Ebay to End US Affiliate Purchase of PPC Ads

[irish_john]

Its looks like Ebay are going to be changing their terms and conditions to stop direct PPC Ad Purchases in their .com website by affiliates, from MSN, Google and Yahoo.

[markwelch]

Huh? What facts have led you to reach this conclusion? I have not heard this elsewhere.

[JRnow]

wow, this is huge news. eBay has done remarkably well over the years by creating one of the best programs for paid search arbitrage affiliates via direct navigation. Some of their top affiliate partners accounted for a decent portion of their business . . . and all of a sudden they no longer wish to work with direct navigation arbitragers?

wow they really have flipped the tables this time - so it looks like they are giving the boot to the top performers.

Sure, eBay still allows Paid Search affiliates to link to other sites (other than eBay.com), but we all know the performance simply will not be the same with extra page in the process.

so why did eBay make this change?

Well one thing for sure - eBay has access to all of their top partners keywords and why pay commissions to their affiliates if they can do it themselves . . . right?

eBay has even been promoting and showing affiliates how do to direct navigation for months . . . and now they ban this practice?

i'm confused . . .

[restless]

I think google would probably ban ebay ads anyway because after a while people are going to start thinking the right hand side of the SERPs as the "Ebay column"

I'm tired of seeing ebay ads in there

[davewray]

The "ebay column"...haha, sorry had to laugh at that one...that is very funny. If Ebay ads cease to exist it will be a great day for all legitimate Adwords advertisers :)

[irish_john]

Here is a link to their website, where they have published the details.

[forums.ebay.com...]

[chronic]

They must be done harvesting the converting terms from their affiliates.

[mfishy]

Seems it wouldn't be a big problem to direct the traffic to a different url and still display their crapola.

If you are making your money primarily via ppc direct to merchant, now would be a great time to rethink this strategy and build a system for your own landing pages. If you are creative, there are actually benefits to this anyway.

[markwelch]

Thanks for the link to the post in the eBay forums. I notice that the PPC change is not yet reflected on any of the affiliate pages, including the affiliate FAQ, so I am sure this is going to catch some affiliates by surprise on June 1.

I've never run PPC campaigns for eBay, as I recognized that they were culling affiliate data to use in their own PPC campaigns, and so I didn't believe there was likely to be any lasting opportunity in that. After a series of issues, I also stopped doing business with Commission Junction entirely, and as part of that I pulled all eBay links from all my web sites (I earned only pennies per month from eBay anyway).

It is important for PPC affiliates (of any merchant, through any network) to understand that merchants can and do use the affiliate data-stream to modify and optimize the merchant's own PPC campaigns. If you do "direct-to-merchant" PPC, then the merchant will always have your most important data (plus its own data). The alternative is to create "landing pages" at your own site, which is practical for some merchants who provide datafeeds, but it's not really effective for eBay affiliates.

[markwelch]

FYI, one reason that eBay might be prohibiting "direct-to-merchant PPC" is the rapid rise in "get-rich-quick" schemes that promote the "PPC arbitrage" theory.

The problem is that scammy promoters are giving naieve "wanna-be" affiliates misinformation, or incomplete information, and end up encouraging those affiliates to over-spend on PPC campaigns, from which they earn back only a few pennies per dollar spent.

These affiliates end up being angry at eBay and other merchants, whom they believe are complicit in the schemes (since the merchant generates some extra sales, profiting in some way from the affiliate's loss).

It would be interesting to hear eBay's affiliate manager explain whether this was a factor in the decision to prohibit "direct-to-merchant" PPC by affiliates through Google AdWords, Yahoo, and MSN AdCenter.