Friday, March 16, 2007

AuctionAds.com, an Ebay Ad System

AuctionAds is a new new service that provides you with eBay ads to include in your website, to make some money (sort of like AdSense). Note that Patrick Gavin, AuctionAds’ partner who sent me this bit, once used to advertise here (and I also programmed something for him in January, which I hope to show you when he puts it live!). I gave the site a quick trial after Patrick assured me that I will not have to go through any CommissionJunction or eBay affiliate ID stuff – because I tried to sign up as eBay affiliate a while ago, and they referred me to Commission Junction, and I found the whole process completely confusing (and you need to go through weird approvals).

So after signing up with AuctionAds (which was thankfully easier than the eBay process), I can add some keywords to create an eBay auctions product box for my website – this looks like AdSense (including the code snippet):

For the box below, I played around with kewords like “google” or “google books” (this is a screenshot of the ad, not an ad itself):

There’s a live preview, so you’ll know what kind of ad you get. I was disappointed though with some of the selections which had very poor targeting – there were actually Playstation 3 ads for some of the time using the keyword “google.” And other ads had no product image showing (there was a replacement image instead), and I didn’t immediately see a way to configure this to be restricted to eBay auctions with images only. This may work better when you want to target a product, not a company, but what the online world doesn’t need at this point are more irrelevant eBay affiliate ads.

I don’t know how much you can make from these ads and if they’re a good alternative to, say, AdSense (which is also often poorly targeted!), but Patrick told me that AuctionAds will pass on 100% of the eBay commission until they find a way to get better commission rates from eBay (because they’ll be a larger group).

Something else for which I found the site useful already though was to create eBay affiliate links. This was why I originally tried to sign up with eBay/ CommissionJunction, because I wanted to add affiliate links to my CoverBrowser.com “buy” links below the comic book covers (at one point with the eBay/ CommissionJunction process, I just gave up and/ or finally wasn’t approved – I also gave up on using the eBay API for Cover Browser, by the way, and resorted to screenscraping, which was much simpler to program). AuctionAds provides you with a box where you can paste in your eBay search, and they’ll output a changed link, and this way I was able to quickly transfer the link format into my site’s global template. (I hope it actually works, I’ll know in some weeks I guess!)

[Thanks Patrick!]

AuctionAds.com, an Ebay A ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (15)

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