The eBay Partner Network announced some changes as of August 1st affecting their ACRU (active confirmed registered user) payouts. There are two ways publishers make money with the EPN, sending traffic to eBay that results in successful purchase or signing up new eBay users. If a user signed up via a referral from your site you would get a flat amount for that sign up. Under the new policy the quality of the account created is taken into consideration, by judging the expected lifetime value, in determining the payout for the account signup. All publishers will be put into tiers based on the quality of traffic sent with the tiers ranging from $0 - $50 dollars. When I logged into my eBay Partner Network dashboard I saw the news alert concerning the change but couldn’t find a link showing the actual tier structure and where each payout threshold lay. I’m sure there will be some grumbling about this as the ACRU payouts always seemed pretty ripe for gaming by scam artists, I just started working with the EPN so this doesn’t negatively affect me.
Which brings me to a little status update concerning my EPN / McJiffy websites, discountroombas.com and joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com, both so far have brought in a little money. The discountroombas.com site has been doing much better earning $14.08, and I’ve only paid out $12.35 in PPC campaigns. On the other hand joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com isn’t performing quite as well, it has made only $4.44 after spending $19.63 in PPC campaigns. Not exactly encouraging. But I do think I can improve the Josh Hamilton site by tuning the landing page, it’s currently using the McJiffy default, maybe embedding a video of him from the home run derby and putting some better graphics will excite people more and result in more conversions. I’m not overly concerned yet, with eBay’s 30 day look back window for conversion tracking the site could start to move towards positive ground soon, I’ll need to do some link building to improve organic traffic with that site.
Seeing the success I am already having with the Roombas site I decided to try another high margin product that does well in the aftermarket, Apple MacBooks. I purchased discount-macbooks.com this morning on godaddy.com, I plan on having the site up this afternoon.
I haven’t done much in the realm of affiliate marketing so far, the bulk of online revenue thus far has been through PPC (pay per click) and direct sales. But that changed today with my first affiliate sale! It was through the eBay Partner Network. Previously I had setup two sites, discountroombas.com and joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com, that utilized the mcjiffy script and the eBay Partner Network search feeds.
My first instinct was that somebody had won an auction via joshhamiltonmemorabilia.com since I have two PPC campaigns, via Yahoo and Microsoft. However it was actually from discountroombas.com, the site has had less than 25 total visitors, most wandering in from digitalpoint so I’m pretty surprised somebody made a purchase, but I won’t complain. This actually validates my assumption, to a purely circumstantial extent at least so far, expensive items will tend to do better on eBay affiliate sites due to the gap between the aftermarket price and the retail price. I had been putting time and money into the Josh Hamilton site on more of lark and interest in him after his home run derby performance.
So feel free to share any stories about your first affiliate conversion, which network was it, how hard was it to get that conversion, was it worth it, etc…
When Google acquired DoubleClick earlier this year they got Performics, an affiliate network, they have since rebranded it as the Google Affiliate Network. Affiliate networks work with Advertisers to develop CPA campaigns. CPA, or Cost Per Action, advertisers usually pay the highest of the various monetization methods: CPM, CPC, or CPA. Advertisers only pay a Publisher when an specifc action is taken such as a user sign up or download of trial software.
Advertisers tend prefer CPA campaigns over other types because they only pay for actual results, after the conversion has taken place. CPM and CPC advertising requires the user to not only take an action to initiate an interaction between the visitor and the Advertiser but must then compel the visitor to take another action such as signing up.
Some of the other players in the affiliate network space, Affnet.com or Commission Junction, need to worry. Google has the scale to immediately contend with the established affiliate networks, and as small publishers look for ways beyond AdSense to monetize their audience “graduating” into Google’s Affiliate Network will be a natural progression.
Cookies are of paramount importance in the internet advetising space, in fact, I would go so far as to say advertising on the internet could not exist without them. Why? Glad you asked! Cookies are little files of data that get set when you visit a site and are accessible when you return to the site that set them, maybe they do something as innoculous as automatically log you in upon return or maybe they store other information, such as what link you clicked to get there. Regardless, they are there to store bits of data about your browsing history. Alarmed? Probably not if you are reading this blog bug but if you are, as Sun’s Scott McNealy said way back in 1999, “get over it“.
While cookies can help sites track things such as visitation frequency and demographic data they are even more important in the context of affiliate marketing. The cookie indicates which affiliate the visitor arrived through and consequently, who get’s paid if/when the visitor converts. Since visitors may not necessarily convert (buy, sign up, whatever) on the initial visit the affiliate marketer needs window of time with which they can be credited for the action. Typical affiliate ranges could be anywhere from 7 to 90 days or more.
I was browsing the digitalpoint forums and found a user asking about the duration of the eBay Partner Network cookie. I couldn’t find this in their documentation so I did a little experiment. I cleared my browser cookies and went to discountroombas.com, the niche eBay site I plan on experimenting with. I had already implement the RSS widget that populates a list of sales meeting certain keword requirements, in my case roombas.
Anyway the intial niche site set cookies under two domains, with dates ranging from end of session (when I leave the site) all the way through 6/24/2010. It wasn’t until I clicked on an auction link that a cookie corresponding to my affiliate status was set (highlighted in the picture above). In this case the eBay Partner Network cookies was set to expire after 30 days. That meant that if the user that clicked arrived to eBay through my site and either signed up for a new account or placed the winning bid on auction link they clicked on would end up netting me X dollars. Had this visitor joined or won an auction after 31 days I would not get get anything.
Bottom line, if you are working with an affiliate program, check the terms of service. The longer the cookie duration for conversion tracking the better.
WordPress is a near ubiquitous blogging and content management systems out there. Not only do some of the biggest blogs out there like techcrunch utilize it but so do small niche sites that end up with a few pages before whithering into the ether, and everything in between, including NicheBuilder.net. But while ubiquitey makes WordPress platform a reliable proven choice it also means there are literally dozens, if not hundreds, of sites that look just like yours. If you want to spend the money or you have the time and expertise you can contract out or develop a custom one off theme yourself. Since my expertise isn’t in PHP/CSS but rather .NET I decided I would purchase a theme. Why didn’t hire a developer to create a custom theme for me so the site would really stand out? Three reasons. One, I could still get a very clean, professional looking theme without spending a few thousand dollars. Two, if I want to start other niche WordPress sites, I would need a theme that I could use over and over as a starting point. Three, the theme developer I settled on offered an affiliate program (af).
Why was an affiliate program a factor in where I purchase my theme from? Simple, were I to ignore a potential revenue stream through the referral of new customers to the theme developer would be contrary to the whole point of this blog. Affilates programs are what are referred to as PPA/CPA programs, Pay Per Action or Cost Per Action depending on whether you are the publisher (affilate) or the advertiser (seller). I’ll be discussing affiliate programs and CPAs in great depth in future articles.
I settled on a theme from solostream (af), specifically, the Solostream 3-Column theme. Solostream utilizes e-junkie.com for their affiliate program. The sign up was easy but they don’t offer creatives for their various sellers which puts additional work on the affilate if they want to use more than text links, it’s not a huge issue but it would be nice and it highlights the differences between e-junkie and some of the big boys like Commission Junction. Regardless of where you get your theme from, search google therearenumerous sources, take the time to get a good theme as the base for your site, you won’t regret it.
One of the most common affiliate programs out there is eBay’s Partner Network, formerly administered via Commission Junction, if you go to SitePoint or Digital point their sites for sale forums are riddled with these types of sites. The most basic of these, of which 95% are, are implementations of eBay’s Widget Editor Kit. Affiliates earn money through referring new users that create eBay user accounts or a user winning an auction they found via your website. eBay’s affiliate program is enticing due to it’s massive scale, everybody is familiar with eBay and a significant percentage have transacted business, either as a buyer or seller, through eBay. Recently however eBay has been dealing with a seller revolt due to changes in the changes to how they handle seller ratings, long story short sellers cannot respond to negative buyer ratings and search results favor highly rated sellers over established sellers. It may seem like a small distinction, but if you’ve been around long enough as a seller you are bound to have at least some negative feedback, and new sellers with no history what so ever are ending up at the top of the search results which is threatening to put established sellers out of business. Naturally, people find a way to game system, in this scenario established buyers register new accounts to end up at the top of the search results until feed back forces them to abandon the account (lather, rinse, repeat). Here is a video a seller, at eBay Live, going off in response to the new feedback guidelines.
What remains to be seen is how this impacts affiliates, if you look in the video the place is pretty empty, in the past it had been extremely crowded. As markets tend to resemble ecosystems, collections of buyers and sellers that coexist, the long term impact on the eBay Partner Network could be dire. One of the sites I have on deck intended to implement the eBay Partner Network, I won’t have historical data to reference but we will at least be able to see whether the eBay Partner Network can be leveraged to create a reliable revenue stream.
