Money-Code » issues

EPN ACRU tracking/reporting issue

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 20:09:35 +0000

Looks like there was a small glitch for May 6th in regards to ACRU/CRU tracking. Here is what they had to say about it..

There was an issue that started at 5pm on Wednesday May 6th with the system that assigns CRUs and ACRUs to individual accounts. Engineers have now resolved the issue, but you may see some very low numbers or even zero for your CRUs and ACRUs in your reports for the dates of May 6th and 7th. The underlying new user events are all tracking correctly, so we have the data we need to credit the right accounts, and calculate the appropriate account level quality scores for the US program. All affected publishers will be compensated through a bonus in their next payment, although the missing transactions will not appear in the reports.

ePN status

admin — Sat, 10 May 2008 20:34:06 +0000

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.

EPN Migration – the saga continues

admin — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:49:42 +0000

I initially migrated two sites over to EPN on the 1st, and I’ve been waiting to see earnings before making any other moves. I also wanted to make sure that clicks and impressions were working as expected. Early on, I thought my clicks were down considerably, but after a few days, I think they’re fairly accurate. This afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to see commissions in my earnings column!

One thing to understand when migrating, is that the new EPN cookie is different than the CJ cookie. So you’re basically starting over with tracking. So expect to see commissions 3-7 days after migrating the site. Also, you still might see commissions and ACRUs in CJ after the migration, since these are different cookies. People are freaking out, and if you just settle down and think about this.. it makes sense.

Items to note:
EditorKit variables are different and need to be changes. I mentioned this here :: EPN EditorKit Transition

RSS Feeds
Make sure you include customid, also if you’re using RSS to generate your links, make sure you change afcj to afepn as well as saaff=afepn.

Remember to go slow on the migration. “Inspect what you expect” is a good saying here. If you get a campaign migrated, verify it is tracking (Can take up to three hours to see impressions / clicks). Move in segments. Prioritize your sites. Maybe hold off on your big earner until the end. Make sure you have a plan and checklist to make things efficient. I’m also taking this time to add Privacy Policies to sites that have AdSense to comply with their latest TOS.

I’ve also been hearing about people not getting approved. I continue to see mention that you can contact eBay EPN with your site PIDs and AffiliateID at CJ and they’ll take a closer look. It’s important to not be bitchy and annoying, but persistent and consistent. I think if you want it bad enough, you’ll get approved. Try to talk to someone at eBay that can communicate the problem, and to possibly offer solutions.

Good luck everyone!

hanji

eBay Affiliate Tracking Issues?

admin — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 16:06:17 +0000

So, while monitoring the forums, there has been a wave of reports of massive dropped sales/commissions for some eBay affiliates. I remember experiencing this a earlier this year, which spanned for a few months. eBay was able to ‘make good’, which is nice, but it’s an uneasy feeling, especially if you’re buying traffic with PPC. As for me, my sales are down in comparison to money spent on PPC, so I would say that I’m experiencing a dip.

There are a few good threads discussing this.
eBay Forum :: “Anyone else experienced considerable drop in sales recently?”
Digital Point Forum :: “Commissions Plummeted“

This is a great case for not putting all of your eggs into one basket. Personally, I feel that I’ve been a little heavy in the eBay game, and this just another reason to diversify a bit. Also, the eBay Affiliate Forum talks about coding errors (specifically with SID in BANS and potentially a space after the PID). I believe you will need to urlencode() your SID value or you will encounter problems.

The eBay Affilate Forum makes it sound like everything is fine with a few cases of coding errors on the affilate eBay store front, but seems like there might be a tracking issue happening. Let’s hope not, the last time sucked pretty hard.