Second Round of EPN Bannings
An eBay spokesperson posted a message on their message board making note of a larger number of recent affiliate bans or “expirations.”
I wanted to address all of the board posts regarding the expiration emails that were sent last night.
These actions were part of our continued effort to focus on delivering the highest quality buyer traffic to eBay via affiliate marketing. To that end, we’ve been analyzing our program closely over the last few months. I know there have been a number of requests to provide insight into all of the metrics via which we are evaluating affiliate traffic, but unfortunately there’s an active black hat community that is pretty effective at exploiting these insights so we can’t go into details on them. However, what I can say is that in addition to earnings per click metrics (EPC), we look at a variety of metrics to see how users are behaving when they come to eBay.com – how engaged they are with our site, and whether the affiliate link clicks lead to incremental buying activity. As we’ve done this, we have seen a big discrepancy in how interested and active the traffic is that comes to eBay from different sources.
Our responsibility in the affiliate marketing channel is to allocate our resources to best drive incremental demand to our sellers. To that end, we need to focus on partners who have had the most success in engaging users who become some of our best buyers on eBay. I understand that these actions do have a very real impact on some of our affiliates who have been working with us over the years. For that, I sincerely apologize, but these decisions are made in the best interest of eBay’s sellers and the overall health of our affiliate program.
We want to be very clear. Affiliates who received these messages of expiration last night are not being asked to stop sending traffic to us due to fraudulent activity or violations of the terms of service. For those of you who received the message, commissions are not being reversed, and you will be paid for all valid traffic you have sent to us to date, and for the next 7 days.
Sincerely,
Steve
Now, quite frankly, the fact that they are blaming this on the blackhat community is a bit ridiculous. It is, in fact, their responsibility to safeguard their own systems. These gentleman essentially skirted around the real question, which is “What does real traffic look like to you guys?” They say they can’t release specific information about the metrics they are using due to the blackhat community exploiting them, but the fact of the matter is that most of the metrics they could use are blatantly obvious and have already been discussed in great detail by people in the know.
The first and potentially the hardest metric to combat is on-site behavior tracking. That is to say, what users that click EPN affiliate links do once they are on eBay. It is unlikely for all users who come from a single affiliate to only go to the first page they are presented. While this might be the case a majority of the time, general traffic patterns indicate that something between 10-15% of users will travel at least one page deeper. This number rises and falls depending on the quality of the on-page content as well the relevance of the link, but this is a good baseline to begin to look at.
Lots of ideas are floating around the office at the moment with ways to combat this, though it should be stated clearly that nothing is in the works yet. We should also note that we’ve received no reports of people utilizing our cookie stuffing method being banned and that we have not been directly effected by these bannings.
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