I was at DigitalPoint today, and came across a great thread “Adwords and ebay?How necessary?“. I personally don’t like to use AdWords (I prefer Yahoo’s YSM), but I wanted to get some basic tips for PPC in general… since I’m always wanting to learn how others are doing it.

Anyway, manx posted the following post, which I thought was extremely useful. I wanted to put in here, so I could easily reference it in the future… but some of you might find it useful as well. It’s basic, but the basics get easily lost when you dive into PPC.

“I have found that if you use extremely targetted keywords/keyword phrases in the ads with the destination url going to the exact product, you can make a profit with ebay & adwords.

For example — doing a “handbags” ad or even a “designer handbags” ad has not worked for me, but if I do an ad something like this:

“brand name” handbag
Looking for “brand name” handbags?
Huge selection at bargain prices.
Display URL: yourdomain.com/brand-name-handbag
Dest. URL yourdomain.com/brand-name-handbag

Then the keywords you would use would be:
brand name handbag
brand name handbags
Buy brand name handbags
bargain brand name handbags
brandnamehandbag .com

AND, use broad, exact and phrase

Or you can take it a step deeper with
“brand name” red handbags

BUT! Before you even decide to advertise a product that is on eBay, you should also do research on whether the thing actually sells.

To do this, login to ebay. Go to Advanced search, Enter the Keyword in the Search box, Check the box for “completed listings only” then click search.
The results will show you All the listings in the past 2 weeks (I think) that completed. The ones with $’s in Green were “won” or sold. The ones with
$’s in Red were NOT sold.

If the product had a lot of listings, with alot of “red” dollars — it means the product hasn’t been selling well.

NEXT! Just because a product sells on eBay — doesn’t mean people are searching Google for it! Alot of people just go directly to eBay to buy products.

So, you should use Google Adwords Traffic Estimator (although it can be very inaccurate) to check and see if the keywords (products) you are targetting are actually being used in searches.

If the product passes the above two “tests” it is recommended you start your bids at .10 cents and go no higher than .15 or .16. If you have to bid more to get impressions/clicks — then you have a problem, because very rarely will you get an EPC (earnings per 100 clicks) from ebay higher than $20.
If you bid higher, then you will just break even or lose money.

So, there you go — One way to make money with eBay and Adwords.

Hope this helps”

With the recent change to ePN, I’d be pretty weary about jumping to PPC with eBay store fronts. I’ve been contemplating pausing my campaigns at YSM, but feel like I need the traffic to help determine if I have linkage/tracking problems at eBay. From my record month (March was a fantastic month) to a totally crappy month for April… this sucks. I’m staying optimistic, and focusing on other revenue streams (like I always preach).