eBay Partner Network wants Quality Traffic, Not Random Visits!
Quick post from a whitepaper posted over at the Search Engine Marketing Journal, where eBay contributed to a topic on “The Coming Evolution in Affiliate Marketing, A Focus on Quality!” You can read the full text from eBay at: http://www.semj.org/documents/SEMJ_ebay_vol2.pdf
Some Key Takeaways:
- Affiliate Marketing is forecast to GROW 13%, Year over Year, through 2012!
- eBay PREFERS Affiliates who focus on just a few Quality sites instead of creating hundreds and sending QUANTITY clicks!
- Payouts in top 2 Tiers for ACRU New Users ($40 & $50 per lead) has INCREASED by 80% since the newpricing structure was put in place
- Payout in the LOWEST Tiers ($1 & $10 per ACRU) has DECREASED 86%!
- eBay relates GOOD affiliates with sales that would not have occurred had it not been for the efforts of the affiliate!
- User Behavior (Your visitor sent to eBay) is a KEY METRIC in determining the quality of your Site!
Here are a few quotes from the report… EVERYONE in the ePN should ready the full report!
An affiliate whose customers spend a very short time on a
merchant’s site after a click (eBay has seen averages as low
as 1 to 10 seconds) are probably either not reaching the right
audience for that particular merchant or potentially even
tricking unsuspecting users into clicking the links.
eBay is now tracking several dozen other variables that
closely correlate with quality and incrementality. Click-tosale
conversion rates, number of masked or unknown
referring URLs, and percentage of buyers with fraudulent
credit cards can be very indicative of the quality of an
affiliate’s traffic. These will of course vary for each
merchant and its objectives.
Some of the models that have historically produced the
highest volumes of clicks and sales in affiliate programs,
like remnant inventory ad networks, are some of the
least incremental along these quality-based metrics.
Affiliates who take the time to create high-quality sites
with value-added content tend to perform better than
those who simply slap together hundreds of sites that
contain very little other than affiliate ads and AdSense.
It probably doesn’t come as a shock that ads crammed
five or ten to a page on ringtone sites don’t capture the
same quality of users as well conceived ads thoughtfully
integrated into product-oriented content.
Fewer Clicks from Engaged Visitors = More Money for Affiliate!
I am going to stop posting at this point… Everyone should go over and read this!!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- eBay Partner Network Kicking Affiliates in the Face!
- eBay Partner Network (eBay Affiliate Program) Open for Enrollment
- Steve Hartman Says Farewell to eBay Partner Network
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I have been doing my part to "Build the Internet" since 1994, when I built my first website! Since then, I have built hundreds of niche websites for myself and many others, focused on design, applications, ecommerce, search optimization and internet marketing.
I wonder about traffic quality and how EPN decides if they want to terminate you.
Some of my sites are pretty thin but they aren’t found unless you really hit a specific keyword. Brand X widget model 12345 is the kind of stuff I get with relatively low bounce rates. Would EPN terminate me because the site is thin even though the traffic is very targeted for those products and converts?
Yes, EPN, I have indeed found long-tail keywords that only bring in people with “good” credit cards.
I have been bumped up to the $40 ACRU level since January so I guess according to eBay’s standards, I’m bringing in quality visitors. Last year I was focused on quantity instead of quality, but have turned things around and started focusing on adding content to existing sites instead of building more and I’m starting to see better results because of it.
Great info, I always enjoy your efforts to inform. As for EBAY, sounds like a major case of “Do as I Say and Not as I Do”. I guess that is good for affiliates, since we get to pick up the slack and get some money for it, however, if EBAY were not who they were, their site would be a prime example of what they say NOT to build.
“sites that contain very little other than affiliate ads and AdSense”
This is a very succinct description of EBAY, on a larger scale of course, but accurate none the less. If fact this is probably why most of the affiliate programs come out of the box looking like mini-EBAY site. They write the checks, so we do what we have to do, but their treatment of some of the affiliates has been less then professional or smart.
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