Any comments or personal experiences would be greatly appreciated.
Shak
What if it was to your own auction? I have wondered the same thing but linking to my own auctions and BINs with my ebay affiliate link.
I'm speaking of my own auctions, not an affiliate program. Regarding the other posts, why would linking to my own auctions get me kicked off AdWords? And why am I 12 months too late? Late for what?
What I'm asking is if it's feesable to run short Adwords campaigns to drive buyers to my individual eBay auction listings, in order to up the traffic and, hopefully, increase sales. Why would Google give a rat's butt where I direct the links to? I'm the one paying for the campaign. What's the difference between linking to a web store or an eBay auction listing?
I did try the ebay/adwords model and made about $15, but I would say that there are much better ops out there.
What better ops? Could you elaborate, please?
As a matter of fact, they seem to be promoting this method of sales by offering the Conversion Tracking tool for eBay, Yahoo, etc.
Am I missing something here?
spicekat
I think you should read the EBAY TOS as I am sure it says you cannot use adwords or other ppc to promote your auction using your ebay affiliate code.
However there is nothing to stop you using adwords to link to your auction directly (not using the affiliate link). In fact you would probably get a better response than had you paid for ebay front page and all the other bells and whistles.
For example if you wanted to sell an xbox game on ebay and also wanted to advertise on the ebay front page, you would need a rating of at least 20 at first and even then a large % of the traffic would be other ebayers looking at your listing to get ideas etc. But if you had a rating of 1 and used Adwords to drive traffic to your listing, you would be getting a larger % of people who wanted to buy a cheap xbox game. You could set up a campaign which would end after 7 days, buy highly targeted keywords related to your listing for as little as $0.05 and it would probably cost you a lot less than paying for all the bells and whistles ebays 'likes' you to buy.
The 12 month late ref is to do with the fact Ebay pays people who help find new members to sign up for free to ebay. Its an affiliate thing.
As for other ops.... look for the affiliate programs that pay you when a person signs up to something for free.
That's what I was thinking of, linking to my own auctions to drive up the traffic, and sales. And, you're right, I think Adwords will be way more effective and cost a lot less than any of eBay's 'premium' enhancement features.
I'll give it a go and let ya'll know if I get any positive results.
Regarding affiliates, I've found one that has paid me about $50-$100/mth for the last few months (based on 2-4 sales per month) but has slacked off this month for some reason. I've also got the eBay affiliate banner on my site but earnings on that have been pretty much zip, nada. Guess I'll just have to do some more research reading on affiliate marketing to learn how to optimize the income.
Cheers ;)
As far as driving Adwords traffic to Ebay auctions, you can do it. But why would you drive paid traffic to Ebay and then pay ebay a cut (2.5%) of the sales you generate from what you spent out of your own pocket for that advertising? Why not just direct that Google traffic to your own site with the products for sale and pocket the whole sale and keep Ebay out of your pockets for the sales? The whole point of advertising on Ebay is to get Ebay's built in traffic and advertising for the cost of the listing and final value fee....
Yes, you probably are too late to get in on the eBay Aff thing. I am sure though, that there are still opportunities abound... These opp's may very well be in other countries.
I still want to know how the heck the top eBay aff's managed to sign up so many people and collect over 1 million dollar cheques in a month! I have heard it wasn't really ethical, but would still like to know what they did.
All the Best,
C.K.
As far as driving Adwords traffic to Ebay auctions, you can do it. But why would you drive paid traffic to Ebay and then pay ebay a cut (2.5%) of the sales you generate from what you spent out of your own pocket for that advertising? Why not just direct that Google traffic to your own site with the products for sale and pocket the whole sale and keep Ebay out of your pockets for the sales? The whole point of advertising on Ebay is to get Ebay's built in traffic and advertising for the cost of the listing and final value fee....
Well........as eBay is flooded with more and more listings each day, and category rollups now place all of the similar topic items under one category, it only makes sense to begin marketing your eBay auctions in other ways. I've tracked several sellers (those that sell items similar to mine) that are long time power sellers and have really noticed a downturn in the amount of daily sales they have had over the past few months. The buyers are still out there, I think, but they need to be prodded and led in the right direction. More targeted exposure should mean more sales, if my math is acurate. ;)
Yes, I could upload and sell all of my inventory on my own site but the payback, even including eBay's fees, would still probably be far less the cost of using eBay's marketing prowess and Adwords' search popularity.
I'm just going to test Adwords for awhile and see if I notice any upswing in bidders. If not, it's history altogether because, if I can't generate more sales on eBay then how can I expect to generate more sales off eBay using the same method?
Well........as eBay is flooded with more and more listings each day, and category rollups now place all of the similar topic items under one category, it only makes sense to begin marketing your eBay auctions in other ways.
Yeah it is very true. I used to sell on ebay a few years ago and always had tons of sales. Now days they have gotten too big and too diluted for there own good. Ebay is a mile wide but only an inch deep...
I'll bet that this will hurt them some eventually, getting too big with so many sellers and too few buyers that for one it becomes extremely difficult as a buyer to search through thousands and thousands of ads for your given targeted search to find the right one, and for sellers to get burried on page 20 of search results. It seems as though ebay's "featured" listings now go on for about 10 pages on some of there categories. How is your auction "featured" when it is really on page 10?
They just want to collect that $20 featured fee from everyone even though they should really limit how many auctions can be featured at one time in a category so all the auctions are really "featured".
I see ebay becoming thinner and thinner and the competition growing to where they'll be new types of advanced search features and more optimization tactics for auctions. I see there keyword banner advertising growing within there site too. Why don't you use that instead of Google's keywords? You can use both or just use Google but the people on Ebay are deffinetely buyers already looking for a deal. Plus the keywords on Ebay's PPC would probably be cheaper as there is not as much competition. Plus you get the added benefit of using a visual to further qualify the traffic before they click. I tried it and it was o.k. I wasn't selling anything expensive enough or in volume enough for it to be really worth it. But ebay gave me $50 free credit to try it.
If the trend continues it will start driving a lot of sellers away from ebay or out of the market completely if they can't get enough auction impressions on ebay to sell enough.
If the above holds true, those lower ranked auction sites and niche sites may benefit from the added linking to their services. If Adwords isn't the answer, then I'd guess most online auction sites, including eBay are on the road to disaster. Buyers simply won't spend the time searching through hundreds of pages of listings to find one item.
....and I agree with the last post regarding eBay's rolled up categories. Seems to be nothing but a clever (sinister?) way for eBay to sell more 'Featured Listing' space or to get eBay sellers to 'want to use' more of their optional selling tools, i.e. bold listings, gallery, etc. I personally think they are making a huge mistake and, at the same time, ignoring the thousands of disgruntled long-time eBay sellers. Only time will tell. ;)
For the particular niche my campaign runs in, the ebay commissions break even. If we bump the volume to make it to the next commission tier, then it may become profitable.
Have noticed quite a lag due to the natural sales cycle, so if you test your campaign for a week or so and then switch it off, you may still accumulate commission until those cookies time out (or are wiped out by another aff).
I believe there are more lucrative aff schemes, however.
Do you get a lot of reversals of your commisions with ebay? Do you get a lot of activated registrations or mostly just 5 cent bids and bins?
I did a test with PPC to eBay before and I lost money on it. At first it came out even, just getting back what I spent on advertising. But then a few days later about 95% of all the bids and active registrations were "reversed" in what ebay calls there "transaction washing". More like commision laundering...
I think if you really want to do this, you need to commit $$ and drive substantial traffic, and it would have to come from a variety of niches. This means alot of category investigation and ad copy as well -- or automation and "scan / refine" strategy.
Separately, I run ebay search results as an alternative to AdSense PSAs.
Just seems like better opportunities out there.
It contributes to my CJ account revenue.
I might tune the PPC kws a little better as well.
Also, I may run across other potential ebay content niche ideas. Eventually, the combination may bump to the next commission level.
It gives me data to analyze. It's fun.
Anyhow, plenty of credit, so no problem dropping a few on this if it breaks even now and has slight potential.
That's what I was thinking of, linking to my own auctions to drive up the traffic, and sales. And, you're right, I think Adwords will be way more effective and cost a lot less than any of eBay's 'premium' enhancement features.
Kjp55m, I'd also be aware of the possibility of sending someone to an 'ended' auction page, especially if you're running 'Buy It Now' auctions. This would not be a great user experience.
One other thought: Since auctions are usually short (mostly 7 days, no?), be aware that when you first submit your ad it goes live on Google very quickly - but to partner sites only after it has been reviewed and approved.
So your audience will be limited to Google alone during the first days of your auction, until the review process has been completed. But hey, that is still a good sized audience. ;)
BTW, I used to run AdWords pointing to my eBay auctions. I linked to my About Me page. Don’t do it anymore though, as I'm too busy to sell stuff there. Never too busy to buy, however!
AWA
I started my first Adwords campaign with a test auction and set the expiration for 7 days. So far it's not getting many hits, and I even received a warning message from Adwords on the subject of Low Performance Keywords and the $5.00 3rd strike charge.
Man, they're strict.
Oh well, I'll probably try it for awhile and see how things pan out. Not much to lose, either way. ;)
