October 2008 Archives

If you're using eBay's partner network you may find the reports provided to be a bit lacking in detail ie. it's hard to work out exactly what is converting and what isn't.

According to a post on their EPN blog this will change come October 22nd, when they release a new category report.

The report will allow you to see which categories and sub-categories are getting the most conversions and you can match those against your campaigns.

While it may lack the transparency of Amazon's reports, it's definitely a move in the right direction.

Search engine giant Google has announced that it will allow gambling ads on its Adwords network to target users in England, Scotland and Wales.

Google banned gambling ads back in 2004, but is expected to add at least £100 million a year to its bottom line with this move.

As the ads will be targetting users based on those countries you can expect webmasters with sites attracting UK traffic to be rubbing their hands with glee, as the payouts on gambling related ads are traditionally quite high. Unfortunately Google has never fully divulged the percentages that it gives publishers.

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Amazon have launched yet another feature for their affiliates - Site Stripe

As you browse the Amazon site you can easily link to any product you see without having to mess about with the Amazon Associates section:

The Associates Site Stripe lets you build your Associates links right from the Amazon page itself. The Site Stripe will appear at the top of every Amazon page and provides quick and easy access for building links, adding products to your aStore and even seeing your reports. The Associates Site Stripe is a convenient alternative to using some of the Associate Central linking and reporting tools.

It looks like this:



I haven't had much time to play with it, but it looks like it could be a really useful weapon in an affiliate's arsenal

Google Adsense is now available for games. And by games they mean Flash, web based games.
And by available, they mean "available to really popular sites".
In order to qualify you need to be serving a minimum of half a million games per day and have at least 80% US or UK based traffic.

More information, screenshots and more are available on the official adsense blog.

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The OpenX team have released a number of Flash tutorials which include one on using OpenX to serve Google Adsense.

The tutorial is easy to follow and does not assume any prior knowledge of using OpenX, so it's perfect for beginners.

Webgains have informed affiliates that the CD Wow has been closed.

This follows on from the closure of several other DVD / CD merchants including base.com (formerly dvd.co.uk)  on other affiliate networks in recent weeks.

Are the merchants feeling the pinch or are they planning on launching their own inhouse affiliate solutions?

If you're using eBay's API to hook into their affiliate network then you probably need to know the category IDs.

Ebay maintains several pages on their site with listings of the categories and their respective IDs.

So if you are interested in the main DVD category, you'd be looking for category ID 11232, while DVDs and Blu Rays are in the more specific sub-category of 617. Unfortunately some of the categories would appear to almost overlap, so you probably need to explore which ones are the most suitable for your needs.

Amazon are always introducing new and interesting ways to hook into their content, however obviously not all methods work as well as others.

As of October 14 2008 the "context links" system will be retired.

The context links system seemed like a good idea, but it probably didn't work as well in reality as it did in theory.

In case you're wondering what they were:

Context Links - You create the content. We'll link it. Context Links are a quick and convenient way to add links to your page and help you monetize your content. Context Links automatically identify and link relevant phrases within your page content to Amazon products

There's still plenty of other link methods available, so it's no great loss!

I mentioned Twittad a while back.

They've since launched a new site that shows you how much your "tweets" are "worth" - a bit like the way TLA does it for websites and blogs.

You can get yet another totally useless HTML widget to shove on your website ....