Ok, i'm new to CJ. A friend told me about CJ and some of the cool tools that ebay provide to help affiliates. He showed me this tool http://affiliates.ebay.com.au/tools/linking/ I thought it would be a good idea to make my own 468x60 banners and use the above tool to link users to specific categories on Ebay. I assumed this would be ok since Ebay provides the tool itself. But since i did it i noticed that my clicks have gone up but impressions hasn't changed. I looked at an original code that ebay provides on CJ.com and notice the link to images are different. Take this for example: http://www.lduhtrp.net/image-2715663-9488242 It doesn't have an extension on the end of it. I assume its like this so it can gather statistics for CJ? What i did is made up a whole heap of different banners and uploaded them onto my website then used the above ebay tool to link them to a specific category and now i don't receive impression stats which makes me think this might not be allowed? Thanks
I think there is nothing bad about it, but I cannot confirm this, as I'm a newbie in eBay affiliate marketing, too. You can contact your CJ account manager or eBay. Actually I was thinking about something similar. You might like to check out AuctionAds - that might be even a better solution, only if their ads worked better with the keywords.
I did try contact them about something regarding the ebay flexi tool the other day and they were pretty clueless...
This is perfectly legal. It is not showing impressions because there is no way to track them if you are using your own banners. If you want it to show impressions, go to get links, find a keyword text link, get the html code, and just copy the code for the little 1 pixel by 1 pixel image file and put in on your site next to your own banners. This way each time one loads it will count your impressions.
Or you can just check in the Awstats in your cPanel how many visitors your site has had and you can then estimate the number of impressions.
Thanks for the help, yeah i'm not worries about tracking my site statistics i just though that CJ may ge concerned if i'm getting all these clicks but no impressions. Edit: i just found something on the CJ site that links to this page http://pages.ebay.com.au/affiliate/cjflexiblelink.html?aid=10281274&pid=2715663&sid= Perhaps i am meant to use this tool instead?
Impressions are usually not a problem for CJ or any merchant on CJ. We strip the tracking pixel and use mostly just links and our own creatives and have for years. There are a few advertisers that don't want you creating your own creatives (banners), but ebay is fine with it. Just as long as you don't violate their trademarks or the trademarks of others. The most important numbers are your CTR and EPC for most merchants.