Spring Cleaning your ePN Campaign Account List
Like I posted yesterday, we are all very aware that ePN is closely watching affiliates to be sure they are bringing value to eBay. While we don’t know the metrics for measurement, we can be sure that sites producing little to nothing over a period of time are junk! Not only in their eyes… but in ours also! All of us have this great idea for a new niche site at one point or another… purchased a domain and tossed up a new site within the same day, and never visited it again!
Today… lets run through our ePN account and take out some trash.As you do this simple exercise, remove any emotional attachments you may have with one site or another! This is not about being touchy-feely with your niche sites, its about preserving your ePN account and making money!
Spring Cleaning your ePN Campaign Account List
In order to know which of our campaigns are historically doing well and which aren’t, we need some data!
- Login to your ePN Account and go to the Reports tab.
- Report Type: By Campaign
- Date Range: Choose CUSTOM date range
- Custom Date Range: Set Start Date to Feb 2008, or a full year prior to the date you do this.
- Program: Choose All Programs
- Tool Category: All
- Run the report….
What you now have is a list of ALL your Campaigns that have produced an impression or click to the ePN system for the past 12 months. They are automatically sorted by the amount of revenue they have produced, highest to lowest. As you can see in the image below… I have cropped down to the 8 sites I will eliminate! I do this every 3 months…
Eliminating or Archiving your Inactive Campaigns
Removing the crap from your ePN account is a two prong process… First, you have to identify and archive them in your ePN account, then you have to eliminate them from your hosting account, or zero out your CampID in your chosen administration, so they no longer send traffic that is tied to your ePN account, and bring your scores down.
Don’t use a specific starting point for reviewing them… look at ALL your campaigns!
To Identify the garbage campaigns, just ask yourself a few questions…
- Is the campaign less than 90 days old?
If Yes… Make a note to Keep it.
- Have you updated or changed ANY non-rss content on the site at least once in the past 30 days?
If Yes… Make a note to Keep it.
- Do you have ANY interest in keeping the site active, other than money?
If Yes… Make a note to Keep it. - Did the site earn ANY money in the past year?
If Yes… Make a note to Keep it.
The First Decision to Make, is whether the sites you DID NOT NOTE to keep, are worth your efforts! When I say efforts… I mean, are you willing and do you have the time to start turning them around TODAY? Are you willing to completely tear them down and rebuild them from the ground up? If not… Make a note to Archive them! If so, make a note to keep them!
Now you have this nice list of campaigns you want to KEEP right? Go back to the top of this page, and repeat the same report process, using a 90 day report, versus 1 full year! This time, you can get away with only 2 questions:
- Is the campaign less than 90 days old?
If Yes… Keep it. - Did the site earn ANY money or Produce ANY clicks in the last 90 days?
If Yes… Keep it.
By the time you are done, you should have a list of ALL active campaigns that you want to keep, and a second list of those you are going to eliminate. Its very important to understand that ANY campaign you decide to keep, should immediately start receiving at minimum, weekly updates to the content! Not the rss content, but content you write or have written, yourself!
Time to Archive the Rubbish
The reason we are going to archive these campaigns… is to get them off our screen from this point forward! The best thing you can do is eliminate them from your sight, so you never think about them again, unless you decide to rebuild them, and pull them back into action.
From the main ePN Account screen:
- Click on Campaigns
- First, Identify ANY campaign that did not previously show up in your reports reports. If it is less than 30 days old and you are updating it weekly, keep it. If you have not made a single click to ePN on this new site in more than 30 days… you need to seriously consider rebuilding or scrapping it!
- On the right side of the screen, place a tick in the check-box next to ALL the campaigns you decide to eliminate, and click the “Archive Button” at the bottom of the screen.
Prevent New Traffic from Coming through Your ePN Account
Most of you will ask… Why would I want to stop even 1 visitor from coming through ePN, when it may result in revenue?
Lets say your having a good month… you have thousands of BIN/BID clicks and 28 ACRU signups. Then you get that one single click and purchase from your poison site, that until now, has really done nothing for your efforts. Sure it has a HUGE EPC, since it only sent one click who bought… but its got a long history of doing nothing, which is likely to continue! Well that single click may just be the one that reduces your entire quality score, reducing that $35/ACRU, down to $10 or less!
Life is full of sacrifices… and in this case, you MUST sacrifice the campaigns that are garbage and producing less than expected income from your efforts! Remember back in elementary school when you played musical chairs? The slow kid always lost right? Get Rid of your Poison, before it Affects your Good Stuff!
The first thing you need to do is login to ALL the sites you decided to eliminate and change the CAMPID to XXXXXXX, or whatever you decide to change it to! This will instantly eliminate it from further poisoning of your ePN account!
The next thing you need to do is eliminate it from your hosting account, or decide what to do next with it! Which we will discuss in a later post…
In the next post in Spring Cleaning your Niche Sites, I will go into cleanup of your hosting account!
Previously Published Articles You May Like to Read:
- Spring Cleaning of your Hosting Account
- Spring Cleaning Week at The Niche Store Builder!
- Spring Cleaning of your Domain Inventory
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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.
Mark,
This confuses me a bit. Since we don’t know ebay’s inputs to their quality score, how are you making the conclusion that low earning sites hurt your overall score. And that an uptick in earning from a low earning site can be poison? My experience hasn’t shown this … so far, at least.
I have one site that is my major earner (about 60%), I have several other sites that make earn $100-$300/month, and then I have a few more that earn next to nothing.
Since ebay has introduced their quality score for ACRU’s, my ACRU rate has increased to $40. So, it doesn’t seem to appear that they’re punishing for me these low performers. Curious as to why you feel this rather drastic action is necessary.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks Mark
I had not thought about this until you mentioned it. I did have two sites I was not sure what I was going to do with.
This helped me decide once I took a good look at them. It was simple to decide low to no traffic at all why even keep them if I decide to do something in the niche it would be easier to start over then rebuild, and since I was not going to lose any traffic why not just cut the cord.
Now like you say I can focus on the sites that are generating some traffic and income.
@ Beth –
I have been on the upside of the overall ACRU as well. I have done so by eliminating my garbage sites every 3 months, or whenever I get the whim to go cleaning them out.
I think you may have misunderstood a bit of the post though. If you have sites that are producing regular income in the hundreds of dollars each month, they are not garbage!
On the other hand, if you have sites that have been active for a period of time and produce very few clicks or conversions, they ARE bad sites, and you should review them to either eliminate from your account, or work on them to develop into something that will bring them up to par with the rest of your campaigns.
Even though you may get the stray click or bid from these sites, there is a reason they don’t perform better. If you are working on them regularly to build them up, that’s great… but if you just leave them as is, they wont survive anyhow.
In the end, if the folks that are reviewing these sites find your non-performing site, label it as thin, and put a freeze on your ePN account… the good sites are washed out with the bad.
Mark
Great reminder post, Mark!
As I continue to grow my online real estate I appreciate you letting us peek inside and see how a master does it.
Every three months is an excellent period for reviewing sites.
Even though I watch these stats I don’t usually have such a large time frame to get the birds eye view.
Hmmm, very interesting!! I had a couple of sites that I had thought about scrapping a week or so ago.. your post encourages me even more to work on those low performing sites and try and bring them up!
My lowest performer for the 1 year stats was $190.00. I’ve done NOTHING to that site.. Before this post I had already started adding content to each page and lowering the number of listings per page… I’m going to stick with it and see if I can pull it up!
Side note.. i never started BANS until March of ’08. So i can’t really even say that those stats are for the full year since it took a couple of months to get things going etc etc!
Thanks for the info!!
I generally review a site when the domain is going to expire. Why pay the $10 if it’s not earning and you don’t wanna work on it.
Mark,
Bit confused with the stats, I transfered some campaigns quite a while ago to pepperjam from EPN should I delete those campaigns in the EPN account or how does that work please.
Like M.Speener, I too review when the domain is going to expire. i also take run year to date numbers in June/July to see how things are going through the first half of the year.
It’s too bad there isn’t more info about how “bad” sites effect your ACRU $$$.
Spring has sprung and I always get motivated once the sun is up later. A massive blast of energy hits me every year.
The Rockie Mt’s have been sunny and in the 40′s since the new year.
I’m getting rid of unused domains and plastering deindexed sites with ads
Hi Beth and Mark,
If your ACRU rate is $40, does it mean you are doing good in eBay’s eyes?
This makes sense. I have a couple sites that make $100-$500 each a month. Then last month I had two sites that receive clicks but no purchases get a BIN. My ACRU quality score went from $40 to $28. I was not happy because I had a lot of ACRU’s last month. It cost me $400 in ACRU commissions.
I am going to redo those sites and put anything but EPN links on them and see how it goes.
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