An incredibly interesting move by eBay’s Partner Network last week to move away from a CPA payment metric to a new system that they call Quality Click Pricing. They will therefore pay out per click based on the quality of traffic sent through, rather than their old system of paying a CPA for new users, bids and revenue.
Having met and spoken to Chris and Julia, as well as some of the American guys, I know that a lot of thought and effort will have gone into this and for me, it’s an incredibly brave and positive move. Whilst a lot of people have discussed an attribution model fairer than last click, very few have stuck their necks out and done anything about it. So will eBay’s move lead to a rush of other merchants altering their payment models?
There are a couple of factors to take into consideration here. Firstly eBay’s business model varies wildly from the majority of merchants involved in affiliate marketing. They reward affiliates based on a system of sign-ups, bids and revenue driven making it a much more complex landscape than a payment based on a transaction model. The increased complexity lends itself more readily to a click based payment model, as opposed to a traditional transactional model.
Secondly, the move was facilitated by eBay’s decision to move all of their affiliate business in house with the investment in people and technology that lead to the birth of the eBay Partner Network. This has allowed eBay to have much easier access to the huge amount of data needed to understand and undertake a project such as this. I am presuming that eBay are taking into account the impact of their affiliate traffic alongside other online marketing channels (eg PPC, SEO, display, email etc) when making these changes. In order to do so you need to have an overall view of what’s going on.
Therefore, they took the decision to invest heavily to enable this. However, this isn’t viable for the majority of merchants. eBay’s scale means that it was worth them doing it but setting up your own affiliate network and doing it properly is an expensive and time consuming process and a merchant would need to be dedicated and committed to making it work if they chose to go down this route.
I wish eBay all the best in what I think is a really good move for them but don’t think this will precipitate a wide ranging shift away from a last click CPA model. I know that a lot of people are working to understand the true impact of affiliate marketing and I look forward to other brands coming up with more effective ways of rewarding all different parties.
