Money-Code

Coding For Online Success

ePN status

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Hello All. First of all, I’d like to apologize for the lack of posts here at Money-Code.com. Frankly, I’ve been quite busy with web development clients, and that really puts things on the back burner as far as affiliate marketing. Not to mention, that I’m quite frustrated with the current state of eBay’s ePN and the drastic change of commissions since migrating. I wanted to give you a summary of where I am, and point out some interesting results.

I began by migrating a few of my big earners to ePN on 4/1 to take advantage of the 5% early bird migration (that’s laughable now). The first thing I noticed were the lack of commissions almost immediately. I was showing clicks and impressions, so my tracking link code and campids were correct. I also noticed the lack of ACRUs. I had 3 CRUs in April, but none converted. This is unusual, since I was receiving 10 or ACRUs on a consistent monthly basis.

Regardless, of the situation, I was still pushing sites to ePN on hunks. I have 60+ sites using eBay now, and wanted to slowly migrate, in case there were code issues reported from eBay to explain the lack of commissions. One item that did come up was the urlencode handling for the sid or customid fields. In one blog entry then mentioned that ‘%’ and ‘_’ needed to be encoded, which is retarded since % is the start of a encoded character. I however was using ‘_’ in my customids to replace spacing. I then converted my keyword capture script to simply parse out any non-alphanumeric characters. Thought I’d play it safe. No immediate results were discovered.

Another item brought up was the link generation typeid. I’ve been seeing people have trouble with type=2 links which are the new ‘item id’ links. So I started switching back to type=4 which was the original flex destination tool URL. Now, I started seeing better commissions, but this could still be related to cookie life, or change in the economy.

I mention a change in the economy, because I also noticed a considerable drop in my AdSense earnings as well as a considerable drop in ‘clicks’ in my Yahoo YSM campaigns. It was interesting to see things go down all areas, and we must consider this data.

I now have about 90% of my sites migrated, and I’m projecting a gross affiliate income of $1100 for the month of May, which is horrible considering I grossed $2000 in March. We should expect ups and downs, but there definitely appears to be something wrong with commission and ACRU tracking. I received my first ACRU at ePN today (5/10) since I started migrating on 4/1, again, I use to get approximately 10 ACRUs / month at CJ.

The only silver lining for me is that eBay has a good track record for make goods.. hopefully they’ll continue while at ePN.

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