Reason #1: Tracking delay
eBay updates your earnings every day with the previous day’s earnings. So if I go to your site today and buy something, you won’t know about it until tomorrow. But ebay also has a 7-day cookie. So if I go to your site and bid on something, but don’t win the auction for 7 days, you won’t know about those earnings for up to 8 days.

The key to successful PPC campaigns is tracking. You need to know what keywords convert and how often they convert. That way you can set your bids so you profit based on your conversion rate. But if you don’t know what converts for another 8 days, then you could be wasting lots of money before you know what is converting.

Reason #2: There is no set item price
Since you get commission for anything someone buys on ebay, you have no idea how much you will make per sale. You could spend $50 on PPC and earn $100, but maybe $75 of that was from a really expensive item on ebay. So if you say, “Hey, I spent $50 and made $100” and continue your PPC, you are unlikely to sell another expensive item every day.

Since you never know exactly how much a winning auction will earn, it’s hard to set your bid prices so you can make a profit.

Reason #3: SEO is the way to go
You want to build a phpBay site with long term potential and a long-term strategy. And SEO is the way to do that.

A short story: I decided to test PPC on my golf ball site for a very short period of time. I ended up spending about $400, and only earned about $200. So I lost $200 bucks. Then it hit me; I could have a writer write over 100 articles for that money. That would be 100 unique pages of keyword-rich content.

In the long run that would have been amazing for my SEO and would have brought in way more visitors than I got with the money I spent on PPC, and it would have been a long-term solution. I could have spent the money once and got visitors for long after that. And I wouldn’t have even had to spend that much. I could have just spent $100 for 25 articles. That would be more than enough content to get me great rank for my keywords.

In fact, after I realized my blunder I paid a writer to write 25 articles for me. So far I have only published 16 and I am already getting over 60 organic visitors a day and the site is only a month old (and the articles have only been up for 2 weeks).

So, in summary, the reason not to do PPC is because it’s too hard to track and because it would be smarter to invest the money in good content and get steady traffic over the long run that won’t keep costing you.

If you’re going to try PPC…
If you feel the need to try PPC then here is the way to approach it. First, make sure your niche is small enough where you can appear on the first page or two of Adwords for your keyword. Second. Don’t bid more than 10 cents a click.

Run the campaign for a week and then stop (just lower your budget to $1.00 a day, Google doesn’t like paused campaigns). Wait a week so all the cookie sales catch up. Then calculate how much you made. It will be tricky to calculate if you are getting organic traffic as well as you wont know which commissions are coming from organic traffic vs. paid traffic. You may just have to see your earnings increase over what you had been making.

Also, if you are selling high-ticket items that sell for a ton of money on eBay, then you may be able to earn on PPC if your site traffic had been converting well for organic search. But it’s still more risky than the SEO method.

Has anyone else tried PPC? Would love to hear how it went.

It’s really easy to figure out with the Ebay Publisher Network. I’ll walk you through it.

First, log into your Ebay Partner Network account.

Second, click the “reports” tab from the top menu.

Next, click the “transaction download” option from the bottom of the list of options on the reports page.

Then select the date range you want to search. Click the “Download Excel File” button.

This will download the Excel Report for the date range you selected. Open it. This file has all the information for all of your campaigns. Each row is a sale or lead. The event type (column C) says if it was a winning bid or an ACRU. ACRU means a lead. You likely get $25 for each lead (read all payout details here).

The next column (D) is the amount of revenue that EBAY got from the sale. You need to multiply that number times the percentage you get for each sale (varies based on our payout scale). The ACRU’s will have a “1” which means one lead, so that is $25 for you (see payout scale for more details).

As a side note, the fact that ebay doesn’t just tell me how much I made is really dumb. Why should I have to start doing math in my reports? I realize that I can look at the dashboard to see how much I made, but what if I want to know per item?

OK, on to the good stuff. To find out what item people bought you need to look at eBay Item ID (column M). Sometimes the number will be screwy and have plus signs in it. If this is a case, click the M to highlight the whole column, then right-click the column and select “format”. Then select “number” and set decimal places to 0. That should fix the item IDs.

Then all you have to do is copy that item and search ebay for it. It should take you direct to the winning auction, there you can see what people bought from you phpBay site.

I’m pretty sure that this will only work within 30 days of the purchase, so you may not be able to go look up older auctions.

Don’t be surprised if it’s something random. That’s because the eBay cookie tracks for 7 days. So someone can come back three days later and buy something on ebay and you’ll get paid. I sold a $4250 fridge from my discount golf ball site.

Hope that helps!