This article is part of the Ebay affiliate program guide.

Bids and winning bids are used by Ebay as one of the major factors in determining your quality score and how much you earn per click.

What is a bid? What is a winning bid?

Bid

A bid is when someone bids on an item after they have clicked your affiliate link. A bid is also when that same person bids again on that same item or another item.

Winning bid

A winning bid means that the person who clicked on your affiliate link not only bid on something, but also won that bid.

Quality and interaction

Ebay is looking for affiliates to send them quality traffic that interacts with their site and purchases things. Ebay pays quite a bit of money to those who send such traffic. Making sure people are buying things on Ebay should really be one of your major goals. If they don’t buy something you should be making sure they are interacting with Ebay…

Optimizing Bids and Winning bids

I have been talking about a few of the quality factors for the Ebay affiliate guide and in each one I always like to point out that the publisher (you) have more control than you may think. Bids and winning bids is no exception. You may not have all the control you want, but you do have some control. The publishers who pay attention to details are rewarded with higher earnings.

How can I control what someone bids on or doesn’t bid on after they leave my site?

There are a few ways. Oversimplified…

• You can only display Buy it Now items (which are not bid upon) and this will lower the amount of bids you are getting.
• You can only show auction items and this will tend to increase your bids and winning bids

What else can I do?

You can do the other main optimizations for your webpages which help not only bids and winning bids, but most of the other factors as well.

• Geo targeting – Using geo targeting to weed out people and clicks who won’t or can’t buy things because they live somewhere Ebay doesn’t have a site or somewhere no one will ship to.
• Pre selling – Displaying the right information to the right customers
• Discouraging random clicks – unlike most other affiliate programs, the Ebay affiliate program pays for quality.

In another affiliate programs the logic might be something like

“Just get anyone to click, then if they ever come back, I will get credit for that!”

That mind set hurts you in the Ebay program, in fact that mindset is one of the main reasons that someone might not be making what they should from this program.

Bid and winning bids in a nutshell

Bids indicate engaged traffic, which is the kind of traffic Ebay pays for. Winning bids indicate revenue making traffic which is the type of traffic really really pays for. A good healthy site should have daily bids and winning bids.

My name is Patrick Sexton and I will be doing dozens of specific posts just about the Ebay affiliate program, please consider subscribing. Thanks.

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.

This article is part of the Ebay affiliate program guide.

If your application results in a rejection it really isn’t the end of the world.
Ebay can be very good about re-examining applications. You have two main options when you are rejected.

• You can study up on what Ebay wants in an affiliate and try to be more like that then reapply.
• Your second option is to use a different way to display and monetize Ebay items through Skimlinks, which is a third party affiliate program that Ebay works with that has less stringent rules to get in.

Reapplying to the Ebay Partner Network

Probably the best piece of advice I can give here is to remember actual people are looking at your application and are making decisions. These people have certain things they are looking for in the affiliate approval process. If you have been rejected then there is typically a good reason for it.

a site that has been rejected from the Ebay affiliate program probably would not have done very well in it anyway

Ebay is looking for real sites, with real people who are actively doing great things with their websites, or have existing communities or traffic that is beneficial to Ebay. In truth, and just to sprinkle some reality on this, let’s talk real. You very likely fall into one of two groups…

• You have one website that you work on a great deal, you have built up an audience or are trying to and you are truly interested in the subject of your website.

Or…

• You are an affiliate marketer who has made several websites and plans to make several more and the goal is something like… build sites, add affiliate links and build more sites and add more affiliate links and you probably chose the subjects of your sites by determining how much money you could make rather than choosing their subject because you like that subject or are knowledgeable about that subject.

I am not judging which one is better or worse, I have seen people make lots of money both ways, what I am doing is saying it is good to know which one of these scenarios you fit in. Ebay wants the first type of webmaster for their affiliate program, not the second.

If you are the second type of webmaster, you will probably have to do more work than you want to get in the Ebay program (like building a quality website with great content), but there is an option for you too.

Options for monetizing Ebay items and listings on your site or blog

Whatever kind of webmaster you are you can display Ebay listings on your blog and profit from them. Here is a side by side look at your options and what is good or bad about each…

If you are interested in reapplying to Ebay, make sure you have changed something, that you have the type of website they want and that your marketing type is accurate. Then reapply.

If you are interested in a quick way to monetize all the stuff on your blog (Ebay or other merchants like Amazon), Skimlinks has a WordPress plugin that will do that for you automatically.

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.

This article is part of the Ebay affiliate program guide.

Geotargeting can be confusing. There are so many scenarios that things can get complicated quickly. This article will highlight one of the most simple geo targeting strategies for Ebay affiliates, which is displaying Ebay ads and creatives only to people in the USA. This is only one of many possible geo targeting options. I will be writing about several options, but today we are discussing this one.

Why display ads only to the USA

The most common scenario for displaying ads only to the USA is as follows…

• Most of your webpage visitors are from the USA (80% or more)
• Your average EPC is lower than you expect
• You are getting many clicks, but not so many sales

In the above example situation it is very likely that you are receiving clicks from places where nobody is really going to buy anything. This can cause many problems for you. The main problem it creates is a low EPC (earnings per click).
This means you are getting less money than you could.

Virtually any website in this scenario can be making more money by geo targeting for the USA only

If you were to implement USA only geotargeting you will likely see higher EPC within a week. There are several reasons for this…

• Only showing ads to those likely to buy things (in this case those in the USA) means the only people who see your ads are those who can actually buy something
• Many of the bad things that can happen (like bots clicking your links instead of people) originate outside the USA. When you don’t show your ads outside the USA you greatly reduce the bad things that can happen with your ads
• In this scenario (most of your traffic is already in the USA) there is very very little downside to not displaying ads to those outside the USA

How to Geotarget for the USA only

There are many ways to accomplish this. I will cover how to implement geo targeting extensively in one of my next posts. If you are serious about making money from the Ebay affiliate program, you should probably subscribe to this blog.