Little survey... For those affiliates who have traffic from multiple countries, would you be interested in a redirection service which would forward your eBay clicks to the eBay country site the click originated from? Eg. You are a US based affiliate who is getting traffic from Canadian users, instead of clicks from those users going to ebay.com they would go to ebay.ca Why you ask? It's simple, a user may end up on ebay.com from your affiliate site but they may be from another country that has its own eBay site. Chances are that user will actually go to his/hers country specific site to finally make the purchase. Countries that have their own eBay site. Austria Australia Canada United Kingdom Spain Italy France Belgium Singapore India Netherlands If you get traffic from those countries you may be missing out on revenue. Would you be willing to pay a very small monthly fee for a service like this? This could take the form of actual payment, $2 - $3, or allow the system to capture a very small percentage, 3%?, of your clicks, whichever option works better for you. Comments/Suggestions?
Yes, there would be real-time click stats which is another part of this idea. You would have exact, real-time click stats, you would know in real-time when users clicked, what item they clicked, country they came from ..and other stats that come to mind. No more waiting for CJ to update their click stats who knows when. Eventually, for more advance users there would be a way to link PPC campaigns so you would know which ads are generating clicks. Also, importing of sales from CJ once they are published would be possible in the future. It would take some time to develop all these features, starting off with basic redirection and click counts.
FYI, BANS in it's about to be released version 3.0 is going to enable participation in various country specific eBay affiliate programs, as well as the ability, as I understand it, to narrow feeds down to the local level.
It would detect the clicking users country of origin based on their IP address and redirect to the proper eBay country site. The IP database would be updated daily to give the most accurate results. You would be able to set the default eBay site to use and which country specific sites to allow redirects to. You would have to apply for the eBay country specific sites through CJ first, I had no problem getting accepted to most of them.
It's very clear to me what you were talking about is IP delivering, it is a form of cloaking. I'd be wary as this practise is frown upon by Search Engine !
How is that cloaking? This has nothing to do with search engines, I think you are a little confused here.
Quote from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloaking#Cloaking_versus_IP_Delivery "IP delivery can be considered a more benign variation of cloaking..." and "One use of IP delivery is to determine the requestor's location, and deliver content specifically written for that country."
This has nothing to do with search engines or SEO. I'm not going to argue with you about this, thanks for your opinion.
It's not cloaking, Google does it all the time itself when it redirects requests from Google.com to the local version. Cloaking is the practice of presenting one page to the search engine and another page to the end user. As far as the IP targeting it's funny, I've been toying with the idea myself because of the new BANS. I've come very close several times to starting a thread just like this one. My final decision was that the average site owner just wouldn't be willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile. We're a cheap bunch. The cost of development and the IP database (the best one I found was $500 annually) and the support issues just wasn't going to make it worth my time. Good luck to you if you've found a better solution.
Yeah, there isn't anything wrong with presenting the user with information they will understand better.
I like the idea.. but it's free.. <cough>geoip</cough> And I also agree.. this would NOT be cloaking. AuctionAds was using IP redirection as well. hanji
If you are a programmer you can slap something together a geo redirect for yourself sure, I already use this on my sites and get sales from various eBay country sites. But, if everyone was a programmer BANS wouldn't be so popular Now, to develop and maintain a multi user system takes significant amount of time and resources, you need something in return. For those that do not want to actually pay fees, allowing the system to capture a very small percentage of the clicks coming through I think is a pretty good setup. I think real-time click statistics would benefit a lot of people, especially those who use PPC marketing.
I use PPC marketing among other methods and this would be a great service for my websites. PM me if you get the chance.