eBay Partner Networkblog

Hello and Welcome to the Halloween edition of the ePN blog

Fall colors, longer nights and that telltale chill in the air … Halloween is just around the corner. As brick and mortar stores set up their creepy displays, eBay sellers are not to be outdone. Online shoppers can scare up a good deal on hordes of costumes, decorations, movies and more. By posting banner ads or links to Halloween related listings on eBay, affiliates are bound to drive a frightening amount of quality traffic … while driving revenue for themselves. 

A few tips on hot costumes for 2008: With the releases of Iron Man and The Dark Knight, this is sure to be a big year for superheroes. Here are a few fun examples:

Iron Man

Little Batman

Big Batman

and even … Batdog? Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, we like to share an affiliate success story to help inspire and offer ideas to other affiliates. We are planning on creating a series on this topic featuring new publishers each month.  This week we spoke to Squidoo, to learn more about how they’re using the eBay Partner Network. 
 
Squidoo is a hand-built collection of about 600,000 web pages created by people with passions. Each page is called a lens and can be about anything a person is interested in. The idea behind Squidoo is to provide a place where people can research and meet other people online that have similar passions. Anyone can create a lens, and they can use the lens to earn money for themselves and for charity through ads and affiliate links. 

Squidoo has quickly become one of the top 300 most popular websites in the U.S. and has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charities and for its users, or “lensmasters,” as they are called. Creating a page is free, and lensmasters can decide how much of their income they would like to donate to charity. Squidoo automatically sends 5% of all proceeds to charity, keeps 45% to run the company and lets the lensmaster decide what to do with the other 50% - keep it or donate a portion to a favorite cause. Read the rest of this entry »

As you know, we released a new Campaign Quality Score Report as part of the newest Sept 10th release of the eBay Partner Network.  The report is only available for the US, and only affects ACRUs (a glitch at launch of the report meant you could select countries other than US and metrics other than ACRUs – but this will be addressed shortly – we apologize if this has created any confusion).

For those of you who have not yet gotten a chance to run the report – it’s easy to do following these steps:

1. Log into your account and click on the Reports Tab
2. Select Report Type: By Campaign Quality
3. Period 8/31
4. Program: US
5. Actions: ACRU Read the rest of this entry »

We have identified an issue that affected reporting of eBay Revenue, Earnings, and EPC in the US, UK, AU, and CA programs.  Some of these metrics were double-counted in our system. The issue affected publishers from Sept 5th-Sept 9th.

We have been able to calculate down to the individual publisher level what the correct revenue should be for those days. Our team is in the process of correcting the associated data and summary reports but may take several more days to complete this task.  You may also see line items in your transaction download report to debit the overstated amounts in the next few days.  In the meantime, please keep this information in mind as you run any reports that span the associated time periods.

We apologize for any inconvenience this reporting error has caused and thank you for your support of eBay Partner Network!

The eBay Partner Network Team

Copyblogger.com editor Brian Clark provided a three-article series earlier this year that offers helpful insight into how online publishers can overcome issues associated with traditional advertising methods and make money with affiliate programs:

Why Affiliate Marketing Will Save Free Online Content

Three Killer Content Strategies for Building Affiliate Marketing Assets

Five Effective Copywriting Tactics for Affiliate Marketing

Clark notes that traditional advertising tactics don’t translate well to the Web, what with limited control over where the reader accesses content (RSS, email, etc.), and the ease with which Web surfers can dismiss, block and simply ignore ads around the edges of a page.  His advice? Since the Internet is a buyer’s market, become the buyer’s trusted advisor. He believes (as do we) that it’s possible to recommend quality offers without alienating the visitors you’ve worked hard to attract. Read the rest of this entry »

We are working hard to continue to improve the eBay Partner Network platform and are excited to announce our newest release, which will go live Sept 10th.  Some of the most consistent feedback we have been getting from you has been in the area of reporting.  You have given us many tips and suggestions about how we could expand the functionality in this section to help you better and more easily track your traffic’s performance on eBay.

In this release, we have focused on improving this area of the platform.  We will be:

• Introducing a new tab, “Run Reports”, that consolidates all your reports into one, easier to use create flow.

• Introducing saved and scheduled reports to let you more quickly get the information you use most.

• Adding new fields to the transaction download report that will help you see what category and country the transaction corresponded to.

• Providing a transaction ID to help track each transaction and all the credits/debits associated with it.  We are also giving you the ability to receive non-paid transactions in the download report. Read the rest of this entry »

Our philosophical approach at eBay Partner Network is to pay generous commissions for quality traffic that drives incremental buying activity on eBay, i.e., purchases that occurred due to the affiliate’s actions.  Thus, we’ve looked closely at how engaged the traffic is from our affiliates and in the interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of the program, we made the decision to expire a small number of affiliates who were driving the least engaged traffic.  Moving forward, should we notice that any affiliate is driving low quality traffic according to our metrics, our goal is to provide help in improving the affiliate’s site(s) before taking any action such as expiration.

In the interest of helping you maximize the impact of the traffic you drive to eBay, and enjoying in the financial benefits, we also wanted to re-post some of the tips from our board posts which some folks found to be very helpful. Read the rest of this entry »

As you may have seen already if you’re an eBay buyer or seller as well as an affiliate, we’ve made some changes to the eBay.com, eBay.co.uk and eBay.de sites in September to keep buyers coming back to eBay time and time again. 

The changes vary by country, but in summary, we are making it easier to list fixed items on eBay by reducing the up front costs and shifting the costs to the back end final value fees, which are only paid if you’re successful in selling an item.

Although, the changes are designed to increase the number of products on the site and therefore provide more choice for the buyers that you drive to eBay, we don’t expect this to have any immediate impact on any of your metrics.

Find out more on the changes in the US, in the UK and Germany.

US – 16th September

UK – 25th September

DE - 25th September (in German only)

There is a known bug for Tool Validator, and and it currently reports a base URL error for Editor Kit in our Tool Validator Report, despite it being correct in your links. We are currently working on a fix for this, and it will be implemented on September 10. As always, we appreciate your on-going efforts to verify your links, and appreciate your patience!

Dear Publisher,

We will be making a few enhancements to the Transaction Download Report in our upcoming September 10th release.  If you are using the API to automatically receive and process this report, or are an active user of this report, please be aware of these changes and make the proper adjustments.

Field Changes:
We will be adding three more  fields to the right of the existing columns. These will include the Site ID, Meta Category ID, and Unique Transaction ID.

New Field Details:
The Site ID will identify the site on which the conversion took place (e.g. eBay.com, eBay.co.uk, ebay.fr, etc) Read the rest of this entry »