We regularly check Google ads appearing on eBay to ensure they are not advertising eBay affiliate sites and so you don’t need to worry about their being any impact on your EPC.

Julia

The links to the first 3 articles that Chris has posted on SEM are in the first paragraph of this article or you can search by “Successful Search Engine Marketing” and you will find them. Happy reading!

Julia

I’ve just recently setup some new demographic ip tracking on my ebay site network and have noticed a lot of my sites are getting traffic from off-beat countries like Russia and China and I say off-beat because as far as I can tell in my eBay Publishers account I do not get paid for clicks from Russia or China since I’m not opted into those programs (not even sure if you have programs for that type of traffic).

Anyway recently my EPC has been dropping a fair bit and I’m guessing it has to do with the surge in traffic I’m getting from Russia and China, I believe that users from these countries are coming to my site clicking on the eBay auction links, then eBay counts them as a click but since they do not pay for that traffic they never track a conversion from it.

The problem lies in that since I can’t make a conversion from users from these countries, the eBay tracking system may still be counting them as a click via my referral links and with no conversions this means that my overall EPC is dropping and it’s looking like my traffic is getting to be a lower quality.

Well it only appears that the traffic is a lower quality I’m sure its not the worst quality but nonetheless it still seems to be dropping my EPC down to a bad low level that I’ll have to make up.

Anyway my advice is that if your on the network you should look at the countries your traffic is coming from and re-direct the traffic you don’t get paid for to a website that doesn’t contain your affiliate links or if you do not have another website, simply remove your affiliate links with generic stock eBay links.

This will mean that all users will see the same overall content but only users from countries you can get paid for will be given an affiliate link, driving you possible conversions and the other users which you do not get paid for won’t sit there clicking on your affiliate links lowering your overall EPC.

I’m not 100% sure if this is how the eBay partner network tracking system is currently setup or if there are steps in the security of the system to prevent this type of lowered EPC but it would be interesting to see someone make a post around this topic.

Basically it would be really good to clearly know if you get traffic to your site that eBay doesn’t pay for (since the user is from a country not convered by the program) will that overall traffic drive down you overall EPC.

I’m currently updating my system I use on my eBay network of sites to accomidate for this out of country traffic and remove my affiliate links for those users to see if my overall EPC will begin to rise again over the next month or two.

Just something to keep in mind.