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.
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?
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.
I take my work pretty seriously (stop laughing!!!), so naturally there comes a time to measure up to your competition. For ZinText, that would be other in-text advertising networks like Kontera. So recently I found an average publisher that by chance was running both Zintext and Kontera on the same page. Aside from being a little shocked the code was all working properly with the two competing for space, I got a unique opportunity to see my lil baby in action against arguably the best among the competition (certainly the biggest).
On the homepage, we both linked the word “Nokia” in the first paragraph since it was mentioned twice. Here is what their ad looked like:
Uh, No Xplode? which links to: http://www.toseeka.com/search.php?q=No%2BXplode?? I don’t even know what No Xplode is or why it’s $39.99, but this didn’t seem too relevant to me.
Here’s our ad, same page, same paragraph:
Now I am not knocking Kontera, I know first-hand how hard it is to match relevant keywords to relevant advertising and I am not saying my product is perfect, but come on.
Big news today, well I guess not big but rewarding for a nerd like me, ZinText finally got the blessing from eBay, meaning we get to use this cool logo:
And take the scary “not approved by ebay” text out of the terms and conditions. Pretty cool, thanks eBay!!!
So I have really had my head buried in the javascript books lately working on Zintext. Linking keywords to ebay searches sounds like an easy thing to do, but in practice its pretty difficult to do right.
First of all the javascript technique I was using had a pretty large bug in it that made it more or less useless. I had to come up with a better way of crawling the html of the page to be linked and then altering the html to create the links. In doing this the DOM and I have become very close, not that I wanted to be friends. Then I had problems with the spacing of links. Sometimes keywords would be all clustered towards the top, sometimes all in a group in the middle, not evenly spaced. I came up with a pretty elegant solution for this, but now the words I am linking are not always the best. For example president will be in the same paragraph as ipod video and zin will link president. Not exactly what we want, so thats my main focus right now.
At any rate, if you were holding off using it for any technical reason, it should now work without problems on any sites. As usual feedback is always welcome, thanks for using zintext.
I have been in the web publishing business for 7 years now, and along the way I have experimented with almost every advertising network available. In terms of traditional web advertising (banner ads, boxes, skyscrapers) I don’t think anyone can really beat Google’s AdSense. I use them exclusively except where we sell direct advertising, which is always going to be more lucrative (no middle man!). There are many other ways to make money online, including popunders, interstertials, affiliate links, and lots more I am not going to mention here. As a rule I avoid “no choice” advertising like popunders or interstertials, because I hate them in my personal surfing experience.
Another interesting way of advertising surfaced a few years ago. Pioneered by companies like intelliTXT and Kontera, in-text advertising is something you have seen on the web and may not even know it. A web publisher simply places a few lines of code into their website template, then the network analyzes their content and links certain words that their advertisers have purchased. These links look like normal links but they have a double underline and when you hover your mouse over them they pop a little dialog balloon with some marketing copy. If a visitor to your site clicks, you get a fixed cost per click, and you share that revenue with the ad network, usually intelliTXT or Kontera. (for all the people who are going to comment and point out companies like tribal fusion who also have in-text advertising solution, I know. I know.)
I personally used intelliTXT, then switched to Kontera for marginally better performance. I was making $2 - $3 eCPM with Kontera, meaning for every thousand impressions I was making a few bucks. Not bad, I thought. At the same time, I was messing around with ebay’s excellent affiliate program, creating niche stores like Cars For a Grand and Get a Cheap TV. If you don’t know about eBay’s program - learn. Anytime you send a click to ebay it sets a 7 day cookie, so anything they buy you get a fee for. Great thing is, everyone uses ebay, so almost ANY traffic is going to result in commissions. Their fee schedule changes but is very lucrative, check out details at affiliates.ebay.com.
With some inspiration from Shawn I decided to build a simple web application that would behave like intelliTXT or Kontera but instead of splitting cpc fees with an ad network, would deliver clicks to ebay. I tested it on my forum archive with great results. Instead of $2-$3 eCPMs I was seeing $8-$9. Seemed like some pretty simple math to me, so I am offering this service to the world. For free you ask? Of course not, this is America Jack! Just kidding, it is free, I only take a VERY SMALL % of clicks as a fee for using the service.
I have asked eBay’s affiliate team repeatedly to sign off on this program and they have been at best unresponsive. I got one response back that obviously hadn’t read my email in any detail, so I have contacted them again and again and will hopefully get a response soon. I have looked over their terms and conditions, and the T&C of CJ, and the program seems to be well within their rules.
Oh I forgot to mention I also set it up with geoip targeting so a visitor from the UK would go to eBay UK, a visitor from Australia would go to ebay.au, etc. So if you are going to use it make sure you are enrolled in all the available eBay programs on CJ.
So recently I have been really into promoting eBay’s program and having a lot of fun. We have created a bunch of niche sites and use eBay’s api to get listings. Funny thing happened though, I really started to get addicted to some of these sites. My Dad has always been into real estate and would always point out cool buildings and why they would or wouldn’t be a good investment, so even though I can’t buy any of them at the moment I find myself clicking and clicking on the Commercial Property listings on Property for Pennies. So much cool stuff out there.
Another thing my Dad was always into is classic cars. We originally made Carsforagrand.com for people that need cheap transportation, but the thing that keeps me clicking is the cheap classic cadillacs, Chevys, and Fords. Just old cars that people have had sitting on their property god-knows-where that are cool to look at.
I’ve been seeing more and more of this so I thought I would chip in my 2 cents. There is a company out there called “build a niche store” or BANS. (No that’s not an affiliate link) They produce software that allows someone with little or no web experience to set up their own “niche store” using eBay’s affiliate program. Now, this in itself is not a bad idea. If you read my blog, you know I have several of these sites and push the ebay program in general. But the fact that it’s such a great program and so many people have done well off of it makes it easy to entice and exploit people trying to make a buck. Which I also don’t have a problem with, what’s that saying, “there’s one born every minute?”
Problem is, all these sites look like shit. I’m sure the owners are making some money, but come on. Take the site that inspired this post, Modified Car Auctions UK. Nice niche, nice idea, HORRIBLE site. These guys need to go pick up a php book and go visit the ebay developers site and save themselves some money and us some sore eyes.
Update: Ok, time for a little egg on the face. The site I used as my example above is in fact *NOT* a BANS site. Nevertheless, my point never was that BANS is a bad site or that the people that produce it are scamming people. My point is please don’t litter the web with MFA or in this case MFeB crap. Take your time, do it right, and make a ton of money.
I have been using StumbleUpon’s Paid Ads for a few weeks now, and have some feedback.
Biggest thing: Budgets
Right now you can set a daily budget for all your ads, which seems cool but is really ineffective. This is compounded by some of the problems below and I will get into those. Yes I know you can in theory control this by using the # of visitors per campaign option, but is still not as effective as saying “spend $100 on this campaign per day.” This allows us to more accurately measure ROI using the SU program.
Setup vs options
When you set up a new campaign, you can only set destination url and one category. Once your campaign gets approved you can go in and add some paramaters like Country / State / City targeting and gender / age range of visitor. Cool, but why can’t I do that on setup? Also being able to select one category is really limiting. Why can’t I say show this page to people that have these 3 categories but NOT this one or show it to anyone who has any of these 3 categories? Seems pretty simple.
Let me know!
You have my email address, use it! Because of the manual approval process (which I understand completely, you don’t want spam/pr0n sites whatever), we have no idea when our campaigns go live. So you end up with a situation like I had this morning, where I had an old campaign in there that had run out of $$$ so wasn’t running. I added some new campaigns and then added some $$$ for them and went to sleep. When I checked them this afternoon the old campaign had resumed and sucked up most of my daily budget. So yeah its my bad for not pausing it, but at least let me know when campaigns are approved and start getting traffic. Also if I had a daily budget per campaign, this could be avoided.
Basically, I love SU’s ads program, $0.05 per semi-targeted visitor is cheap, and SU traffic is generally pretty good. I always average over 2 pageviews per user and under a 30% bounce rate. Pretty good no matter what your content is.
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