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
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Yes It is true epn is making efforts in filtering bot clicks but it is better if they give it a priority to this issue whenever affiliates report about bots. By the time epn looks into this bot menace we would get at least 10k clicks and imagine EPC and our hard earned traffic turns into lesser earnings.
Virtually this bot click menace disrupts all calculations of earnings.
Other way around I started denying this doubtful ips on mt .htaccess files first and then report to epn about bot clicks. I believe this approach seems to be so for better for me. Thanks for the guys on discussion board.
This is good – definately a fair pursuit!
We havent seen any activity lik ethis yet, I assume some of thsi activity is by EPN users trying to inflate their clicks which is of course counter productive as the fake clicks are useless to EPN and generate zero revenue.
Other angle is that fraudsters running rival EPN websites are simply trying to wipe out competing EPN sites to their own by bombing their competitors sites with fake bot clicks so EPN terminate accounts.
Its amazing the lengths some scammers will go too, when all you need to do to earn revenue with EPN is honesty, integrity & effort! In the long run its the only way to profit. I build my EPN websites with this as the #1 ideology and look forward to along future with EPN
I agree with the comment above that by reviewing IP’s of clicks that seem suspicious then blocking them in htaccess and reporting to EPN seems to be a good idea
Anand I would have to say that your doing it correct, you cannot wait upon ePN to update there bot filters since it wouldn’t do a ton of good, sure it would simply stop the known bots but in a few short months there are going to be a hundred more known bots and a thousand more unknown bots.
The best defence is to use your .htaccess files to help in the detection of bots, verify your users headers, and then try to verify that there IP address actually matches a real country.
Combine there with other basic security measures on your websites and you will help lower the effect a lot of these bots can have on your website and your overall EPC.
One thing I would like to know about the click filters is this, lets say we get paid only for traffic to the USA eBay.com website and lets say 10 users from russia visit our website and click on our affiliate links, does eBay do there own geographic tracking and say ok 10 users are from russia so we won’t even count these clicks, or does ePN still count the clicks and just don’t pay you for them which translates into a lower overall EPC for us.
I would understand if eBay does not verify the geographic location on there end since this is more or less something that can easily be done on the affiliate end but I am curious to see if anyone has any insights into how they work there numbers with this.
It was never an issue on the old payment structure. Who cares how many bots you got. Sales was all that really mattered.
Hi Adam and Jenny,
Adam – on your question about geographic tracking, even if you delivered clicks to eBay.com which originated from Russia, these would still be tracked against the US program. Therefore, it’s worth spending time ensuring you geo target all your eBay ads and considering alternative advertisers to eBay to monetize traffic that comes from countries with no eBay site,
Jenny – Remember that the number of clicks does not affect your overall payout. Bot clicks may reduce your EPC, but the amount you receive in commission will be the same.
Julia
Julia,
Thanks for some thoughts on the geographic tracking, I was fairly sure that was the way ePN handled the traffic and I’m always looking for ways to better monetize traffic coming from countries which don’t have a eBay website.
Just as a tip for anyone that was in my situation, if your looking to improve your EPC, what you can do is once you detect traffic from a country which you would not be paid for, you can simply show them the default (non-affiliate) link to the eBay products and for the traffic that you will get paid for you can show them your actual affiliate links.
The downfall to this method is that there are a hundred other ways to monetize traffic from countries not in your approved list, basically your leaving money on the table, but then again the up-side to this is that you can keep your overall site appearance and user experience levels high which may generate additional backlinks and SEO benefits, driving up your search engine rankings for some additional traffic that you do get paid for via EPN.