Money-Code » tracking

EPN Tracking Image

admin — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 16:19:07 +0000

A good friend of mine, just starting out in EPN, asked me if I add a tracking pixel as suggested by the link tool. Hmm? I haven’t ccreated any links using the tool in over a year, so I didn’t see mention of that. I do remember that one of the EPN webinars that someone mentioned that they wanted to see some more impression tracking for more publish transparency, but I didn’t hear more on the subject.

I quickly went to the tool and generated some links and saw the mention…

Tip: We recommend serving at least one impression pixel per Campaign on every page that has eBay links. For more info, click the help link to the left and contact us.

As some of you know I roll my own EPN sites (No BANS) so I needed to quickly add this tracking image on my sites. All of my sites have a ‘store’ section, so within that template I added the following PHP code at the bottom:

echo ‘.EPNID.‘&customid=&mpt=[CACHEBUSTER]" alt="" />’;

The EPNID variable is a PHP constant that contains my campid for every site. I’m not seeing increased impressions in my campaigns. I had ‘some’ impressions before, but those were from various pages that had Editor Kits, but now I’m seeing proper page impressions for my RSS and API pages.

I wanted to post this in case others like me, didn’t see the ‘suggestion’.

Side note, EPN’s QCP is still better than my daily commissions under the old system. I’ll be officially ramping up my EPN development again. I’ve been working on Amazon store fronts during the last month and half, and seeing some ‘okay’ earnings from there. Still nowhere near my EPN earnings, but I’ve been learning alot about what works.. and what doesn’t. I’m hoping that these Amazon sites will really pay off during the holiday shopping spree.

Incoming search terms:

epn tracking
quality code for pricing

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.

Tracking converting keywords from your PPC campaigns

admin — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:10:44 +0000

I’ve seen various questions about tracking PPC. You can do alot with Google Analytics (see goal tracking) but it’s hard to put all the pieces together to see a clear picture. I personally want to know what PPC network (YSM, MSN or AdWords) is coming to the site, but more importantly what keywords are used, and what keywords convert to sales.

I’ve been rolling out various eBay storefronts and trying new things to separate from the pack, and one of my goals was to get a keyword tracker to feed my SID value in my rover code. This could be adjusted and altered to fit your needs, and is basically just shown how to pass the keyword around in your site, and drop that value in the SID.

The first thing I want to do is use a accessible function called getKeyword(). This function is set up to look in the REQUEST object (POST/GET) and see if there is a variable called ‘x’. This ‘x’ variable will hold our keyword as the user visits our site. We’re also checking YSM keyword string. It’s also important to note that you should have Tracking URLs set to ‘On’ via YSM Control Panel.

function sanitize($requestVar){
$requestVar = urldecode($requestVar);
$retVal = eregi_replace("([\<\>]+)","",$requestVar);
$retVal = strip_tags($retVal);
return $retVal;
}
function getKeyword(){
$keyword = ”;
if(isset($_REQUEST[‘x’]) && strlen(trim($_REQUEST[‘x’])) > 0){
$keyword = sanitize($_REQUEST[‘x’]);
}
// check yahoo
if(isset($_REQUEST[‘OVKEY’]) && strlen(trim($_REQUEST[‘OVKEY’])) > 0){
$keyword = sanitize($_REQUEST[‘OVKEY’]);
}
return urlencode($keyword);
}
?>

Next, I have a navigation file (I’ll exclude it here, since your scenario will differ). Basically, I see if we have a keyword, and if we do I, append it to the navigation URL. If your a BANS users.. this will slightly suck, since you’ll have to dig for the navigation output and add this. Why didn’t they abstract their navigation to file or single function call? Who knows.. but now I’m off topic.

$keyword = getKeyword();
$qString = (strlen(trim($keyword)) > 0 ? ‘?x=’.$keyword : ”);
?>
"/Action-Figures/Star-Wars">Star Wars

Now, this will carry our keyword as the user navigates through the site. Now we need to pass it to our rover code if they click a auction link. I personally like to cloak all of my eBay links, but for this example, I’ll just show the straight rover code.

On your auction page, you can simply add this code

$keyword = getKeyword();
$sid = (strlen(trim($keyword)) > 0 ? $keyword : ”);
?>
http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-1751-2978-71/1?AID=5463217&PID=xxxxxxx
&SID==$sid?>mpre=http%3A%2F%2Fcgi.ebay.com%2FblahblahblahblahblahPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

With SID being passed in rover, we can see what keywords were used to produce sales. Simply click on Reports -> Transaction Reports in CJ. Then click on the day. You’ll see a listing of sales for that day, and your keyword should appear in the SID column. You can then take this data to determine what keywords are converting for you. The keyword that is clicked the most in your PPC stats does not mean that it’s the most converting, so this is a important piece of the PPC puzzle.