An interesting twist has come to light regarding the adverts eBay are testing on the site in search results.
eBay are consulting website owners to gauge their interest in paying for the adverts and gathering information on the likely take up rate and the amount users may spend per month.
One new snippet that has come out of the research is the question “How interested would you be in a service like this that linked your ad to your eBay Listing or to your eBay Shop?” In other words eBay are now considering offering the opportunity to create adverts to appear in search results which would link directly to your eBay listings or shop, alongside others that link to off eBay sites which could be your own website.
I’m in two minds about this, firstly the ability to drive additional traffic to your own listings could be a way to utilise shop inventory listings more fully. On the other hand if you have your own website it’ll allow you to drive traffic off eBay and save final value fees. The downside of course is you could be competing with large corporates with big advertising budgets. Until more information is available on the cost per click and how the adverts will be implemented on the site, it’s hard to decide if this is a good or bad move on eBay’s part.
One thing is for sure, having paid eBay fees many sellers will be reluctant to pay for adverts to drive traffic to their listings, and even less enamoured with the idea of adverts driving traffic off eBay and losing sales.
eBay will doubtless be measuring the results of the current tests as they can’t afford to lose core site sales and face another debacle, similar to the SIF in Core fiasco of last year.
9 Responses
We’re having a big discussion about this on UK community Q&A Board.
As a shop owner we will be pushing forward with building our own site, getting rid of ebay, and using saved fees to pay for advertising to link offsite.
We already have increased hits on our website from Ebay because of google adwords and the new positioning of adverts last week.
It will be pointless having a shop on ebay with lack of visibility and advertising appearing above shops.
Why pay to list when you will effectively be able to pay to redirect and not pay for FVF’s etc
I am seriously considering reducing my eBay spend by 50% or more and putting that into Adwords *on eBay*. If the current ad positioning stays as it is, I think that would be a much more effective use of that bit of budget for me.
by the time I add bold, highlight, gallery plus, bigger pictures, subtitle, etc etc etc etc I am skint so its matterless to me
though to be Serious
advertising is only expensive if it fails to increase profits or sales, if it does either its worth the bother and cost,
the big trick is knowing when it has
Wasn’t it Henry Ford who said that 50% of his advertising budget was wasted: he just didn’t know which half?
We did use the banner ad program with ebay a while back when it was in a slightly different form, but we spent quite a bit of the ad budget on those ads, but like you said, we never knew which half was wasted, and we ultimately dropped the program when eBay lowered the incentives to the power sellers.
Oh, another way of generating revenue- well that’s come as a huge surprise….not.
Surely this is some way of offering us shop and business owners a consolation to the fact that ebay are now putting sponsored links in from much bigger fish?- these sponsored links apear after auction listings and therfore before our shop listings- not good ebay!
I sell high quality complete dog food direct from our own factory- my products offer great value and I pride myself in my great service, but seriously, how can I really compete with some of the sponsored website links in the pets section (i.e. Eukanuba, etc) In retaliation; am I now supposed to fork out more money for additional advertising in order to appear before the offending sponsored links?
Unfortunately I just cannot afford to do this.
Sue,
I have been saying (at eBay Uni usually) that it was Henry Ford. But I was quietly corrected the other week: it was John Wannamaker.
From the Wikipedia:
“The famous advertising axiom “half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” is credited to John Wanamaker.”
Ah, thanks Dan! I shall use as my excuse that it does sound VERY like the sort of thing Henry Ford would have said. Although apparently the “any colour you like so long as it’s black” thing is rubbish too (everything I know, I know from Q.I. :-D).