Thursday, March 09, 2006

Contextual eBay adverts with ctxbay | by Adrian Cockcroft | 9th March 2006

The winners in the eBay developer contest were announced at ETech, one was Alex Stankovic, who has developed a contextual advertising system for eBay that works just like Google Adsense. I just changed my advert bar for this blog to use his system at ctxbay.

At the ctxbay site you find a link to sign up with eBay for the affiliate program (via Commission Junction) this was an easy fast signup, and gets you an affiliate id number. You then create an account at ctxbay, and enter your affiliate number, which they will then use to call back to Comission Junction and make sure you get paid.

The rest of the setup is similar to adsense, however you do need to login to ctxbay with your new account, and it didn't do this automatically for me. ctxbay generates a selection of common ad frame formats using javascript that can be slotted into your site template. I found one identical to my adsense format, and swapped out the code. My first attempt didn't work because I was not logged in, and the id field in the javascript was empty. After I logged in I got a fairly long string that keys my ad to ctxbay.

I setup adsense in order to understand it better, and going forward I'll see if ctxbay can generate any sensible eBay items out of the keywords in my blog.
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