commission junction | Croncast - Life is Show Prep

Major eBay Affiliate Program Changes

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 10:40:03 -0400

No clue how I missed this but one of major contributors to keeping the Croncast server humming, the eBay affiliate program, is being overhauled by eBay.

eBay will no longer use Commission Junction to run their program they will be taking it in-house. It will be interesting to see how eBay changes the program and what their reporting interface will look like. Hopefully, it will be easier to read and offer more information about the types of sales and leads that affiliates generate for eBay.

My only real concern is what the payout structure for affiliates will look like. With all the recent changes in seller's fees and feedback it makes me a bit nervous that eBay will lower the payouts to affiliates. I've become accustomed to accepting their money and very much like the $25 for new signups and fifty-percent of sellers fees.

The new program goes in to effect on none other than April Fools Day 2008.

Are they trying to send affiliates a message?

Tags: iPod eBay affiliate program commission junction

Apple Affiliate Program, Giving It Another Shot

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 11:47:16 -0500

I have no clue why I am giving the Apple Affiliate Program another shot. When you look at the numbers you will think I am crazy for trying again. I just can't get passed the fact that they sell a ton of iPods, MacBooks and now the MacBook Air and that we could possibly make a couple bucks from it.

Last year we were paid $0.00 by Apple after running a pretty aggressive campaign on Croncast and Resale Queen and in our RSS feeds. There is no way that in hades that not one single individual didn't buy the item they clicked on from the online Apple store in the 3 month span we ran the ads. It is illogical to look at the numbers (first table) and think that not one items was purchased from the online store within the cookie expiration period.

Advertiser	Commissions	S_Amount	Items	Sales	Leads	Clicks	Imps	CTR
eBay	$ XX	$ XX	47	598	84	351,500	59,514	590.61
Apple Store US & Apple Store Canada	$ 0.00	$ 0.00	0	0	0	218	31,192	0.69

Here's where we are in the last 4 days since I started running a couple ads in Betsy's Resale Queen feeds: blog posts and her podcast feed. The ads are for iLife '08 and the new MacBook Air. They are placed after the post item content and before the post tags.

Advertiser	Commissions	S_Amount	Items	Sales	Leads	Clicks	Imps	CTR
eBay	$ XX	$ XX	3	105	6	26,354	4,949	532.51
Apple Store US & Apple Store Canada	$ 0.00	$ 0.00	0	0	0	57	82	69.51

The clicks and impressions both are higher than I would have expected but maybe I did better targeting of the audience this time around. I doubt it. I think I was dead on during October, November and December to run iPod ads for shuffle, nano and video iPods.

I did contact the Apple Affiliate program through CJ during the second month to ask what the issue might be and never received a response.

For some reason I feel a need to go through with this again and hope that we can get our payout on a purchase from a lead that we created. I'll let you know how this goes.

Anyone else have experience with the Apple Affiliate Program?

Tags: MacBook Air iLife 08 Apple Affiliate Program Commission Junction eBay affiliate

Facial recognition for contextual internet ads?

Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:55:34 -0500

Though some may call it an eerie coincidence. I prefer to think of it as a conspiracy by those trying to target ads.

What is, "it"?

Glad you asked.

"It", is what I saw today while reading a news story about a guy who wanted to bail out of a plane at 30,000 feet.

Those smart marketers have done two things:

1. Proven that inline facial recognition from images can work like keywords to control ads
2. Proven that Einstein did invent a time travel machine and bad caricatures

Tags: Einstein Google Adsense advertising United Airlines commission junction