This article is part of the Ebay affiliate program guide.
Managing your campaigns wrong in the Ebay affiliate program can cost you money, alot of it.
What is a campaign?
A campaign is a way of separating and tracking your ad placements. Ebay describes them as…
A campaign is an organizational unit you use to group types of activities, tool placements, or traffic on the eBay Partner Network.
If you are an organized person you might (like me) think that more campaigns are better, but nothing could be further from the truth. If you don’t provide enough clicks per campaign, you will lose money. Use “custom ID” to track things, not campaigns.
If a campaign receives less than 50 or so clicks a day, Ebay can not properly determine the value of your clicks.
Because of this your earnings are NOT determined by your click performance but are rather combined with other low click campaigns and you generally receive less per click than you would have if your campaigns were more broad. I explain this in detail below, but the main point of this whole article is to always have more than fifty clicks per day for each campaign. Let’s illustrate this fact by looking at the same website with different campaign setups…
The same website can receive more money per day if campaigns are managed better
In the above example, the same website could receive 14 dollars more per day simply by changing how many campaigns are used. I can not say how much more you will receive if you do this, but I can say you probably will receive something more. Let’s look at this deeper to explain.
EPC (earnings per click)
I will go into great depth about EPC in a later article, but for now we are talking campaigns. As far as campaigns go, here is what you need to know about EPC (how much you get per click).
- EPC is determined daily by Ebay based upon several factors.
- Different campaigns receive different EPC
- Ebay needs at least 50 clicks or so per day to determine how much a click is worth
- If a campaign has less than fifty clicks or so then Ebay will combine those clicks with other low performing campaigns from your account AND other peoples accounts to determine the EPC
This means that no matter how valuable, useful, or just darn great your clicks are you will receive less for them if Ebay does not have enough clicks to determine a personal EPC for just your campaign.
That sucks
Yes. It does. Imagine someone followed your link and bought 1000 dollar item or a 10,000 dollar item…
If your campaign does not have 50 or more clicks, Ebay won’t use that to determine the value of your EPC. It will use data “pooled” from you and other users. Ouch!
How to set up your campaigns to maximize your earnings
First and foremost you must ensure that your campaigns are each receiving more than fifty clicks a day!
In general you want campaigns to be very broad. If you have two websites than it makes good sense to have two campaigns “website1″ and “website2″ if each website receives more than fifty clicks per day.
If each website doesn’t receive 50 or more clicks per day then you need to combine those two campaigns.
When you are first starting with the Ebay affiliate program you should only create one campaign.
This is the most important piece of information that I wish I knew when I started.
Is 50 clicks an exact number?
No. The safest bet, and the way I do things, is to ensure each campaign has 75 or 100 clicks per day.
In the end, you want to make your campaigns very broad
If you need to track your clicks more, you can always use “custom ID” for your tracking and this will not affect your EPC.
If you are serious about making money online with EPN, you might want to subscribe to this blog.
My name is Patrick Sexton and I have been using the Ebay affiliate program for years.
