Over the weekend, eBay officially cut over their affiliate program from Commission Junction to the eBay Partner Network.
And here is my heartfelt reaction:
Am I the only eBay power affiliate who has seen her commission drop like a lead balloon?
Like an airborne mule after gravity takes effect? Like a 73 ton jackhammer visiting the Titanic?
I’ve proactively contacted the eBay Partner Network and will see what answers I receive – the traffic being sent is the same, yet the commissions now remember stark utter pain. I’m entirely positive I cut over the majority of my 100s of sites to the new commission program; hopefully this is just a growing pains glitch.
I’ll keep y’all posted…
UPDATE – The eBay Partner Network responded with:
Thank you for contacting us regarding the drop in your revenue since eBay switched from Commission Junction.
We want to let you know exactly what we have been doing to address your posts and what some of our preliminary findings are.
First, we are tracking revenue events per click (eg. bids per click, commissions per click, revenue per winning bid, etc) vs. our historic averages on CJ. So far they all look either consistent or higher than our averages on CJ pre-migration (at a summary level across all affiliates). The one metric that is tracking a bit lower is ACRUs / click (this stat is about 15% lower than pre-migration). Although we’ll continue to monitor this closely, we expected this as we would expect some level of ramp-up in commissions as ACRUs have a 30 day window and we saw on CJ that registrations can take up to a few weeks to confirm and bid, etc. What this also means is that even if you were to delete all your links today, you would still receive commissions from us for customers you would have sent in the past 15 days, up until their 30 day cookies expired.
Second, although we can’t check all our affiliates’ links manually as there are millions of pages from thousands of affiliates with eBay links on them, we have been spot-checking individual links from several of you who have shared theirs on these boards and contacted you directly where we could. We have also called many of our top affiliates personally and although we are investigating an issue or two here or there, most have not reported any problems with their tracking. The primary issue we have seen to date is errors in the way that some of the new links have been implemented on affiliates’ websites. We have tried our best to capture these, along with tips on how to resolve them, in a new blog post here: www.ebaypartnernetworkblog.com/english/common-mistakes-when-building-new-links/ . The best way to avoid these issues is to as often as possible use the tools provided by eBay Partner Network to re-generate new HTML links, and then copy and paste those links directly into your sites.
As you know, although eBay Partner Network is a new proprietary in-house platform of eBay, our tracking is actually built and managed by the same third party (Mediaplex, a division of ValueClick), as we had with CJ. The platform and tracking have been rigorously alpha and beta tested with Mediaplex as well as the large external consulting firm that helped us develop eBay Partner Network. However, in response to the feedback on the boards, we have been working with both of these firms to re-verify that there are no issues. We are still early in this new investigation.
One issue that has come up is that bot clicks are currently not filtered out by the eBay Partner Network tracking system. This does not have any effect on revenue events or commissions, but could inflate the click counts you see in eBay Partner Network. When a website or a paid search campaign changes their links, the bots and crawlers that index those sites will sometimes click on those links as they re-index the sites to determine their rankings. The issue is even more pronounced for paid search campaigns, where we believe search engines will test most/all links to see if they are valid by clicking on them. Because of the way our tracking is currently constructed, those bot clicks will be shown as normal clicks, which could have the effect of inflating the click count vs. the actual commissions.
Other than this, no other system-wide issues have been uncovered by our investigations to date. We will continue to investigate thoroughly and follow up on your concerns. Tracking is a critical part of our program and we’re committed to making sure it is working 100% correctly – we can only be successful if you’re successful.
Barbara Ling
ps – this calls for some major coffee application:
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