As I'm sure you've heard by now, the Ebay Partner Network has issued a tremendous amount of bannings to upstanding affiliates. The word they use is expiration of partnership, but you get the idea. The ones who are now banned from EPN have received a 7 day lead time before their referrals will no longer count. Below are official responses from Steve on the EPN forums.
I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night.
These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we’ve been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there’s an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can’t go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we’ve done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources.
Our responsibility in the affiliate marketing channel is to allocate our resources to best drive incremental demand to our sellers. To that end, we need to focus on partners who have had the most success in engaging users who become some of our best buyers on eBay. I understand that these actions do have a very real impact on some of our affiliates who have been working with us over the years. For that, I sincerely apologize, but these decisions are made in the best interest of eBay's sellers and the overall health of our affiliate program.
We want to be very clear. Affiliates who received these messages of expiration last night are not being asked to stop sending traffic to us due to fraudulent activity or violations of the terms of service. For those of you who received the message, commissions are not being reversed, and you will be paid for all valid traffic you have sent to us to date, and for the next 7 days.
Sincerely,
Steve
Later this same thread after coming under fire, Steve decides that yep, he probably didn't say enough. Therefore he spent more time and a lot more letters pretty much still saying nothing. After all, many MANY of the affiliates that are now expired were using the methods he outlines.
At the risk of making this post too long, I’ve tried to answer a few of the key questions that have been posted in the thread. Hopefully this will provide some more useful information to the affiliates who are concerned about how we’re evaluating traffic and how they can improve their sites and monetization.
Also, I wanted to address the folks who are wondering who the person (also referred to in the thread as commie, retard, etc., etc.) is who made this decision. That person is me. I’m not posting on the boards on behalf of others who made the decision, nor am I asking anyone on my team to post on my behalf. With the gravity of this decision and the impact on the affiliates who were expired, it’s only appropriate that I’m out here doing the speaking, so here I am.
With that, I hope the information below is helpful.
Thanks
Steve
What does “engagement” mean?
Among other metrics, we measure the time that users spend on eBay after they come through an affiliate link, the number of pages that they view, and their buying activity after coming through the affiliate link. Hopefully this helps to further clarify what we mean. I know that we don’t provide reporting on all of these metrics, but we’re looking at ways that we can improve that visibility so that you can optimize your campaigns for them.
Can affiliates affect engagement and conversion?
Definitely. The metrics show that there is a wide distribution of these metrics between affiliates. To illustrate the point with an extreme example, a site that helps potential buyers find and research stereo receivers and then points them to great deals on eBay will probably drive more engaged buyers with better conversion rates than an eBay banner on a ringtone site.
How can affiliates improve engagement from their sites?
Many of you are already using these techniques and others, but for those who may not be, here are some tips to improve engagement.
• Maximize the amount of unique content to your site. Create commerce-oriented content for your site that engages the user in the shopping experience. Conversely, avoid putting eBay affiliate ads on pages that have little to do with shopping – e.g. ringtone sites, non-commerce oriented social network sites, e-mail services, etc. Also, sites that do little other than offer links to redirect to eBay generally don’t perform well. Engage people with content on your site, and make it clear to them on the affiliate links that they will be redirected to eBay to shop.
• Use more targeted creatives. If all you have is a simple text link to eBay or a static eBay banner ad on your site, consider using one of our flash creatives. Use what you know about your users and your content: consider using banners targeted to specific demographics (e.g. male vs. female) or categories – which are also available on eBay Partner Network. Also consider using our Editor Kit and eBay To Go widgets, which can be customized to show specific eBay listings for a given category or keyword right on your page.
• Integrate eBay links within your content. Sites that find a way to work eBay advertising into the content, rather than just as a simple ad at a top, side, or bottom of a page, tend to do better
• Optimize your landing pages. Use what you know about your users to help them find what they want on eBay. If your site is about tennis rackets, avoid landing your users on the eBay homepage, and instead send them to a search results page on eBay for targeted tennis queries.
• Use our geotargeting functionality. Sending a visitor on your site who is from the UK to ebay.co.uk (our British site) rather than ebay.com (our US site), will significantly improve conversion rates and engagement. You can select this option when you’re generating eBay links in the “tools” tab.
• Avoid simply incenting visits to eBay or registration with eBay – their primary motivation is typically not interest in eBay or in purchasing from eBay. If you are going to give your users cash back or points, tie those rewards to actual valid purchases on eBay.
How can affiliates test & improve their performance?
• Set up specific campaigns to test out any new sites, links, content, etc., and ideally, test these approaches at smaller volumes in comparison to your overall traffic. This way you will be able to evaluate the performance of each new campaign separately, ramp up the ones that perform the best, and prune the ones that don’t perform.
• Leverage the custom ID reports to further segment your testing. In an upcoming release targeted for September, additional category reporting will be made available that will help you see the categories that your users are converting in (at campaign, tool, and program levels) which should help you further target your content and affiliate links.
Still under fire the official EPN forums are bumping with angered affiliates, most of which seem to have had a great run with eBay affiliating in the past. It's a frustrating time for all involved, including myself. Luckily I've been able to tide over my earnings, but still affiliating for eBay through the Pepper Jam Network. As I type this I'm already thinking of new ways to leave eBay and never to return. Anyone with half a brain will be doing the same.
