eBayAdCommerce Blog

Listen to blogger and eBay Platinum PowerSeller John Lawson and eBay Director of Advertising Alexis Van De Wyer keeping it real in this revealing interview about AdCommerce, posted on the ColderICE  blog.  They talk about how the AdCommerce tool works, what’s working for sellers, and what we can look forward to in the future. You’ll hear about keyword selection, the performance-based model and how eBay is reaching out to help AdCommerce partners be more successful. You may be surprised to hear how easy it is to take control of your own advertising!

Join John and Alexis and find out how to use AdCommerce to sell more on eBay today.

Walk into any retail outlet and you cannot escape the pink and red reality: Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. We’d like to offer a few keyword tips to help AdCommerce partners get in on the fun and profits – but keep in mind that most of these apply year-round. 

When our sellers find the right keywords, their traffic skyrockets and they sell more products. But how do you pick the right words, especially for something temporary like a holiday? In the case of Valentine’s Day (or any holiday), try working holiday terms in with your product terms, i.e.: “Valentine’s Day Gift: iPod Nano.”  Then use your ads to let shoppers know about your great deals on excellent last-minute gifts.  Nearly any product makes a good gift for someone searching on eBay.

Otherwise – and this is true for any day, not just holidays – the AdCommerce wizard will provide keyword suggestions you might find helpful.

Here are a few other “words to live by” when selecting keywords, holiday or no:

1. Relevance. Select keywords related to your product or category. We’ve seen this in action: adding more relevant and targeted keywords helps sellers get better exposure.  Plus, sellers are more likely to stay on the site, buy, and come back again when they see results relevant to their searches.
2. Research. Check eBay Pulse for the most searched terms in your category. While these terms will be more competitive, you can combine a top term along with a term unique to your product.
3. Optimization. Once you choose your keywords, make sure you’ve optimized your listings or your store page(s) for those words.
4. Reporting. Use the reporting tools to check your results and to optimize your ads for the best return.

Here’s to finding the right words – on Valentine’s Day and all year long. Cheers!

The AdCommerce Team

We’ve had reports recently of an AdCommerce “spoof” email, originating from a fraudulent address and claiming that the recipient owes AdCommerce a given amount of money.  Spoof emails are messages that claim to be sent by well-known companies. They generally ask consumers to reply with personal information, such as their credit card number, social security number or account password.  Another form of spoof will direct the spoof email recipient to click through a link to what appears to be a legitimate site.    

Please note the screenshot of this particular spoof, below:

For your protection we’ve included tips here on spotting these emails and how to handle them.

1. If you feel you’ve received a spoof message regarding your AdCommerce invoices, the best way to check is within the Invoice Summary screen within My Accounts in your AdCommerce dashboard.  The bottom line – all information regarding your AdCommerce invoices should be reflected within your Invoice Summary under My Account.
2. The good news about spoof emails is that you are in control – you can protect your personal financial information by ignoring the spoof altogether. You should never provide contact, sign-in or other sensitive personal information in an email.  
3. If you feel you’ve received a spoof email, please forward a copy of the spoof email here.

You can also visit the PayPal Security Center at http://www.paypal.com/securitycenter or check out the eBay Spoof tutorial at http://pages.ebay.com/education/spooftutorial/ to learn more!

The AdCommerce Team

Few people knew what to expect from the 2009 holiday shopping season after 2008’s disappointing results. Fortunately, the big shopping weeks of 2009 turned out to be good ones for many online retailers. This week comscore reported U.S. online holiday sales were up 4 percent compared with 2008, to $29.1 billion.

We’re pleased to report that our AdCommerce partners enjoyed a particularly happy holiday season, as they launched successful campaigns that provided maximum exposure and big traffic boosts during the busiest time of the year.

KMS Coins attributed an influx of traffic into its auctions to its AdCommerce campaigns. “We get roughly 550-600 hits on our auctions each day from AdCommerce, which is a great way to boost our traffic across the site,” said Mike Schwede, KMS Coins Owner.

BrandNameLiquidations’ perfume campaign spiked in December, attracting double the traffic and hundreds of bids and sales.

The folks at Buy.com report that even post-holiday sales during the week after Christmas remained strong. In fact, post-holiday sales for eForCity’s electronics accessories peaked at an all time high, as consumers shopped for the add-ons to their new game players, GPS units, printers, cell phones and other personal electronics.

eMarketer predicted this week that the 2009 online holiday sales growth points to “brighter days ahead,” and expects online sales growth to surge ahead in 2010. We’re looking forward to being a part of your growth in 2010!

The AdCommerce Team

Welcome to 2010! We’re excited about getting a fresh start in the new year – it’s always a great time for getting new priorities off the ground.  What are your goals for the year ahead? Do they include increasing your site traffic? Boosting sales? AdCommerce is a great way for eBay sellers to increase visibility of their products among eBay’s millions of online shoppers. 

If you’re just starting out with AdCommerce or are considering adding us to your advertising mix, welcome. Below we’ve included a few ideas to transform your journey into a successful venture.

1. Make a plan. What’s your budget? What would you like to accomplish with AdCommerce? Which products and/or categories make the most sense to promote and when?  A little up front organization will help you reap the rewards later.
2. Plan ahead. Often it takes several weeks for a campaign to build momentum, so that means right now you’re planning for sales around Valentines’ Day or later. (Watch this space for thoughts on Valentines’ Day promotions.)  Consider:  84 percent of our top advertisers saw a strong increase in their ROI during the holidays. Those who planned ahead with AdCommerce showed larger increases in return.
3. Get down to writing. Take ad copy seriously. Use the flexibility in our titles and draft copy that draws customers in.  Make sure your ads reinforce the perception you’d like customers to have of your product. Be relevant to the user, focus on product value and highlight key features that make your product stand out from others.
4. Play copy editor. Avoid errors and all caps, same for over-emotional pleas, scare tactics, etc.
5. Optimize like a pro. Use the robust reporting features to adjust your campaigns for maximum returns.

Feel free to send us additional tips on how you’ve used AdCommerce here.

Or, click here to get ramped up now.  Best of luck in 2010!

Protecting our advertisers from click fraud is something we at AdCommerce take very seriously. Like most types of fraud, click fraud is not something anyone can say that they’ve completely eliminated. Fortunately, though, there are steps that can be taken to prevent a significant portion of it, and there are companies and organizations in the industry that are working together to get better and better at fighting it. We’re proud to say that we’re one of those companies.

Today we’re announcing two major steps we’ve taken to show our customers just how important preventing click fraud is to AdCommerce. First, we’ve successfully completed the ImServices Group’s click measurement accreditation, indicating our full compliance with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Click Measurement Guidelines.

The IAB guidelines provide a rigorous methodology to help companies define and measure valid clicks and eliminate fraudulent ones. Passing this audit was no easy feat and eBay AdCommerce is among a small group of industry leaders that are first to achieve this distinction. We did this to show that we are focused on delivering a transparent, robust and accurate advertising platform for our customers.

Completing this accreditation is a great step forward for us but there is always more work that can be done. The nature of click fraud is such that it will evolve and it’s up to us to continually evaluate potentially fraudulent clicks and make sure that we continue to deliver high-quality traffic to our advertisers. That’s why we’ve enlisted ClickForensics, the industry leader in scoring, auditing, and improving traffic quality for the online advertising community, to help us do just that.

The ClickForensics team brings deep expertise in online marketing, Internet security, and click fraud detection techniques to our team, and together we’ll work to identify and eliminate sources of low-quality traffic from the AdCommerce platform. We welcome ClickForensics to the team and look forward to working together to deliver the value and reliability that AdCommerce customers deserve.

Sincerely,

The eBay AdCommerce Team

In a recent article published in E-Commerce-Guide.com, a leading source for independent, up-to-date information on e-commerce trends and products, Alexis Van De Wyer, Director of Global Advertising for AdCommerce, explains how eBay sellers have been raking in clicks and conversions using AdCommerce, eBay’s cost-per-click advertising solution.

Read full article here: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/advertising/article.php/3852286

Learn how Jonathan O. (CEO/Founder, CanCrafts) used AdCommerce to increase sales during the holidays:

In a conversation with Alexis Van De Wyer, Director of Global Advertising for AdCommerce, Ina Steiner, Editor and Co-Founder of Auctionbytes.com gains a deeper understanding of AdCommerce and how eBay sellers can use it as a key driver to attract more qualified buyers to their eBay store.

Alexis explains some effective strategies on how various eBay sellers have used AdCommerce’s flexible platform to tailor their marketing program to meet specific business needs.

Alexis Van De Wyer Discusses AdCommerce Program for eBay Sellers
By Ina Steiner
AuctionBytes.com

AuctionBytes:  How are advertisers using AdCommerce, what are some examples of some effective strategies?

Alexis Van De Wyer:  Effective strategies will vary amongst eBay sellers and will completely depend on the specificities of their businesses. AdCommerce offers sellers the flexibility to tailor their marketing program to their specific business needs. For example we have seen sellers with a wide inventory be extremely successful by creating several category-targeted campaigns for each of their product lines and driving a large volume of traffic to a category in their stores. Other sellers prefer to create ads for each specific product and use a more targeted approach – with carefully selected keywords – to drive highly converting traffic directly to their product page.

For some sellers it’s going very well, and for others it doesn’t seem to be a fit. Fortunately, our detailed reporting allows sellers to see exactly what’s working so they can modify their campaigns accordingly. As with any of the many features we offer our sellers, what works will be different for each of them. We aim to provide them with as many tools for success as possible, and AdCommerce is just one of those tools.

Read the full story here: http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y09/m12/i09/s01

We are happy to report that critical search functionality was restored overnight on Saturday and we are seeing normal activity levels as of Sunday, November 22, 2009. A technical issue occurred on Saturday, causing search to return limited or no results throughout the day. As part of eBay technical team’s effort to restore critical search functionality as quickly as possible for both sellers and buyers, we approached the search restoration in phases, focusing on primary functionality restoration immediately after the issue occurred, with full restoration of secondary search features on Sunday, November 22, 2009. We realize this is a really busy time for sellers ramping up for the holiday season. We’re sorry this technical issue occurred, causing search to return a limited or no natural results throughout the day.

However, during the search downtime, AdCommerce sponsored results were fully functional, which resulted in higher overall visibility and click through rates for AdCommerce partners on Saturday, November 21, 2009. AdCommerce advertisers enjoyed higher exposure for their ad placements, due to no other results being shown on that page.

For more information, please read the full eBay announcement here: http://announcements.ebay.com/.