eBay PartnerNetwork Blog

Announcing Quality Click Pricing

August 19th, 2009

Over the past year, we’ve taken several steps to improve the quality of traffic driven to eBay sites through eBay Partner Network, and we’re pleased to report that our efforts are paying off.  Today we’re announcing Quality Click Pricing, a new payout structure designed to further reward the affiliates who drive incremental transactions on eBay and who send value buyers to our sites. We’re also unveiling a number of resources, tips and data to help publishers become even more successful under this new payment model.

What’s Quality Click Pricing?

Until now, eBay Partner Network has paid for sales and leads.  With Quality Click Pricing, we will now instead pay affiliates for each click sent to an eBay site. The price paid per click will still depend on the short-term and long-term revenue of the traffic that the publisher drives to eBay, but will now also take into account the incremental value of that traffic to eBay, i.e., whether a sale happened as a direct result of the publisher’s actions.  The greater the incremental revenue and the higher the expected lifetime value of the customers an affiliate sends, the higher the EPC and total earnings the affiliate will receive.  Earnings Per Click (EPC) will be set daily for the previous day’s traffic.  

What does this mean for you?

Quality Click Pricing (QCP) will have several positive impacts for many publishers:

• QCP simplifies the commission structure.
• As the payout will be more closely aligned with traffic quality, we will pay more than we do today to publishers that are driving us high quality traffic, regardless of the size of the publisher.
• Publishers will be rewarded for multiple sources of value in addition to sales, such as revenue from advertising on eBay pages and PayPal transaction revenue.
• The EPC will be visible the very next day and will be more stable on a day to day basis.  Publishers will not have to wait up to seven days to see if clicks convert to sales, or 30 days for new users to sign up after a click.

The impact of Quality Click Pricing on publishers’ earnings will vary according to the quality of the traffic each publisher is driving to eBay’s sites. For many of you, this change will mean that your payout will increase. For others, you may make less money than under the previous payment structure, and will need to make some changes to your campaigns in order to see better rewards. All publishers will have the opportunity to increase the amount of money they make under Quality Click Pricing by sending ever more engaged, targeted traffic to eBay sites. Again, we have lined up extensive resources to help all our affiliates earn more under the new payout model.

When will this change take place?

We launched and successfully ran a 3-month limited beta of Quality Click Pricing starting May 1st.   We paid 25 publishers successfully through the new system and we have already made a number of improvements based on our beta testers’ feedback. 

We plan to phase the introduction of Quality Click Pricing to ensure existing publishers have enough time to understand how this affects them. 
• New publishers that join the eBay Partner Network as of September 1st will be paid out under the new system.  This includes all publishers joining as they transition from TradeDoubler and affilinet. 
• Publishers that joined eBay Partner Network prior to September 1st will remain on the current pricing system until October 1st, when they will begin to be paid under the new Quality Click Pricing payment structure.   Before October 1st, and starting the last week of August, existing publishers will have access to a preview report to see how their new payouts compare with the existing payment structure for them.  More information about this report will be available as a blog post when it launches.

How can I find out more about this change?

We are committed to helping affiliates succeed with Quality Click Pricing. We know you may have a number of questions about this change. Therefore, we have put together several resources to give you more information about it:

• New set of pages on eBay Partner Network are available later today that explain how QCP works in more detail, including FAQs
• Two new videos that explain the concept of Quality Click Pricing (one available today and a second that will explain new reports on September 1st). 
• In addition, we will hold two live webinars to explain the change and give publishers the opportunity to ask questions.  The first will be on Friday 21st August at 9am PST and the second on September 1st.  See our blog post about the webinars for full details.

We will also be on the boards more frequently over the next few days to answer publishers’ questions. 

Why now?  What are we hoping to accomplish with this? 

We are very excited about the launch of Quality Click Pricing, as it will allow us to reward publishers who are driving engaged and incremental traffic to eBay.  This move reflects eBay’s overall approach to quality in the marketplace.   High quality affiliate marketing and promotion to potential buyers off eBay will contribute to high quality buying experiences when those customers come to eBay. 

We published a white paper in February sharing early positive results of our Value Based new user (ACRU) pricing model, which was our first step at better rewarding publishers who brought us high quality users in the US.  Many publishers that had been getting paid $25 per new user went to getting paid $28, $40, and even $50 per user.  Since February we’ve seen even more positive results due to the change and that’s why we’ve decided to take the initiative a step further.

We are committed to continuing to invest in helping our publishers succeed with eBay Partner Network, and to ensuring that everyone is rewarded fairly for the value they generate for eBay.

We look forward to working with you on this new endeavor.  Thanks for your continued support!

Sincerely,

Steve Hartman,

eBay Partner Network