So the AdCommerce promotion is pretty much over, but the big question is was it successful for you (if you were one of those who got a £50 free trial) and will you be continuing to use Adcommerce in the future?
Already the placement of Adcommerce has slipped on eBay, it’s now below the listings, below the Sponsored (off site) links and appears below the page navigation as “Sponsored Results”. It’s not exactly the most prominent position on the page and I would have thought it better to offer adverts keeping buyers on eBay before adverts sending them off to third party ecommerce sites.
Will I be using Adcommerce again? Probably not. In an attempt to learn how it works (and to blow through my free £50) I achieved just over 50,000 impressions with a miserly 26 clicks costing £4.82.
The cost isn’t the issue (especially as it was free), it’s the lack of clicks and the lack of conversion data. If I could be sure a reasonable percentage of the 26 clicks resulted in a sale it would be worthwhile continuing. If Adcommerce received more clicks that resulted in shop traffic it might be worth continuing. Currently though I see little or no benefit whatsoever.
Other sellers may have had more success, I’m guessing that for products where buyers browse, click through rates would be significantly higher than for computer products where a buyer pretty much knows what they want already.
One of my biggest problems was only being able to advertise keywords in relevant categories and if I had the product available buyers would always see my eBay listing higher up the page then the Adcommerce advert at the bottom. If I could have spammed other categories results may have been better.
I’d be really interested to hear other people’s results – did you receive a reasonable number of clicks? Did you see any uplift in visitors to your shop or in sales which you can attribute to Adcommerce? And possibly most interesting of all did you manage to spend all of your £50 voucher?
16 Responses
My clickthrus were a lot higher than that – as you say, I think because I sell in browsy categories. I would probably have carried on with it if there were any conversion data. And if they hadn’t billed me for something that was supposed to be free (twice).
0.05% Clickthru just isn’t big enough for me to worry about. Time spent creating ads and monitoring them is better spent doing other things.
Marked the email as spam and moved on, total waste of time.
Didn’t use my £50 voucher. Can’t see the point spending time on it when theres no conversion data available.
I didn’t try it – wasn’t listing anything on eBay at the time. I haven’t changed my initial view that it is just a flipping cheek for ebay to expect people to pay adcommerce fees on top of existing listing and final value fees.
It does seem particularly pointless not to make conversion data available for those who might want to pay ebay more money though.
Over 100,000 impressons, highly targetted keywords and categories and a click through rate of less than 0.01%. By any stretch, that is a very poor rate and not worth the money, albeit not much money, that was spent.
I think that too many users still see the sponsored links as “the enemy” and refuse to click or even acknowledge them.
Just how hard was it to try to use up the £50 credit?!
3066200 impressions – does that make me an eBay millionaire????
Blimey Keith, that’s going some! So tell…. what clickthru percentage did you get?
1053 clicks coming to 0.03% CTR
Sheesh that sucks! No wonder eBay have moved off site links above the AdCommerce links – can hardly be *less* profitable for them 😀
£14.90 of the voucher used up. Will keep it up with a £0.01 CPC and the ads will be all be changed to individual listings, GTC for low maintenance.
Most campaigns are paused now, with ads for 30 day listings, now ended.
I think ads on other eBay sites are still worthwhile, instead of listing directly, due to higher listing fees.
I can get an ad on eBay Germany with a picture without having to pay the €2.25 gallery fee for a UK seller.
1.3 million page impressions over 44 adverts, and about 300 odd click throughs.
Hard to say if it made any difference to sales, maybe the odd one or two extra perhaps. Buy hey, it was free, even if I did only manage to spend less than half of it despite setting stupid limits in the last few days to try and use it all.
Would I use it again? probably not, judging by the pathetic click-though rate. But it needed to be tried and I always like free things.
I still think it can be useful in swamped categories, to have some presence on the front page.
But I only have a “feeling” to go on, which is not much use really…
Mark 🙂
Hi all…
My stats are 121,000 inpressions, 108 clicks, cost £3.38, which seems similar to many others. Hardly worth bothering really, as according to my shop stats, I was generally getting 500+ visitors a day already.
How many keywords did others use? I had about 100 keyword terms and I think perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of this was finding out what people were actually searching for, which turned out NOT to be what I was expecting!
What did annoy me was being told by the rep on the phone that I could use ‘Dior’ then finding it rejected by the system. I’ve had rows with eBay before about this, but they eventually told me I could use it, as I sell a couple of vintage Dior pieces (not the valuable stuff!) each week. Can’t use it for ad-commerce though. Huh.
However, I have never used any sort of ad-commerce before, so it was a useful experience for me to find out how it all worked. Should I now try Google perhaps?
Jane
Silk Dreams Lingerie
#5 Gill, “a flipping cheek for ebay to expect people to pay adcommerce fees on top of existing listing and final value fee”
If I were to have my skeptical/conspiracy hat on I would say this.
Isn’t very coincidental that the introduction of the new eBay Shop format that reduced the amount of traffic a shop was getting (not just my findings), was launched at the same time(ish) as the ad commerce scheme?
I didn’t get my £50 for what ever reason, but I don’t think I would have bothered. Like other people I think the time would have been better spent elsewhere.
AdCommerce is a joke. I’m the #1 seller in my category for my product. I got a little woried when I saw my biggest competitors sponsored ads in various search results.
His sale are *DOWN* 20% this month! So since he’s started using AdCommerce his sales are *down*. That tells you all you need to know.