eBay Affiliate’s Day

Wow I haven’t been hungover like this in a while. Yesterday was eBay’s “Affiliates Day” at their annual developer’s conference in Chicago. Had a really full day starting at 8:30am, which if you know me you know is way before my workday usually starts, especially with the time change. But it was definitely worth it. ePN showed up in force, with around 10 account managers, VPs, basically everyone from their internet marketing team.

We as affiliates are often used and abused as marketing tools, but this was a really special experience to work closely with the folks involved in the program. They did a bunch of sessions:

• Matt “everyone who uses the term eCPM on a regular basis is on my team” Ackley - gave a great talk on where eBay is today and where they are headed. Really interesting to see their internal thought process and he did a really good job of making us feel like part of the overall strategy.
• Jarrod “internet celebrity” Schwartz - drilled down into the partner network some more and had some good insights. It was also good to make fun of him for having his picture in the sidebar on the affiliate forums for so long hahaha
• Will “don’t you dare send me bad traffic” Martin-Gill - this may have been the most educational talk of the day, he went into the value of ACRUs (for u non epn addicts this is a new user registration), and how they can pretty accurately predict the lifetime value of a customer after just a few days on the site. Right now eBay pays flat rates for ACRUs, $25-35 depending on the volume you do. Will discussed this possibly changing to a value based model, so affiliates that drove ACRUs that didn’t generate much value to the company would make less per, and affiliates that drove better traffic would make more. Makes sense but change is always feared.
• Cian “only funny because of my accent” Weeresinghe - the head of an intern at ebay.co.uk talked about geo targeting. When they launched ePN they made a big deal of how they were going to geo target for affiliates. Uh, yeah. I posted a while ago about this saying it doesn’t work. Apparently it does work, but it works via javascript (huh???). If you copy and paste the exact code (including the javascript) for every link you make, I guess it works. This is kind of retarded to me. Every click for every eBay program (canada, france, uk, au, everything) goes to rover.ebay.com. Is it really that hard to download the free maxmind db, do a live lookup on the click, and send the user to the correct ebay? I am sure they could even afford the $12/mo 99% accurate edition. Bottom line, eBay should do a better job than any of its affiliates at geo targeting, so why not? In the time Cian gave his talk I fixed my geotargeting for ZinText using the free one. Cian was on my side, and apparently its up to Jarrod to get it done.
• Steve “don’t stuff my cookies” Hartman - did the mandatory network quality talk. nothing new here, just remember not to cheat! don’t even try to cheat, we are too good at catching cheaters, there is no more cheating now that we are here to catch all the cheaters. He did have some funny quotes pulled from some blackhat affiliate marketing site with guys getting their accounts closed.
• Sunny “i am only here for the famous IM party” Li - I really should have paid more attention to this talk but this was like 6 hours in and my ADD had about all it could handle. Plus I found an open wifi network and was gettin it crackin on digg Anyways, Sunny was from the developers conference and gave a talk on the APIs and how they are changing and stuff. Really important to my business and I couldn’t tell you what was said

Then they gave me some cool Robert Marc sunglasses (everyone got sunglasses, a bunch of different brands) and some free drinks, then we all met up last night for dinner and a party all hosted by eBay.

I would just like to say thank you first of all to eBay and whoever’s idea it was to reach out to affiliates like this. I would also like to thank everyone from eBay involved in the event, especially Kim Thai. It was a great experience for me and I learned a lot. There was great energy in the room, and everyone was pretty jazzed about promoting ePN and making $$$

Side note, I also got a chance to meet Michael and Kris Jones from PepperJam. These guys are very cool and if you haven’t had a chance to explore their network definitely give it a look.

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