Recommended reading: “The Ultimate Guide to PPC Affiliate Marketing” on www.PPCBlog.com

March 11th, 2010 | eBay Partner Network Team

Last February, PPCBlog published an interesting article called “The Ultimate Guide to PPC Affiliate Marketing”. Written for publishers who are new to using Search Engine Marketing to drive traffic to their affiliate sites, it gives a number of great insights into how to get started and be successful in this competitive area. There are no magic tricks or ready-made “easy money” formulas here – just sound advice on how to make sure you are relevant, you understand the market and you add value to your advertisers.

You can read the article here.

Although eBay Partner Network doesn’t allow you to redirect users straight from search engines to eBay, Giovanna’s tips may still come in handy in driving search engine traffic to your own websites.

Happy Reading!
The eBay Partner Network Team

  • Adam

    I was going to leave this comment on there website but wanted it to be seen and read by eBay affiliates more then others.

    The article touched up on some very good key points in the affiliate game but they left out something huge and that is your tracking efforts.

    If your not tracking your website visitors your shooting in the dark and you are making uninformed decisions which will eventually lead to your demise in business.

    In my personal experience your websites tracking system, the statistics and knowing how to read and understand those statistics are the blood of your company or desire to make money, sure you can survive with minimal amounts for a period of time, but eventually you’ll turn over and die from the lack of it.

    Think of it this way, with no correct statistics on your site you would never know which keywords are the most profitable, you would never know which website is sending you the highest quality traffic and you would never know how much you should spend on keyword A over keyword B.

    There is a lot to learn in order to become a successful affiliate but one of the most important things you can do is to learn how to read your statistics and how to implement them on your sites so that your not missing out on any valuable information.

  • http://www.113tidbits.com 113Tidbits

    Adam when you refer to site statistics and traffic, are you referring to third-party tracking of click-thrus? I would like the ability to see in EPN’s system a way to keep track of incoming and outgoing CTR as well.

  • Adam

    113Tidbits – When I refer to site statistics I refer to having the ability to track everything. Let me give you some examples of what systems are excellent for tracking and what there current drawbacks are.

    Probably one of the most trusted and easy to use analytics packages around is Google Analytics, its free lightweight, can be easily customized, they have a reports tab, it can be integrated into AdWords with a click of a button and it tracks the user from the website they were at before your website all the way through to the exact link they clicked to leave your website.

    I honestly love there system because it shows you everything you need to know as a online marketer, however the biggest draw back to there system to us affiliates is that the entire thing was built around real time tracking for your OWN website (more importantly conversions happening on your own website and not on an external site)

    You see I cannot write a piece of software that tells Google Analytics to give me a unique ID for the user, (Thats actually a lie since I can get the unique id from the cookie they set) however even if I do end up with the unique id there is zero way to tell Google that this user turned into a conversion. This is because there system is created around real-time tracking and the restrictions of data manipulation.

    There system basically breaks the second the user leaves your website, which means you can track everything about them EXCEPT the most important parts like how many conversions are being made by a particular keyword, ect…

    Now comes my next most important tracking system, one that is custom built, one that you can tweak to suit your needs, I usually always build my own custom solutions even though I would rather use Analytics.

    The benefits of a custom solution are that just like Analytics you can track the user from all over the place but you can also track them all the way past your website into the actual conversion.

    So with Analytics you can see where the users are coming from and how they are interacting with your website but not how many conversions each keyword is being made and with a custom solution you can do everything Analytics can do (With a lot of extra work on your part) and you can track the user directly to the conversion which is very powerful information.

    Now with that said here is the a major drawback that the eBay Partner Network creates for us. You see no matter what you do you cannot get 100% accurate data on how much to spend over how much you make since eBay doesn’t show us in our reports exactly with 100% certainty this is how much we (the affiliate) will make.

    For instance lets say I spend $50 dollars on a keyword, I track the clicks from that keyword to my site, while on my site I place a custom ID in my affiliate link, when the user clicks through and makes a conversion that custom ID appears in my reports and I can use it to say ok Keyword A has made 100 conversions and keyword B has made 50 conversions.

    But in our reports profile eBay doesn’t actually show us how much revenue WE as affiliates make for a unique conversion, instead they show us how much the sale was and how much they are making but they don’t show us exactly with certainty how much of that income will be given to us in additional EPCs and they do this for a hundred good reasons and a hundred bad reasons so I’m not saying this was a good or bad choice for them.

    However this leads us to making an assumption because if I spend $50 on keyword A and $50 dollars on keyword B, and keyword A makes 10 conversions and keyword B makes 5 conversions, which keyword is more profitable?

    Based upon the information just provided its still not possible to tell which is more profitable because maybe out of those 10 conversions keyword A got it only generated $10 dollars in revenue leaving us at a $40 dollar loss and maybe keyword Bs five conversions made us $100 dollars making us a $50 dollar profit, since eBay doesn’t tell us exactly how much of a conversion we will be taking home we cannot make a truly accurate assessment on how much to spend on PPC over how much we are really making.

    Which leaves us with making a general assessment, however we can say with better judgement that if the 10 conversions keyword A made turned out to make eBay only 10 dollars because the average sale price was only 1 to 2 dollars each, we can assume our profits are going to be small since the income eBay is making is small and if the amount of money eBay makes (shown in our reports) is a larger amount in the hundreds or thousands of dollars range then we can say with more certainty that we will be making much more money.

    Sorry for the long post about stuff you probably already know about but I just felt the need to go into it all for some reason, anyway I hope you have found it helpful.

  • Julia

    Hi Adam,

    Many of our affiliates have overcome the issue you raise in the comment above about not being able to see your earnings on a unique keyword level. Firstly, they segment their campaigns into AdWord Groups and pass the keyword through in the cutom id parameter, although when you do this just need to remember to keep your campaigns at around 100 clicks a day. If your volume of clicks on certain keywords is high enough on a daily basis, then you could even consider one campaign per keyword. You can then look at the earnings of your keyword group vs. what you pay Google and can calculate the margin on your SEM activity. You can then also use the Transaction Download Report to calculate the revenue per 24 hours per custom id to get down to keyword level, although this wil lneed to be done across a longer period of time, depending on your volume of clicks. You can find out more about how to do this in this post (http://www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/en/hints-and-tips/how-to-optimize-for-quality-click-pricing/)

    Julia

  • Adam

    Julia,

    Thanks for sharing that post, the three lines which state

    • Conversion Rate from click to sale (calculated by dividing number of winning bids by number of clicks)
    • Conversion Rate from click to ACRU (calculated by dividing number of ACRUs by number of clicks)
    • Revenue per click (calculated by dividing winning bid revenue by number of clicks)

    That small bit of information definitely makes me retract my previous statement which stated “In our reports profile eBay doesn’t actually show us how much revenue WE as affiliates make for a unique conversion.”

    Now that I know if you dividing the winning bid revenue by number of clicks to get the revenue per click you can easily determine exactly how much your ROI is from a PPC campaign by simply using a unique custom id for each Adgroup/Keyword you may have. I also appreciate the fact that the amount of time the user takes to turn into a conversion can have an effect on your QCP.

    I’ll have to work all of this information into my new tracking and analytics software I’m building for my network. It will be very nice to see in a very clean and organized manner the information that is being given to us.

    The reports and the information in them are great but I’ve found that looking at graphs and historical data and ROI details are much easier to remember and understand over looking at a spreadsheet filled with raw data.

    Anyway keep up the good work on the blog I love reading all the technical and non-technical details that you guys write about.

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