Several months ago, we created a Geo-Targeting tool for eBay affiliates to use. It was promoted through the eBay Partner Network blog, and picked up by a wide cross section of publishers.

It essentially allowed them to geo-target the existing content units they were using, so that their widgets would automatically display products from the correct local eBay site of the visitor.

As a bit of a research project, in a Mark Zuckerberg kind of way, we’ve analysed the data, and can see some positives results.

Obviously, to protect publisher privacy, to present this info on the blog, we’ve taken a random sample and then averaged out the data below:

So what are the points of interest?

Well, as you’d expect, clicks for the publisher’s “home” country remain fairly consistent, as do publisher commissions. The slight drop in home country clicks can be attributed to visitors from other countries, who before the implementation, would have still clicked through the widget despite it showing results for a different country.

The quite staggering number however, is the increase in clicks from other countries once the geo-targeting tool was installed by the publishers, actually out performing the publisher’s home countries!

So should we all run out and buy geo-ip databases to start coining in the benefits?

Well yes and no…

I feel that part of the increase is from publisher effort. Publishers may have already be making a conscious effort to increase their global traffic, and would have implemented this geo-tool as part of that. This would perhaps account for the fact that there was already low level activity reporting for other territories, in the before stats. Also, publishers may pick up the tool, and be spurred into improving and creating international content and traffic sources.

In addition, eBay’s global reach shouldn’t be ignored. You can promote eBay in 13 countries, all from one interface. Geo-targeting in this case is a no brainer. It’s obviously slightly more difficult if you’re promoting UK only merchants.

However…

I still don’t think you can totally ignore these figures. Sure it may not be applicable to every affiliate, but you never know where your site will crop up around the globe. An affiliate friend of mine, who runs a niche UK based camping site, whose primary traffic source was PPC, told me that it was not uncommon for him to get emails from the USA, inquiring if he delivered there.

I’m sure some of you have your own opinions on this, and may have even dabbled in other markets, but for those that haven’t, it may be an option worth exploring.

eBay · eBay Partner Network · epc · geo targeting

After putting a roof over your head and food on the table, what does your next hard earned pound need to do to keep you and your family safe and well? Maslow put shelter, warmth, sleep and sex as the other primary needs, but with this being a family show we’ll focus on shelter and warmth for this blog!

Clothing is one of the most immediate things we as humans require to keep warm, but what we choose to adorn ourselves with goes way beyond than that of course. Higher up Maslow’s hierarchy goes esteem and aesthetic needs which are where the need for basic clothing becomes a passion for fashion.

But enough of my technical mumbo jumbo…!

The fashion and clothing sector in the UK is apparently worth around £40bn annually and InternetRetailing reported a few months ago that online fashion sales were “exceptionally buoyant” as the economy entered the spring/summer. Comments from ASOS in the same publication further backs up the assertion that shoppers are increasingly willing to shop for clothes online, citing their improved returns policy as critical to this trend.

Regular readers of the R.O.EYE blog will know that we manage the eBay Partner Network programme, but you may be surprised to learn that the clothing, shoes and accessories category has represented the most popular category on eBay.co.uk for the past two years. For an e-commerce site that has over 18m unique users every month you can imagine that this represents a huge number of online fashion sales!

To support eBay.co.uk’s major push into the fashion vertical with their Fashion Outlet, as well as managing a major online fashion retailer, Boohoo, we have been on the serious look-out for fashion affiliates of late. I have to report that in comparison to other retail (e.g. electronics) and travel verticals there are relatively few “super” affiliates in the fashion and clothing sector and it seems baffling to me why this is.

While there are a lot of fashion blogs out there, these tend not to be commercially driven ventures and often run by passionate, yet hobbyist fashionistas. This is all fine of course and we’d love to hear from you if you fit this description! But what I’m talking about are large-scale, shopping comparison, product feed/API driven sites with some serious promotion behind them. There are some very good fashion sites around that I am speaking to of course (wouldn’t be doing my job if I wasn’t!), but relative to the size of the market I think there are way too few.

So in view of the scale of the opportunity here – what’s putting affiliates off?

Un-apologetically pointing to stereotypes now, but it’s easier to see how a ‘typical affiliate’/web developer/tecchie type would be much more comfortable building a site around gadgets and gizmos as opposed to dresses, shoes and handbags. (Cue angry letters from fashion-conscious affiliates with an electronics website!)

Or is it something else? Perhaps affiliates have weighed up getting into the fashion vertical and are put off for other, perhaps commercial reasons? Are search volumes too low and too competitive? Average order values and commission levels too low? Promotional methods and tools insufficient? Just a few top level thoughts but I’d really love to hear from affiliates who are seriously considering fashion as a vertical.

affiliates · boohoo · eBay · fashion · fashion outlet · online clothing · online fashion

Custom Banner is a fantastic tool which enables publishers to generate Banners that display a number of eBay items relevant to their site content. If implemented well we have seen a multitude of publishers whose CTR (Click Through Rate) for Custom banner integrations have far outperformed Google Adsense and Amazon, providing a profitable and sustainable stream of site revenue.

The key to Custom Banner’s success is in part down to the relevance of the product listings that can be achieved, but there is equal importance in ensuring the placement and styling are optimised for your site. I am often surprised by the number of affiliate sites I come across where little or no thought has gone into the setup and placement of affiliate ads on a site. In many cases no formatting has been applied and placements are either tucked away at the bottom of the page or placed in an obtrusive area of the page which can often discourage visitors from clicking through to eBay. In this Blog post I have highlighted three areas which I think publishers should consider carefully when setting up their eBay Custom Banner integrations. By following these steps we have found that publishers CTR’s and conversion rates have improved and have ultimately resulted in increased commissions.

Three Steps to Success

The Placement

There are three areas of a site where we have found that Custom Banner Integrations perform particularly well. The first placement is within the editorial content of a page. If you have a page about iPhone handsets then using a Custom Banner with relevant listings will attract that visitor to click though to eBay. The integration helps to break up the content but it is important not get carried away with multiple placements as this will detract from the user experience.

The next best placement we have seen is the left hand margin of the site. This is often a preferable location for affiliates as Custom Banner can be applied to the site template and applied to multiple pages of a site. The reason that this area performs well is down to the fact that most navigation menus are located on the left hand side of a site so the visitor’s eyes are automatically drawn into the line of site.

The third area that performs well is the right hand margin, which can be as equally effective as utilising the right hand navigation bar. This is especially true if the left hand navigation is quite busy and the Custom Banner can be integrated above the fold on the opposite side of the page.

Maybe surprisingly, some of the worst performing placements for Custom Banners are the Header positions. You would think that using such a prominent placement would produce the best results, but instead we have found it to be a poor performer, even compared to below the fold footer placements.

There are many studies that have been carried out into the optimal placements for banner advertising. While Custom Banner should be treated and implemented in a contextual format I would certainly recommend that you read the research carried out by Eyetrack. While the research is now quite dated it still provides some good insights and observations into placement effectiveness.

Appearance

Custom Banner is fully customisable to fit in with the look and feel of your site, and from experience we have seen that placements that are edited to blend in with the rest of the site actually perform better than placements that have purposely different colour schemes to stand out from the page. By default Custom banner uses an eBay theme, but by selecting the “Theme” dropdown you can edit the colours within a couple of minutes. The process can be made even easier, and produce more accurate results if you update the theme using the Hex colour Keys. Looking up a table of Hex keys isn’t a simple task, so one of the tools I recommend is a Firefox plug-in called Colorzilla. Installing the extension allows you to click the pipette icon, which in turn gives you the Hex key (FFFFFF for white) for the pixel currently selected by your cursor. This makes it really simple to match the Custom Banner colour scheme for a more professional looking integration.

Size

This might be a bit of an obvious one, but the more space you can allocate to the placement the more likely it is that the visitor will see the placement and the items within it. While you shouldn’t go over the top with the placement dimensions (filling half the page with Custom Banner will deter visitors) we have found that the most successful placement dimensions have been 120×600 and square 250×250 units utilised in editorial content and side bars. While Custom Banner does offer the flexibility to generate custom sizes, anything less than 120×400 is unlikely to perform well as you will be limiting the display results to 1 item which fails to showcase the purchasing choices available on eBay.

Chris Worthy – R.O.EYE

advertising · click through rate · colorzilla · custom banner · eBay · eyetrack · tools

It seems recently that affiliates feel increasingly “frozen out” by merchants. Whether it’s getting booted off a programme over conversation rates, or being part of an en masse cull, there’s no doubt that this topic is getting a very public airing. Whether this is because merchants are being more savvy with their traffic sources or blinded by the need to make stats look good is a debate for another place – and there are plenty of places this debate is raging – either way, merchants are seemingly taking more notice of the channel.

The day before the A4u Munich Expo, eBay arranged a “Top Publisher Day”, inviting 30 publishers from across their UK and European programmes to attend. Now before you stop reading, this isn’t a shameless eBay promotion piece, I promise you! The day involved presentations from some of their top brass from Europe and the USA, working groups and feedback sessions. eBay divulged their strategy for the coming year, and encouraged their affiliates to target those areas. In turn, affiliates got to give their feedback on all aspects of the programme, such as tools and payments etc.

The point I’m trying to make, is that merchants and affiliates should really try to see their relationship as just that – a relationship. There are many affiliates out there, who’s proactive approach and suggestions fall on deaf ears, and likewise, there are great merchants who bend over backwards to provide a great package for their affiliates, who don’t seem interested. It doesn’t need a open day in a conference suite to work, all it needs is for channels of communication to be open and both ways. I’d be grateful to hear if other merchants run a similar open day style event.

eBay · eBay Partner Network · relationships