This article is part of the Ebay affiliate program guide.
Clicks are good, they make us money and might seem a simple straight forward part of making money with the Ebay program, however there is alot more to clicks than meet the eye.
More clicks, more dollars, right?
No. This is not true. There are sites which make vastly more money than others with significantly less clicks. This is because Ebay pays you for the quality of your clicks not the quantity.
The basic logic of quality clicks
Ebay pays you per click, but the amount they pay you per click depends on the quality of your traffic. If you want to make more money with the Ebay affiliate program, improving the quality of your clicks is one of the most effective ways to do so.
If your click quality is low, so is your EPC (earnings per click). If you have a hundred clicks a day for 3 cents each you make three dollars a day, if you have fifty clicks per day for 20 cents each you make ten dollars a day.
Ten dollars is better than three dollars.
What makes a click a “quality” click?
Quality traffic is determined by many factors, but it all boils down to one thing… Are your clicks leading to sales?
If they are then they are deemed quality clicks.
What control do you have over who clicks your ads and what they buy?
You might not think you have alot of control over this, but you do. There are several things that you could do today that would significantly improve the quality of the clicks you send to Ebay. We will look at several ways you can do this.
Where your link or ad points to is important
If someone sees something on your site they like, they might click your ad or link with the expectation that they can buy that item. If they don’t see the item, they can’t buy it and probably won’t go through the effort of finding that item. If you link to Ebay home page instead of the specific item, you will lose many many sales.
It is not good enough to just throw ads on your site that point to the Ebay home page!
You need to…
Know your users
Knowing your users is important, super important.
If your users are not likely to be familiar with Ebay
Are your users likely to be familiar with Ebay? If not, then you need to change the way your links and ads behave. If your users are not likely to know what Ebay is then you may want to send them to “Buy it now” items rather than auctions. This is because they are probably just looking to buy something, they might not know what an auction is if it hit them on the head.
Ebay buy it now items are clear, you buy the item, you get the item. Auctions for some users are very confusing.
Users not familiar to Ebay can be very profitable for you, as this is where ACRUs are made (new users of Ebay) Ebay pays you more for these types of users.
If your users are likely to be familiar with Ebay
If your users are Ebay savvy then you might want to add more information about each listing, like “time left”, “amount of bids”, or let them know the seller accepts “best offers”. If your users are familiar with Ebay they will already know what these things mean and will only click through on the items that they know they are likely to buy. By providing more information, you are increasing the chances that whoever clicks a link is going to actually buy something.
Who you are showing ads to
It make no sense whatsoever to show Ebay ads to someone who can not buy the item because they live in a place where Ebay sellers can not ship to. If you display Ebays ads to such people you are going to get alot of clicks that do not result in sales and that will lower your EPC (earnings per click).
We are talking about geo targeting here. Geo targeting for Ebay requires some pretty specific knowlege, and I will be writing more in depth about it soon for the Ebay affiliate guide. But for now we are just stating that who you allow to see your ads is one of the big factors that can help or hurt click quality.
Pre-Selling
Most of we have discussed in known as pre selling. The ability to give your users the most information possible before they click so that those who do click are users who are very likely to make a purchase.
Make every click count
In the end, you will need to make every click count and there are many possible ways to this as we have illustrated above. You will make more money if you carefully consider who will click your ads and who you want to click your ads. Looking at it from the other direction, you can define who you do not want (people who won’t buy something) to click your ads, and then do everything you can to discourage them from doing so.
Do not be scared of reducing your clicks
Typically the best way to make more money is to actually reduce the amount of clicks you are receiving by strategically displaying the correct information to users before they even think of clicking.
Earning more money per click is more important and a whole lot easier than receiving more clicks.
My name is Patrick Sexton and I will be doing dozens of specific posts just about the Ebay affiliate program, please consider subscribing. Thanks.
