All Posts Tagged With: "ppc"

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.

Popularity: 60% [?]

A lawyer, surprise surprise, is attempting to bring a class action lawsuit for deceptive advertising and “unjust enrichment” against Google over their AdWords product. Hal Levitte filed a federal suit in California, claiming that by placing AdWords on parked domains.

After starting an AdWords campaign to increase business Mr. Levitte discovered that 16.3 percent of his AdWord spend was going towards parked domains and “error” sites, none of this traffic resulted in conversions that would have normallay been generated had the ads appeared on a higher quality content site.

As of March, 2008 Google offered a way to exclude ad placement on parked domains and error sites. Mr Levitte is seeing class action status for everybody that has held an AdWords in the last 4 years and served at least one impression.

If, and it’s a big if, Mr. Levitte can attain class action status the lawsuit could be huge. AdWords contributes the lion’s share to Google’s 16+ billion dollar revenue stream so the suit, if designated class action, could be on par with those lodged against major auto manufacturers warranting large scale recalls (think Ford Explorers and Firestone tires.)

Popularity: 55% [?]