This article is part of the Ebay affiliate program guide.
The amount of ad impressions affects your quality score and how much money you make therefore needs to be attended to and understood.
Impressions of the Ebay ads and creatives on your webpages is an easily manipulated thing. Remove some ads for less impressions, add some for more impressions, simple huh? In actuality it isn’t simple, but the key thing to understand is that you have control over this factor.
What is the best amount of impressions?
To make the simplest example I can let’s look at what an ideal amount of impressions would be. The absolute best amount of impressions would be…
every impression of an ad resulted in a click and a purchase
That would be great huh? That would mean that if you had 100 impressions, you would have a hundred clicks and a hundred sales. Aint gonna happen, but that is in essence what the best situation would be.
What is the worst amount of impressions?
all impressions of an ad resulted in no clicks and no purchases
That would be bad!
Please excuse the simplicity, but I think it is important to define the best and worse scenarios so that we can look at how to improve.
Optimizing Ad Impressions
There is a very important first step to take here and that step is to ensure Ebay has the correct information about your ad impressions. You may think that ad impressions are easily known by Ebay but that is not true.
Ebay needs accurate information to decide how much you earn per click
The way that Ebay “counts” your ad impressions is through what is called an “impression pixel”. For every ad impression there should be, in theory, a corresponding image pixel impression.
Depending on what ads you are showing and which tools use as well as when you implemented them all, you may or may not be using image pixels which means that Ebay may or may not have an accurate picture of your page views.
How to determine if you are displaying impression pixels as recommended by Ebay
Most Ebay tools, ads, and links have impression pixels built in. The tools that do not have impressions built are…
- RSS Feed generator
- Data feeds
- Ebay APIs
If you use any of the above listed tools you need to create your own image pixels using the impression pixel tool.
Impression Pixel Tool
If you are logged in the tool can be found here or by going to the tool page, where it is located in the lower right hand corner of the page.
You just choose the program and a campaign and also the tool you are using it with then create the pixel. Once you have the code supplied by the tool you can insert it into the html of your webpage displaying the ad.
Why even use impression pixels?
First off they provide you and Ebay both with the most accurate information possible. You may use this info to help your tracking or help optimize your campaigns.
The more accurate information you provide to Ebay, the better they can determine what you should be paid.
Ebay recommends using it (from their help documentation):
Using impression pixels helps you by providing more accurate reporting of the number of times users viewed your eBay links or advertisements. More accurate reporting means you can better track the business benefits from the eBay Partner Network and optimize your traffic, ad placements, and commissions.
Ebay also recommends not only displaying an image pixel for each page with an ad, but to display an impression pixel for each ad on that page. If you have two ads on a page, you should have two impression pixels on that page as well.
How to use your impression count to optimize your earnings
If you are currently using tools that don’t have an impression pixel, you are not getting a accurate amount of “impressions” in your Ebay reports.
I know I was surprised when I implemented them and I realized that I was actually receiving many more impressions than I thought.
When your impressions count is accurate, you can make informed decisions about virtually every aspect of your campaigns like how well certain ad placements are performing, what pages/customIDs are doing well and which ones are not, and you can determine with more confidence if geotargeting is required for your campaigns.
The bottom line is accurate information is better than inaccurate information
If you are serious about earning more money with the Ebay affiliate program please consider subscribing to this blog. This post was one of a series I am making about each factor that affects your earnings in the Ebay Partner Network.
