Why you should not use PPC with your phpBay Pro sites
Many people who get into eBay sites with phpBay Pro have had some past experience in affiliate marketing. That means they have likely promoted their other sites with Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising in the past. So naturally they want to promote their phpBay sites with PPC. But I’m not a big fan of PPC for phpBay sites. Here are some reasons why:
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.
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June 5th, 2008 at 1:41 am
I was disappointed when I signed up to eBays own affiliate program to find out they didn’t allow keyword level tracking. Unless I am mistaken so far they only let you track by manually creating campaigns.
With CJ you could pass a sub id for each visitor through phpBay which let you track back to the source of the click and measure PPC performance down to the keyword.
June 6th, 2008 at 12:55 am
It is absolutely possible to track to a keyword what’s converting and what’s not.
Joe: You can assign a custom ID to track these.
I think when using PPC with EPN, it is important to focus on ACRUs and leave commissions completely out of it. This way, you have a set number to work with ($25 CPA) and with custom IDs, you can track down to the keyword/product level what is working.
Another thing to consider is that people who click on PPC ads are not as “internet savvy” as others so they are also less likely to have an eBay account already.
June 6th, 2008 at 1:04 am
@Dave,
That is a fair point. When you target leads you can make bank, but your page may need to be set up to target those people. You really need to sell ebay as “hey, sign up to eBay b/c you wont find a better deal on product X, plus it’s safer than you think”. Obviously not in those exact words. But the point is your page may act more as a landing page that shows some sick deals and pushes the user to a sign-up…