knofun

AMP! from Yahoo! is more than just a product with a lot of exclamation points. This looks really cool and I can’t wait until they let me give it a try.

geek stuff, web marketing advertising, amp!, yahoo

Pretty sweet video, how come I have never seen this before?

play, san diego chargers

Big thanks to Laurel and the folks at eBay’s developer program. This morning they featured ZinText on their developer’s blog.

BTW, I am headed to eBay’s Developers Conference in Chicago June 17-19. Hit me up if you are going to be out there.

geek stuff, ventures devcon, ebay, zintext

I had really high hopes for eBay’s separation from Commission Junction. For one, it’s usually always better to communicate directly, without a middle man. And that’s all CJ was, a middle man in our way, preventing us from getting our reporting on time. Or so we thought.

In my mind, perhaps I built up the changeover too much. I imagined a sugar-coated fantasy land where we had real-time click stats, and could click right through on a day’s numbers to see the auction data behind it. Tell me, why wouldn’t eBay just let us run our reports, then click through to a detail to clearly see which transactions resulted in commissions for us? Why the hassle of downloading a CSV file and using third party websites like MyePNReport.com? I mean if that guy can build a tool that breaks up that report and links to auctions, shows you how much you made etc, how come eBay can’t do it? Maybe they don’t want to do it?

Couple this with all the people complaining their earnings are off and would we have to conclude that as of now, ~40 days into the changeover, maybe getting rid of CJ was a mistake? Not a mistake from eBay’s perspective, because I don’t know what % they were paying out to CJ and it must be nice to have that big () missing from the monthly report. But from the affiliate’s perspective? I guess you can only call a decision a mistake if it was your decision to make, and with this one we unfortunately have to suck it up.

A couple other affiliates have blogged about their lackluster earnings including my friend hanjicode. I am not going to post my earnings but April compared to March is off by more than 40%. Now I understand about cookie lag because I am still getting earnings in the account I stopped posting links for 40 days ago. I also understand that maybe a lot of people are implementing their links wrong. I have been writing code for a living for 10 years and I assure you I am not posting my links wrong. The click tracking is for the most part fine, numbers are not off there. Is there an issue? Was there an issue with CJ inflating numbers and therefore their % and this is the correction? I think we might never know about that one.

One thing that is definitely not working is geo targeting. When eBay was with CJ I had geo targeting written into ZinText. I just applied to all the eBay programs through CJ and used the MaxMind free geoip database to send the click to the correct ebay. I would say maybe 15% of my clicks went to ebay.ca, ebay.co.uk, and ebay.au. When ePN announced geo targeting as part of their program, I was happy, one less thing I have to worry about, right? Right? Right? Wrong. I have 0 clicks outside of eBay US. Yes, I have checked the geo targeting option. Yes, I am using type 2 or 3 links. No answers so far from eBay, I am waiting to ask them at the eBay Developer’s Conference they have graciously invited me to.

I understand that eBay has a HUGE affiliate program and changing over from CJ is no small task. I actually expected reporting issues! But the little things I imagined, the detailed reporting, it is a disappointment to me that those things aren’t there. This was an opportunity to reach out and really bring their affiliates into the fold, and it just doesn’t look like that’s happening. The boards have been more active than I’ve ever seen them, and 98% of those people are upset. I really hope eBay does whats right and listens to their affiliates. After all we are on the same team aren’t we? Aren’t we?

rant, ventures, web marketing affiliate, ebay, epn

There are some options for Zintext that I don’t include on the get code page. Not that I don’t think people don’t want them, I just want to make it as simple as possible for publishers to get the code on their pages. Here is some average Zintext code:

<script language="javascript">
var EB_campid='00000000000';
</script>
<script src="http://www.zintext.com/showads.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

That’s all you really need to run Zintext on any page, just a campaign ID from eBay Partner Network. Now to the fun stuff.

To link ONLY some words on any of your pages, add this line under the “var EB_campid” line:

var EB_onlywhitelist = 'beige throw pillow,custom ipod,xbox games';

This can be as long as you want, just separate your keywords with a comma.

If you don’t want a double underline on your links and just want them to follow your normal CSS, add this line:

var EB_doublelink = 0;

There are a couple more, and I will add to this list as we go.

FYI - We are also now requiring email at signup, eBay wants us to be able to email you if there is any problem with your ads.

ventures advanced, ebay, zintext