sites, which until a few years ago I wasn’t monetizing. At that time the market for direct advertisers pertaining to the subject lacked but I wanted to start turning a profit and producing conversions so I turned to affiliate marketing. Offers are constantly changing and advertisers are in and out monthly so it’s a fun landscape to participate in.

Q: What new directions do you think the industry is headed in?

A: It’s obvious that the industry is going in the direction of quality. Over the next few years I anticipate some crazy advancements and I think everything will be far more transparent. I continue to talk with lots of webmasters who are still just getting their feet wet with analytics and tracking. Nobody said transaction downloads and logs are fun to play with but in the next couple years I really expect to see some great dashboards that intelligently predict and extract significant data about your conversions and help you improve results.

Q: Which places (forums, blogs, communities) do you participate in and why?

A: I’m a huge car guy so I participate in a number of automotive forums. It may sound ridiculous but I believe I’m registered at over 60 different automotive forums like Rennlist.com, NASIOC.com, and AudiWorld.com. These automotive sites are both business and pleasure for me so I feel no guilt in spending hours at these sites.
I also frequent a number of closed door sites with fellow webmasters like BigBoardAdmin.com and I’m an avid reader of many architecture blogs (architechnophilia.blogspot.com), sneaker sites (Highsnobiety.com, FatLace.com) and celebrity blogs. I’m honestly not a huge celebrity follower, but I have to find content for a site of mine (celebritycarsblog.com), so I visit all the paparazzi blogs pretty regularly.

Q: One tip that you can share with other affiliates about improving their performance on eBay Partner Network?

A: The only thing I can say is know your consumer and don’t trust your first results. There is never a reason you can’t improve, and when you’ve been running the same play for 3 months, don’t be afraid to mix it up and try something different.

Thank you, Ryan!

The eBay Partner Network Team