eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

The category report can be a very powerful tool when optimizing your sites.  It enables you to compare your performance across all the eBay categories and it shows how well targeted your sites are. 

Why is the category where someone makes a purchase important?

The Quality Click Pricing algorithm is designed to reward affiliates who get people interested in shopping on eBay, whether that is within a category related to your website or not.  However, there are good reasons to look at the category report when assessing the performance of your campaigns.  The link between the products you are promoting on your website and the category in which a user sent by you to eBay makes a purchase can be a very good indicator of the quality of your clicks.  This is because the higher the correlation between the products you promote and the category of purchases you see in your category report, the higher the likelihood that you are using the most relevant items to promote eBay on your site.  This is especially true if you have a niche content site or a site such as a shopping comparison site that has a page per product or category.  A further benefit is that the time between click and purchase is an important element of the Quality Click Pricing system, and the more targeted the traffic, the shorter the time between click and purchase is likely to be.

For example, if traffic sent from your site about camping mainly leads to purchases in the tent category on eBay, you can infer that your site is sending highly targeted traffic to eBay, and therefore this traffic is likely to lead to more incremental purchases.  On the other hand, if the same camping site mainly leads to sales in the book, DVD and clothing categories, you may need to do some further optimization, because the time between click and sale is likely to be longer. 

How do I use the category report?

To see the categories from which your users buy, you can use the Category report that you’ll find in the Reports tab of the EPN interface.  This report will also soon be available on your dashboard.  It provides a comprehensive view of your transactions by category, all the way down to level 3 of eBay’s category hierarchy (for example Computing > Scanners > Handheld Scanners).  You can view the data split by a number of different metrics, but as the main component of the algorithm is still winning bid revenue, this is perhaps the most useful way of viewing the graphs.  You can also look at the data at a campaign level  This can be useful for publishers with many niche sites or who have one site with many categories, and have broken their traffic down into different campaigns according to these sites/ categories.  For more information on how to use the category report go to the user manual, select “Reports”, then “Summary Reporting”, then “By Category Summary.”

What to look at when viewing the report

Percentage of sales in a category

A question that is often asked is what percentage of sales indicates that the traffic is well targeted.  Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast answers to that question.  A good rule of thumb is that over 70% should be in the relevant category or an associated category, but this is likely to be lower if the category you are promoting is a high value category.  Let’s go back to the camping example from earlier.  If 75% of the sales are in the tents category, then the site’s content and ads are highly relevant to its users.  Conversely, if only 25% of sales are in the tents category and the rest in completely unrelated categories, then this shows that either the site, the traffic sources or the ads being shown are not well targeted.

Drill down to sub category level

Sometimes to get the full picture of how targeted your site is, you need to drill down to sub category level, as this can show a different story than looking at the graphs at meta category level.  For example, a review site publisher we have been working with initially started working with eBay Partner Network by monetising their vehicle review section with ads showing the relevant vehicle listings.  When initially looking at the category report that approach appeared to be working, albeit at a meta-category level, as a high percentage of sales were converting in the Vehicles, Parts and Accessories category.   However, after drilling down to sub category level, it became clear that most purchases were actually car parts rather than the vehicles themselves.  On discovering this, the review site carried out AB testing to see whether the vehicle or its associated parts would result in the better click through rate and EPC.  In this case, it was the car parts category that resulted in the higher earnings and therefore the ads next to all vehicles were switched over to promoting parts instead, resulting in a significant uplift.

Know how each campaign is performing

You should always remember that you can filter the report by campaign – it is vital that you use this functionality if you want to have the best overview of how all your campaigns are performing.  It’s especially useful for those publishers who have multiple sites about different topics or product review or shopping comparison sites that have different pages for different products or categories.  In the example about the review site, the links on the publisher’s vehicle review section were given a unique campaign id, without which they would not have been able to have done the analysis above.

Look at your SEO traffic

Even if you drive most of your traffic via SEM, it’s still interesting to look at the traffic you receive via SEO and direct traffic, as this may show a trend that you did not expect.  To enable you to do this, make sure you differentiate the organic traffic from paid traffic by giving it a separate campaign id.  For example, a shopping comparison publisher we have been working with, whose primary source of traffic is from Google, uses a campaign id per Google Ad Words group to track the EPC for each group of keywords bought.  The publisher then also gave a separate campaign id to clicks coming from direct type-in traffic or SEO. 

You may have thought that conversions from this traffic would have been scattered across a number of categories.  However, in actual fact there was a higher proportion of products from the technology category, the hypothesis being that tech products are the most common products bought using shopping comparison sites.  With this knowledge, the publisher made the homepage (where most of the organic traffic landed) more tech focused, which resulted in an increased EPC.

What can I do to improve the relevancy of my traffic?

If you’ve looked at the metrics for your account and realised that your traffic needs to be further optimized to improve relevancy, then here are some top tips:

• Ensure the traffic you are buying is targeted:
o If you buy SEM traffic, check which keywords are generating traffic.  If they are not relevant to your site, the likelihood is that the traffic won’t be of high quality and that these clicks will dilute your EPC, and you should consider un-trafficking them.
o If you are receiving a lot of traffic from SEO, then you may want to work on optimizing for more relevant keywords.
o If you are buying traffic from Ad Networks, you may want to find alternative traffic sources or improve your sourcing.
• Make certain the content of the site is targeted to its audience – there’s little point having a site about guitars and then writing mostly about golf clubs!
• Check the relevancy of the products you are promoting to the topic of the site.  If they aren’t related, then read this blog post, which gives some good advice on how to improve the matching.

As usual, we would love to hear both how you got on with the points in this article and if you have any other tips to help your fellow publishers, so if you do, please comment below.

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!

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

Richard Wright is an eBay Programme Executive at RO EYE, the agency that supports eBay Partner Network.  Rich works primarily with bringing on new publishers and ramping up existing ones, so is ideally placed to talk about the best way to set up your account for success.

It’s a new year, a new decade and to help you get off on the right foot we’ve put together some helpful tips and advice for you to get your eBay Partner Network account ship shape and ready for some serious activity throughout 2010.
A well maintained account isn’t just good housekeeping, it can have an impact that is truly bankable. For example, if you have international traffic, are you earning commissions by making sure geo-targeting is implemented?  If you are using only one campaign ID and drive traffic to eBay from multiple pages, can you tell which pages are dragging your overall EPC down?
Hopefully those questions have given you enough food for thought to put an hour or so of your time into taking some of the following best practice steps: (more…)

In 2007 we opened up the eBay Affiliate Program in the US to eBay sellers with off-eBay websites and it’s now allowed across all our global programs. Our goal in doing this was to allow eBay sellers to earn additional compensation for driving traffic to their own listings.

We have seen many sellers integrate ePN links into their sites to add extra value to their visitors and supplemental revenue streams to their income. Some examples of ways to successfully incorporate ePN into your site include:

• Promoting listings of complementary products to items that you sell. For example, if you sell cameras on eBay, you could promote listings that highlight accessories, frames or relevant books.




• Additionally, you can promote other related items that your customers will likely be interested in. For example, if you sell purses you could feature the new Clothing Shoes & Accessories Widget (US only), or highlight jewelry listings.




• We have found that with nearly any subject matter, promoting the Daily Deals program in the US or UK, the Big Deal in Australia or WOW Deals in Germany is a great addition to your site and increases value to your visitors.




• Another value-add to nearly any items you sell would be to highlight the WorldofGood.com program. Displaying eco-friendly products is a great way to further engage your customers.

As you can see, there are many great ways to promote eBay listings that will not only add value to your customers, but also allow you to earn commissions that will not take away from the sales of your own eBay listings.

Now, at the same time, in order to continue to grow these partnerships, we need our eBay sellers who are also publishers to make every effort to ensure that their traffic is not originating from eBay.

What does that mean exactly? If you have an off-eBay store, you should be sourcing traffic independently of eBay by means of natural search engine optimization efforts, Pay Per Click campaigns to your own site, posting insightful and useful information in related forums with a link to your site, etc. Whatever your acceptable methods of promotion may be, they must be separate and independent of eBay sites.

Specifically, per our Advertiser Terms and Conditions, the following is prohibited:

(b)(1)(iv) All eBay Programs disallow Promotional Content placed on an eBay website itself (for example, in your listings, your “About Me” page, your store or the eBay message boards).

(b)(1)(vi) All eBay Programs disallow redirecting end users from the eBay website to an Affiliate’s website where one of the possible outcomes of this redirection is that the end user clicks back to the eBay website via a Link that places a cookie for the Affiliate.

Some of the common violations we see include:

• The use of a link, or a widget containing links on the eBay site, to redirect a user off eBay to the affiliate website.




• The use of a link, or widget containing links, to open a new window (ex: enlarging images, providing more detail on a product, etc) which places an affiliate cookie on the user’s machine when the user navigates back to the listing.




• The use of merchandising widgets that place an affiliate cookie on the user’s machine when they click through to view other items on eBay.




• The purchasing of ad inventory on eBay via AdCommerce, eBay’s advertising product, to drive traffic from eBay to the seller’s affiliate website.

If an eBay Partner Network affiliate is doing any one of the above actions, their ePN account may be suspended, and may ultimately result in account termination and a reversal of commissions. So it’s worth double checking to make sure these aren’t issues with your account.

As a reminder, it is important to link your eBay account to your eBay Partner Network account so that we can better serve and communicate with our publishers who are also sellers. For more information, see the ‘Ability to link your eBay.com account with your eBay Partner Network account’ section in this post.

Thank you for your cooperation and your continued partnership.

The eBay Partner Network Team

Hi All,

We thought we’d share with you excerpts of a great interview that the head of eBay’s SEO team, Dennis Goedegebuure, has recently done with SEOBook about in-house SEO best practices, a lot of which is also relevant to smaller sites.  You can read the full article here.

Some of our European based affiliates will have met Dennis, as he was with us at the a4uexpo in Amsterdam last year and being from Amsterdam, he was responsible for taking us to all the bars!  Finally, if you’d like a chance to ask Dennis a question yourself, post it in the comments section and we’ll get him to answer them in a future post.

Happy reading!

You do SEO for one of the largest online websites and yet you also run a few of your own websites. How would you compare the differences between your enterprise level efforts and what the average SEO experiences working on smaller websites?

I use my own websites to test small tweaks or new techniques in the broadest definition of Internet Marketing. I’m learning everyday from other people online. It’s important to make sure you are not being focused on one traffic source too much, and not to become too specialized.

On large scale, enterprise websites it’s extremely important to think about the long term impact of certain changes. A site like eBay is like an oil tanker at sea. Where you can make fast changes on your smaller website, which can be easily rolled back, on a large site like eBay, the product roll out process is much more complex. As eBay has been a large target for phishing in the past, a great number of extra security checks are required.

For enterprise websites you would need additional skill set to be more effective. Where in the smaller websites you can rely on getting your requirements in using your technical skills talking with developers, in the larger organization you would need to manage projects and resource allocation through other managers. Those managers might have different incentives or maybe even a different political agenda. Getting your work done in that environment requires the in-house SEO to have a lot of persistence and patience.

You mentioned that people should not be too focused on any 1 traffic source online. What are some of the best things smaller businesses can do to help lessen their reliance on search? What types of businesses & products work best with leveraging eBay as a source of customers?

Link building in the broadest form. Even no-follow links will help any small business to grow in traffic. We as SEO’s are so focused on the link as a means to improve rankings, where we have forgotten the real function of a link. A link is “linking” two documents to each other for easy navigation of the user.
Links are good for generating traffic. Getting more links to your pages/site, will generate more traffic. Early this year I gained a link from Valleywag to my blog. Looking back at 2009, this single link was the second source traffic to my site!

Furthermore, think about StumbleUpon. Stumbleupon can still drive a significant amount of good traffic to your site, as long as your pages are tagged in the right category in SU. I’ve sent the post from Darren Rowse, Why StumbleUpon Sends more Traffic Than Digg, to a number of starting entrepreneurs. Also Brent Csutoras had a more recent post this year how StumbleUpon is one of his major sources of traffic. Read for yourself at: The Stumble Effect: StumbleUpon Hits the Big Leagues.

“StumbleUpon is the gift that keeps on giving” I always say. One of my sites gets hit almost once a month’s with a peak of traffic from SU, (see picture below). This can be a great way of lowering the reliance of your site on search as the main source of traffic.
 
What all success metrics do you look at when evaluating general changes to a site of that scale?

Traffic. Traffic and conversions.

I don’t believe rankings will tell you a whole lot, as this varies too much across data centers, personal search or location based on IP targeting. Rankings can only be directional, not actionable. At eBay, the majority of traffic is on long tail keywords. The amount of keywords that we are getting traffic on, is so large, that we hardly be able to track any of the positions. So I sometimes do some rank checking with your rank checker, but only from home not from the corporate IP address. But with rankings comes traffic. So even if Rankings are not a leading indicator of your success, rankings will produce the traffic which is your objective.

Estimating traffic impact of any changes on a small site is difficult, but you can easily manage the risk rolling back any of the changes. On a large scale site, it’s much more difficult to roll back any changes in infrastructure. Even test results on my own site generally will not be a good proxy of the impact similar changes will have on the larger eBay sites.

This is where search engine guidelines and user experience will come in. Taking the long term strategic approach, we don’t want to lose rankings and we don’t want to lose traffic. What is good for our users, most of the time will be good for search engine rankings.

When you run a site that large, is there any easy way to phase in tests while minimizing risks?

No. As product life cycles are fairly long compared to other, smaller websites, there is less opportunity to test on the core site. And even if you can run a test, we have to keep in mind that more than 1.5 million people rely on their eBay sales for their primary source of income. We service these people to make sure they are successful. Driving traffic to their items for sale is our most important objective.

Now, that does not mean we don’t do test at all. We have a number of initiatives where we test, and luckily I have a VP who used to run the Natural Search channel. He understands how important testing is. We get a lot of freedom to deploy smaller initiatives off the core platform to do some testing. Actually these test projects are paying for themselves as the revenue derived from the test sites outweigh the costs in the long run.

One example of our test projects, the New-Pulse (currently we are having some smaller issues with the cronjobs, will be fixed soon) was a way to tap into the wisdom of the crowds of successful bloggers. My intention for the project was to have blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget do what they do best; bring the newest gadgets to their readers, and we analyze what products will become winners. I published about the project here, after I got questions how it worked at the Jane&Robot session in San Francisco. This particular project gave me a lot of new ideas what I can do with our internal data, and how to leverage the broader data streams that you can find all over the net.

Small anecdote; based on the insights from the New Pulse, I found out there is an active knitting community who knit socks during the months of October, calling it Socktoberfest. Pictures of the socks are being shared on Flickr. Here you can see how I picked up this trend.
 
When a lot of your content ends up being user generated, how do you encourage your users to optimize it to help bring in more search exposure?

Our community of sellers is extremely smart in getting more traffic to their own items. Some of them are getting really creative, and have become good Internet Marketers themselves, without even knowing it.

If you are a seller at eBay, and you would like to become successful, you would do activities that resemble the activities of most SEO’s. Keyword research, title/headline construction, quality content in the item description, good pictures for the window shopper, and maybe even some social media on- and off eBay.

However, their success stands or falls with the tools that eBay provides the sellers. For years we have special tools for the sellers that have an eBay store. Custom categories, larger images, store descriptions at the top of the page, custom page title optimization tool. We have a number of help pages describing these functions. This reminds me I have to start a project to update these!

Furthermore, eBay has a top sellers outreach team. A former colleague of mine from the International Marketing team is now working on that team. She reaches out to me pro-actively to get top ranking factors or tips into their customer outreach scripts.

Next year, we will conduct a dedicated SEO best practice sharing session with the team in Salt Lake City to educate them on SEO. While we are there, we probably will be spending some time with our Customer service representatives to understand how they can help the community of sellers becoming more successful through integrating SEO into their listings.

People sell some of the most remarkable items on eBay, and sometimes items can generate quite a bit of buzz before the listing ends. When listings end for buzz-worthy and well linked to items is there any way to capture that built up equity?

Currently, we distinguish between 3 types of View Item Pages. Open, closed, Expired.

Open, means the item is still for sale, which can be between 1-30 days, depending on the sales format. We also have a format for store listings, which has a duration of good till cancelled.

Closed, means the item has just been closed, but will be available longer for review. The content lives in the database, and the page is still available on the same URL as before. We actually see that our community finds these pages very helpful in their purchasing process to look up historical prices.

Expired, means the item is no longer available for review. The URL will give a 404 error, displaying a message the item has ended or has been removed.

There have been some attempts to capture the link equity from the buzz-worthy eBay items in the past. A couple of years ago, a project was launched called: “Best of eBay”. This was essentially a digg-kinda site, where community could vote for the best and weirdest items. Unfortunately, the site was not designed with the eBay community in mind, and poorly marketed. It failed to live up to its expectations, and the project died.

You are right that there might be a good way of capturing more of the incoming link equity on the rare and buzz-worthy items. I recently even bought a book on eBay, which listed all the rare and viral items over the years. Thinking about all the links that went to the Virgin Marry Grilled Cheese Sandwich, makes me excited. Maybe not a lot of people will be searching every day on a sandwich that displays the Virgin Marry, but at least you can sell a lot of toasters around it!

I sometimes browse around the strange items that are for sale in search for link bait ideas. The strange eBay items are a perfect fit for pure white hat link bait. Just check out this Elvis Personally owned/worn Lion Claw Necklace that sold for almost $30K, or the auction of the popular PVRblog.com site, starting at $0.99, going for more than $12K.

For 2010, I might start a new pet project that will tap into the wealth of strange and funny items getting PR attention around the globe. IMHO as long as the project drives value for our customers, it will be successful in the search engines too. And will be a lot of fun to play around with.

You guys have more data than many search engines do. How do you leverage it help define your SEO strategy?

I really love the eBay data! I have made it my mission, and a pet project, to do more with this data in the future for eBay and the seller’s community.

The eBay site is not only a marketplace, where buyers and sellers can find each other for common or rare products; eBay is also very much a search engine which reflects shopping intent. This shopping search volume is accompanied with conversion data. Based on keywords, or product searches, we track what sells and what does not get sold.
Our paid search colleagues are world class in building predictive models for the conversion rate per keyword. For over 5 years, the paid search teams have squeezed more efficiency out of the paid search budgets to get more for the same investment.

On top of this predictive modeling, the technology team has build our own paid search platform, which makes it easy to scale large amounts of keywords, optimizing for the highest ROI, across multiple countries and platforms.
If you have large amounts of data, it will become more important to invest as a company in analytical and technical resources. You need the analytics to understand what the data can tell you, on which you can form actionable projects to drive more efficiency. You need technology investments to build the platforms to execute against the learning’s the data has told you.

One good example of this was the outbreak of the Zhu Zhu Pets as THE toy for the Xmas shopping season this year. A large number of online data providers have reported on the popularity of the little mechanical hamster right after Black Friday/Cyber Monday. I spotted an increase in search volume on the eBay site back in September, while digging through some internal eBay search data.

Thinking about your career path and how many things worked well for you, what were some of the keys to so many things falling into place for you? If a person wants to become an enterprise level SEO, what are the key things they should focus on learning & doing?

In 2005 I read the book: “Who Moved My cheese”. This changed my life in so many ways, as it changed my attitude towards change. Change is all around us. The way you react on changes around you can impact your success in a big way. One particular rule from the book that made me change myself and the path of my life is: “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?”

I thought that was a wise lesson, and it got me to the point in my life where I’m currently at. I had the opportunity to move to the US for a job that I wanted. If I would have acted out of my fears, I probably would not have done it. But facing the fears, and what these really were, it became really clear for me that I always could return back to The Netherlands without losing too much.
If you want to become an enterprise level SEO, you should do three things:

1. Read the book: “Never eat alone” and start learning how to build connections and relationships asap!




2. Learn from the tech teams how scaling large websites work, and about the problems which can arise from changing the infrastructure




3. Keep learning more SEO on a daily basis.

Dennis Goedegebuure

eBay Motors in the US is now offering buyers a new layer of confidence by offering a free 100-point Experian AutoCheck vehicle history report with every used vehicle listing!

eBay Motors is the number one automotive site on the Web, with more than 10 million unique visitors each month and one passenger car sold every minute.

Cars listed with a vehicle history report enjoy 15 percent more interest than those without!

How It Works

Each vehicle report is scored between one and 100 in relation to vehicles of similar model, year and class, and also considers whether the car has been:

• Stolen, salvaged or rebuilt.
• Turned in under a lemon law.
• In a flood or hail storm.
• In an accident or fire.
• A victim of potential odometer rollback.
• Used as a rental or fleet vehicle, or as a police car or taxi.

Why It Matters

When a used car shopper is provided with a vehicle history report, they are 82% more confident in their purchase. With more than 81% of vehicle sales in the US comprised of used cars, the report is a significant tool in converting customers.

eBay Motors Does More

eBay Motors continues to offer a wide range of features to enhance trust for buyers including a buyer protection plan, vehicle purchase protection, seller feedback and vehicle inspections.

Promote eBay Motors Today

You read above that eBay Motors sells a vehicle every minute – if you aren’t already, now is the time to start promoting eBay Motors and reaping the rewards (and commission!). We informed you of the eBay Motors Widget in this blog post. We also have a variety of banners available in the eBay Partner Network (ePN) dashboard. To find the banners, when logged-in to your ePN account, click on ‘Tools’ and then ‘Creatives Generator’ and look for the perfect eBay Motors creative that is right for your site! You may also want to promote the fact that eBay is giving away a free vehicle history report, as this is likely to increase your conversion of click to sale. And finally remember, we recognize that vehicles are a less spontaneous purchase than most other categories on the eBay site and the QCP algorithm has been adjusted to take this into account.

Thanks for partnering with eBay Motors!

The eBay Partner Network Team

So far, my posts in the ‘Successful Search Engine Marketing’ series have focused on techniques which will come in useful when buying traffic on any search engine.  However, all the keyword, ad text and landing page optimization in the world will only get you so far if you’re buying traffic from the wrong places.  In this fourth post, I’ll be addressing this issue by giving you some tips on which traffic sources offer good value for money, and which ones are best approached with caution.

Which search engines should I buy my traffic from?

When they think about search, the company which immediately springs to mind for most people is, of course, Google.  The statistics bear this out pretty clearly: according to Nielsen NetRatings, in November 2009 Google served 15.4 billion page views in the US alone.  By comparison, Yahoo Search served 2.7 billion impressions and Microsoft’s ‘Bing’ engine served almost 2 billion.  No other search engine passed the 1 billion mark.  In many European countries, Google’s share of searches is even greater than in the US, topping 90% in markets such as Germany.  As a result of this, advertisers also almost invariably start with Google when thinking about SEM, and many never investigate the other options in the market.

While this is understandable, in my view it’s a mistake to restrict yourself to Google AdWords, for reasons I’ll come to later.  Nonetheless, it is the obvious place to start, since it is difficult to imagine a successful SEM strategy which doesn’t include Google.  Not only does Google dominate its rivals when it comes to traffic volumes, it also tends to set the standards which other search engines follow in areas such as advertiser policies, how to determine ad quality, and targeting options available to advertisers – so familiarity with Google will stand you in good stead when advertising on other engines.  For people new to SEM, Google also offers clear, detailed help content.  Google’s superior search volumes, combined with delivering traffic of a consistently high quality to advertisers, means that most advertisers should expect to spend the majority of their SEM budgets with Google, though the extent to which this is the case will differ according to the relative market share each engine enjoys in the countries in which you are advertising.

Despite Google’s many advantages over competing search engines, I would still encourage anyone who is serious about driving traffic to their sites via SEM to experiment with Google’s largest rivals.  The offerings from Yahoo! and Microsoft, Yahoo! Search Marketing (commonly known as YSM) and Microsoft AdCenter, both operate in much the same way as Google AdWords: keywords are organized into Campaigns and AdGroups; different ad text variations can be rotated for each Ad Group; and a ‘Quality Score’ measure is used to denote the relevance of your ads for each keyword.  These shared attributes across engines makes it relatively simple to take your existing Google AdWords campaigns and apply them to YSM and AdCenter – indeed, Yahoo and Microsoft have both made conscious efforts over the last few years to align their systems more closely with AdWords partly in order to make it easier to transfer campaigns from Google.   (more…)

With a new year quickly approaching, for many a smart, responsible and admirable New Year’s resolution is to find ways to ‘Go Green’ and become more environmentally friendly in 2010.

eBay is passionate about constantly finding ways to be more eco-friendly, and we want to share with you some of the things we’re doing and offer ideas on what you can do to make greener choices and promote eco-friendly products.

The Green Team

Did you know that you can take things that you already own and repurpose them into green items? You can join eBay’s Green Team and get free access to tons of information on how to do just that. You can also learn ways to Buy Green, Sell Green and get inspiration on how to Think Green.

eBay Inc.’s Green Actions

Take a look at some of eBay’s Green initiatives. Since 1998, an estimated $100 billion in goods have been reused, made possible only by the eBay community. eBay is committed to a Green campus, and with Green buildings, energy efficiency, alternative power and more, since 2007 eBay has been a carbon neutral company. In 2009, four of eBay’s buildings won Emerald Awards, which are BOMA’s green/sustainability awards which celebrate high performance, energy efficient buildings.

How You Can Promote Eco-Friendly Products

You can find great information about eBay’s WorldofGood.com in this earlier post. WorldofGood.com even offers an Eco Positive center, where you can find nearly 20,000 products from a wide variety of categories.

New WorldofGood.com Widget

We are very excited to announce our newly launched WorldofGood.com Widget! Once logged-in to your eBay Partner Network account, click on ‘Tools’ and then ‘Widgets’ to access this new widget. Implementing the WorldofGood.com Widget will make your pages more dynamic and rich by displaying beautiful handmade products from around the world.

Let Our Tools Do the Work

With our Tools, you can find sellers on eBay that only offer eco-friendly products and promote them. To easily highlight specific sellers, use our Widgets and API to select individual Seller IDs.

Utilize search terms in our Widgets and API to highlight the precise items that you want to show on your site. For example, enter “eco-friendly diaper bag” or “eco-friendly shoes” and see all of the corresponding items that return.

Finally, use the Link Generator to create links to custom URLs where the products that you want to promote on your site(s) reside.

Our tools offer a large variety of ways to highlight and promote eco-friendly items on eBay, so use them to your advantage.

If you have additional ideas on how to ‘Go Green’ with eBay Partner Network, we welcome you to share them with us!

To your continued success,

Amanda Lucas, Affiliate Program Manager at PartnerCentric