Money-Code » rules

eBay and Twitter.. some confusion

admin — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:27:17 +0000

It’s been well documented that you cannot promote eBay listings on social networks.. or any site you do not currently own. Meaning, you can post rover links on Twitter, Facebook, Squidoo, etc. It has been the general understanding that you can use those social networks to promote your OWN site where you’d have rover links on them.

Today, I noticed a very disturbing post on the EPN forum by mrguyhp where a affiliate had their account suspended, then reinstated, but withe following warning from EPN:

We have completed the investigation of your account and decided to unsuspend it. It is now active again. However, please be advised that as of August 20, 2009 publishers are no longer allowed to post on twitter.com or any other social network (facebook.com), even if they are merely sending traffic to their own sites. Please remove all your links on these sites and stop those campaigns. If you continue to receive traffic from these sites, your account will be expired and all your pending commissions will be reversed

Now, this makes no sense! According to their EPN blog “10 Tips to Improve Your Social Media Strategy” they have the following listed:

Although eBay Partner Network does not allow our partners to directly promote eBay through social media arenas, we want to make sure you know that you can drive traffic to your own website(s) through appropriate social media strategies.

These two statements seem to be opposite. So far no word from the ‘pinks’ on the subject. You can follow the entire thread here.

UPDATE

Looks like we have a pink reply on the post!

Hi everyone,

To clarify our policy allows social network traffic to be sent to your own site, just not directly to eBay. The blog post is correct. We are looking into the context of that response from Network Quality.

Thanks,
Casey

So hopefully, this is all cleared up now.

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Thinking out loud about EPN Quality Click Pricing (QCP)

admin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 03:05:04 +0000

So, I’ve been paying close attention to analytics and most importantly, my QCP preview in EPN reporting. Just like what it was stating for the end of August, my earnings will be looking really good under this model and I was trying to figure out why.

I really think the major benefit in my case is that I use limited PPC via YSM to promote my good earning niche sites. I never been too heavy in SEO, and relied on PPC to drive traffic to these sites. Finding the right balance of advertising cost with profits earned is tricky, but I think that is why my EPC is good on these sites. I’m driving ‘buyers’ to come to the site, and eventually ‘buy’ on eBay vs. driving a bunch of readers. I wrote a post about this in January 2008 “Readers vs. Buyers“.

Now, with this improvement with EPC, I think I’ll do some tests in October or November by ramping up my PPC campaigns to drive more quality traffic to eBay.

While I’m still waiting for the dust to settle, I’ve been working hard (hence the lack of recent posts) on creating Amazon store fronts, CJ based store fronts, hub support blogs to my various sites. I’ve been working on creating a new Amazon store front plugin, but I’ve been absolutely LOVING ReviewAzon. I can’t say enough how great this plugin is. If you’re interested in working on your Amazon affiliate efforts, please pick this plugin up. Only $79, you can’t afford to NOT try it.

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EPN webinar about Quality Click Pricing

admin — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:37:12 +0000

So I tuned into the webinar this morning. It was basically the sam re-hash as the previous webinar. I thought they did a better job defining what they’re looking for as far as traffic. It was hard to determine initially what they felt was quality traffic for eBay, but they did very thorough job explaining (I thought).

They also provided a useful slide asking what publishers should be asking themselves relating to eBay quality traffic:

Does my website provide a good, clean experience which could lead people to be interested in making a purchase?

Move value in rich, unique content that helps engage people

More value in well thought-through integrations that encourage people to buy and help people consider eBay for purchases they might not have

Less value in thin landing pages packed full of eBay listings and ads

Is the website that I’m putting eBay advertising on a good fit for eBay?

More value in placements that have commercial relevance

Less value in un-targeted and remnant inventory placements

The one item I was hoping for was a better definition of ‘thin’ sites. Thin sites can be thin in content, but very targeted and useful to the end user. It almost seemed like they were referring to thin as generic sites that have EKs on them, with no targeting value. Either way, it would be good to thicken up your sites regardless.

It was also unclear about the termination due to low performing EPC. They mentioned that they would need way more historic data before any drastic action would take place, but it seems ‘odd’ that a account termination would be included with poor EPC. Their purpose is to punish poor performers while rewarding good performers via earnings. Seems like being a poor performer would result in low earnings, and either the publisher would improve their site or leave. Not sure why a termination would be in order here. It’s also not very clear at what level this occurs. If I have a earning account and one campaign is poor.. what does that mean?

eBay Partner Network – Quality Click Pricing Webinar Notes

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:45:36 +0000

Today I was able to listen in on the eBay Partner Network Quality Click Pricing webinar. I took notes of the slides, some of the question and answer items, etc. Overall, I personally feel that my sites should do ‘okay’ in the structure since I was focusing on quality traffic and niche specific to start with. I think users going broad and random may suffer in the end. It was also good to see the release dates for new and existing publishers with the new system.

The two speakers were Steve Hartman and Will Martin-Gill.

Introducing Quality Click Pricing

Publishers will be paid per click instead of per sale or per lead, with the EPC to be set daily for each publisher

Earnings per click will be calculated from the incremental revenue with a publisher’s traffic generates for eBay

Short term revenue: more related to direct results of pub’s efforts

Long term revenue: take into account lifetime value of new customers

The pricing structure will be effective for all programs in eBay Partner Network (except Half.com)

Pricing will go live Sept 1st for new publishers and Oct 1st for existing publisher

Steve mentioned that quality scoring related to ACRU was very interesting. I personally remember the concern with this early on. He mentions that poor ACRU quality traffic to eBay went down by 86% while high quality ACRU traffic went up to 80%. I know my ACRU have been ranking ‘high’ ever since the change.

How will Quality Click Pricing work?

EPC will be posted next day at publisher and campaign level and once posted, will not change

Existing reporting stays mostly intact: transactions and ACRUs tracked and reported in epn interface

Improved click filtering to reduce bot clicks and invalid clicks

Pooling to manage low volumen campaigns and publishers

Very small publishers (< 20 clicks/day) will receive an average EPC for all small publishers

What activities have gone into developing the system?

EPN team has been working on Quality Click Pricing analytical models and product since late Q3 2008

Beta has been running since beginning of May, involving over 20 publishers across the global affiliate programs

Made substantial changes based on Beta feedback, including EPC at campaign level

Manually reviewed over 2000 publisher accounts to understand impact of Quality Click Pricing.

When will Quality Click Pricing roll out?

Public announcement Wed Aug. 19th

Data will initiallly be available week of Aug 24-28

New publishers will start on Sept 1

Existing publishers will migrate Oct 1

There are several exicitng ePN developments in Europe

On 1st Sept, ePN will be opening programs in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Ireland

eBay programs on 3rd party platforms affilinet (DE, AT, CH) and TradeDoubler (IT, ES, BE, NL, PL) closing as of 31st Oct

Affilinet will support eBay’s in-house team on German, Austrian and Swiss programs mgt, account mgt, recruitment

UK compensation has been increased by 30% on average

We believe there’s great potential in affiliate marketing

Strong mandate from our seller community and shareholders: invest in the best marketing methods

With your help, we’ve made solid progress on affiliate marketing this year

As a result, we’ve been able to invest more in affiliates
Account managers
New tools
Higher payouts for best publishers

What are we really asking from our publishers?

Drive incremental bidding and buying activity on eBay as a result of your affiliate marketing efforts

Engage users with rich, unique content – get people excited before sending them to eBay

Highlight what makes eBay unique – our great selection and our values

Target SEO and SEM efforst – get great traffic to your sites that can result in great traffic to eBay

Below are some question and answers. These are loosely paraphrased, but I think I got the jist of most of them. There were a lot of questions relating to EPC, and I don’t think the questions or the answers were stated very well. This is my understanding. We are currently seeing EPC in reporting. Each campaign’s EPC will be combined to create a weighted average. The EPC will used to multiply the total clicks to determine the actual earnings. EPC is determined by a few important factors in that they didn’t go to into detail over. Basically, if it’s direct sale based on niche, that’s better for you. Examples included, if you had a truck site, and you ended up buying a Beanie baby, that would be calculated with a lower EPC for that transaction. This goes both ways. So on your Beanie Baby site you buy a truck, it won’t be a high value EPC. You’ll still get commission and value for that click, but they’re encouraging ‘targeted’ click to purchase behaviour. You have a guitar site and the visitor buys a guitar would return a higher EPC for that click.

Issues related to this, and not well explained would include side niches or potentially related products. For example, I go to a truck site but purchase truck parts or truck repair manuals. How does this compute. They did not go into this in detail. I’m also curious how they’re determining how your site is related to a specific niche to determine relevance. They also did not go into this clearly.

On to some of the questions/answers:

I want to delete dormant campaigns (don’t want to archive them)

If you have campaign with low EPC, delete the links from those pages.
Short term, this won’t hurt your EPC.
Calcs on each campaign on weighted average.
They will work on deleting archived campaigns in the future.

What does a quality site look like
Will they receive higher EPC if they include logo

You should be stating that products are from eBay.
You should be trying to create a quality buying experience.
No value added content perform sites worse.
Text links, widgets, APIs do better.

Please show some examples of higher payouts for better performing payouts

Some publishers are making over 50% more with new program
Some publishers are doing worse

Is the EPC a reporting value?

EPC is in fact what you end up getting paid on
1000 clicks at .10 EPC = $100 for that day
Sales and conversions that happen on that day as well as historic data (short/long term)

Should you move away from high ticket item on low EPC site (ie: auto)

Lots of research, lots of clicks before buying (pogo sticking). Pogo sticking to research items on your site is okay. Pogo sticking to random products for the sake of just going to eBay for clicks is bad.
Going to the site to look at high ticket item but then purchases a low price item is bad and will lower your EPC

I have not performed well, will I get booted?

You need to ask why you’re not performing well and determine how to improve your site [they did not answer the question]

I personally thought the webinar was quite cool and informative. I’ve never participated in a EPN webinar in the past, but look forward it in the future. They’re planning on having another one on Sept 1st.

EPC is in fact what you end up getting paid on
1000 clicks at .10 EPC = $100 for that day
Sales and conversions that happen on that day as well as historic data (short/long term)

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EPN – Quality Click Pricing (My Thoughts)

admin — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:14:25 +0000

I’m just like many EPN members out there that are very concerned with the new Quality Click Pricing that will be implemented. Going to the official EPN forums, I have a better understanding of the upcoming plan. Basically, it will be more of a CPC (Cost Per Click) type model where earnings are calculated by EPC (Earnings Per Click). EPC is determined by what customers are buying on the site and the quality of incoming traffic in conjunction with the clicks moving in.

Currently EPC is displayed with your reports broken down by campaign as well as a overall average of all of your campaigns.

Issues that are being addressed, and are still quite unclear:

Will low EPC sites (less than .03) will cause your account to be banned? They mentioned that low EPC for ‘extended’ period of time will get you in trouble, and also stated that they are planning to contact publishers that have low EPC to help correct the issue. I certainly hope so. The thought of instant ban with out any discussion has always left me uneasy.
Will EPC earning be based on a per campaign basis or average of the entire account? I’ve read mixed answers on this. So this is unclear. We’ll know more when they provide this information in the reporting area. Apparently, they’ll be providing reports showing what our earnings would be under this new structure.
Do we or should we remove campaigns with low EPC? And if so, how are we expected to start new sites and get their EPC up to snuff? Again, this is mixed. If it’s a average of campaigns to determine EPC, then low EPC sites would be dragging our account down. But if this is a per campaign EPC then we should be okay.
They’re going this route to get ‘better’ traffic to the site and punish affiliates that provide them with low quality clicks. Question, what do they determine as ‘high’ quality? There seems to be discussion that they’re determining this if they purchase items related to the niche that provided them. They’re also looking for recurring visits throughout the life time of that customer related to your site. Obviously, this is ideal for the affiliates, since having visitors returning to our niche site provides us with additional earnings. I wish we could get a list of high/low quality points they’re looking at. Having a clear understanding of this will help us avoid problems, and also help think of new strategies to meet those high marks.
Will this transfer to new payment structure be painful (lost earnings, etc). They seem to have a pretty poor track record when they migrate to new systems. I still have nightmares of their migration from CJ to EPN and the massive loss of earnings and the echoing chant of ‘There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong’ on our end.
Will they be implementing better bot click handling since that directly affects our EPC. I know for a fact that I’m still seeing bot clicks on my sites even though I’m still using robots.txt to deny access to certain directories for bots. I see odd spikes to a few of my sites which can only be related to bots. They say that they will be implementing better handling for this (again, I worry about lost commissions or valid clicks being called bots).
What are the issues with seasonal sites? We might have several sites that only really get traffic during Christmas, and no clicks throughout the year driving our EPC down. I’m not seeing any real answers to that issue as well.

I personally feel that this new payment structure should work out pretty well for me. I know I try to foster community traffic and repeat visitors. I also promote various sites with PPC providing very targeted users to the site. My ACRU quality score has been ‘high’ for months, so I’m anticipating that my quality should be okay. I’m concerned since I have a few ‘dead’ sites that are not producing very well and have low EPC now, so not sure about the impact there.

Everyone should read the following thread at EPN’s official forum.

In the meantime, I’m continuing to work on my CJ/Amazon store fronts, maybe see if I can migrate some of my low EPC sites to other networks.

Is EPN stressing you out?

admin — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 16:03:49 +0000

So, is EPN stressing you out with the new rule changes and another apparent wave of bannings?

Over the last few weeks EPN announced various changes ranging from validating domains, no longer allowing URL shortening services and grey area of trademark domains. Also, it appears that they’re cracking down on round tripping (either via eBay about me page, store or PPC via YSM). Reading the forums, we’re now seeing the ‘I got banned’ posts which makes things a little uneasy. Here are a few things that you should be doing.

Validate your domains via EPN’s control panel (Account -> Domains)
Archive and stop all sites that are using trademark domains in the FQDN
Add eBay sites to your exclude lists in your YSM account
Make sure you’re not round tripping anywhere
Make sure you’re not purchasing eBay items through your eBay link (I would clear all cookies prior to bidding).
Do not post auctions on sites you don’t own (WordPress.com sites, Blogspot.com, Twitter, Squidoo, etc).
Do not use URL shortening services.

If you do get the email it’s important to be professional and persistent and try to create a line of communication with them to correct the issue and be re-instated into the EPN program. Do not give up and focus on re-establishing your account. With that said, it’s also important to be diversified into other areas (CJ, Amazon, PPC to offers/products, etc).

These changes and wave of bannings does concern me, but I feel like I’ve been very quick to make my appropriate changes to comply with the new rules. Don’t be lazy folks, and get on it.

EPN Validating Domains

admin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:26:33 +0000

On July 17th Ebay Partner Network (EPN) announced some policy changes. They also mentioned that they are now requiring new applicants to verify at least one domain with their submission. It also states that existing applicants are not required, but is suggested they also submit their domains.

Here is the exact verbiage from their blog post

Domain Validation
In order to ensure the quality of traffic in our network, we’re going to continue to work with our partners to get greater transparency into where your traffic is being sent from. Beginning July 20th, all new applicants to the eBay Partner Network will be required to validate at least one domain during the registration process (this is standard practice in other large international networks like affilinet and Tradedoubler).

To validate a domain, you will have to upload a text file with a unique identifier we give you to the base directory of the domain. You can find more detailed instructions on how to do this in the e-mail you will receive when you register or in the help documentation.

Although existing publishers are not required to validate their domains, doing so is a good idea, as it will help us know which domains you are sending traffic from and serve as additional information helpful in conversations with customer service or confirming your identity if your account has been compromised, etc.

To verify your domain, log into EPN and click on Account then Domains. You can submit domains individually or by bulk upload. Here are the exact instructions for domain submission:

Create a plain text file in a text editor and in the contents put only your unique identifier (provided on the ‘Domains’ page or in the initial email we sent).
Save the file as ‘epndomain.txt’.
Upload the file to the base directory of each of your domains that you would like to validate.
Example: If your website is www.ebay.com, your file would be located at http://www.ebay.com/epndomain.txt.
Visit the Domain Confirmation Page when your domains are ready to be validated and click on the ‘Confirm Domains’ button.

It has been suggested by other EPNers to submit all of your domains. It seems to be a matter of time before they require it. Another question is do we leave the epndomain.txt file permanently on the server? Love to hear your opinions about this.

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Sourcing EPN traffic from eBay hosted domains is bad.

admin — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 17:59:04 +0000

A visitor brought this to my attention a few days ago. He was currently running YSM campaigns for EPN sites, and received a email from EPN stating that they were receiving traffic from eBay hosted sites.

eBay currently displays Yahoo Publisher ads on their site, so it’s important to understand that if you’re running YSM campaigns, you need to block eBay hosted domains so your ads do not appear on their sites. I personally did this a while ago, but only for the shop.ebay.com domain, so I made a modification and added the other domains.

Here is the actual EPN rule/policy

Per Section (b)(1)(viii) of the eBay Advertiser Terms and Conditions:
All eBay Programs disallow redirecting end users from the eBay website to an Affiliate’s website where one of the possible outcomes of this redirection is that the end user clicks back to the eBay website via a Link that places a cookie for the Affiliate.

This is the list of domains that should be added to your Blocked Domains on your PPC search campaigns:

ebay.com
ebay.com.au
ebay.be
ebay.ca
ebay.fr
ebayanuncios.es/ebay
ebay.de
ebay.at
ebay.com.hk
ebay.in
ebay.ie
ebay.it
ebay.com.my
ebay.nl
pages.ebay.com/nz
ebay.ph
ebay.pl
ebay.com.sg
ebay.ch
ebay.co.uk
ebay.chodientu.vn
tradera.com
shopping.sanook.com
gittigidiyor.com
eachnet.com
ruten.com.tw
mercadolibre.com.ar
mercadolivre.com.br
mercadolibre.com.mx
auction.co.kr/default.html
half.ebay.com
kijiji.com
www.microplace.com
www.paypal.com/ebay
prostores.com
rent.com
shopping.com
skype.com
stubhub.com
stumbleupon.com

To do this is in YSM, simply log into your account. Click Administration and then click on the Blocked Domains link. You’ll be able to do a bulk add to include the full list. Michael.. thanks for pointing this out!

Some EPN answers to new rule changes

admin — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 17:03:38 +0000

Here are some answers regarding new rule changes to the EPN program. These were pulled from the EPN forum.

Thanks for your questions and posts on the terms and conditions. Although we’ll try to post a few more detailed responses early next week, we wanted to post a few answers to some of the questions that have come up that we hope will give you some insight into the approach we’re taking here.

There were a number of questions on the “Third party re-directs for the sole purpose of masking a referring URL” no longer being allowed.

The objective of this change is to make sure that we have as much insight as possible into the sources of our traffic. We still want our affiliates to use services that allow them to do things like track their traffic and optimize for SEO, but we also require that you give us insight into the actual pages from which your traffic is originating. This means that if you use a system that re-directs clicks, it must be able to show us the URL from which the traffic originally came.

Another set of posts has asked questions about the clause that says “Affiliate links on third party sites such as Craigslist, MySpace, etc. are not allowed.” One question was “does this mean ‘direct to eBay’ Rover links, or does it mean I can’t place links on my MySpace page that go to MY personal site that has eBay affiliate links on it?”

We’ve tried to make it clear that we’re talking about “direct to eBay” links (or any automated redirects to eBay). You’re allowed to link to your own site that has eBay affiliate links as long as it’s within the TOS of the 3rd party site.

A related question was: “Can we use affiliate links on third party sites like Blogger, Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Squidoo or article sites where we “own” the IP of the content but not the actual site?”

For blogging platforms like WordPress, we’re requiring that publishers use the download-and-install versions of the products so that they have full ownership of their sites. For other promotional methods such as Twitter, etc, it is ok for your links to lead to your own websites that have links to eBay, but not to lead to eBay directly.

Some folks asked about the clause dealing with trademarks: “…our partners may not use promotional methods that violate intellectual property or proprietary rights of third party trademarks. This includes, but is not limited to, using a third party trademark (or a term confusingly similar to it) in your URLs.”

I think there was some good discussion already on this thread about this. In general here we want everybody to make sure they are abiding by the intellectual property rights of third parties. If we run into issues with a particular affiliate, for some of these we’ll have to evaluate on a case-by-case basis as they occur and decide what best course of action is.

Will affiliates be punished for overlooked or un-editable historic links that now break the new rules? Is 1st August going to be enough time to get this all done?

We’re going to be practical in enforcing these policies as they go into effect. If there is a reasonably small portion (and diminishing) of clicks coming in from an archived campaign where the links were obviously built before the changes, we’ll deal with them appropriately. If a publisher has the bulk of their traffic coming from links that break the new rules that were implemented right before August 1st, that’s a different story…

Again, we’ll be back with a few more detailed responses early next week. Hope this helps in the meantime.

As for me, I’m in the process or removing my link masking on all EPN sites. Frankly, I don’t see the great benefit on the sites that these are in place, and I’m worried that this will bite me in the ass down the road. The ‘pink’ didn’t go into detail on section B and that is where I’m mostly concerned with.