Bert Bassett is eBay Channel Manager at Optimizon, where he helps a number of clients to grow their marketplace sales. In this guest post today, he shares news of an exciting eBay reporting development he’s spotted which reveals Non-search traffic…
…and it’s not so much the report that’s exciting but what it reveals. It potentially turns everything on it’s head that you thought you knew about gaining visibility on eBay and gives a very compelling reason to use eBay Promoted Listing:
New eBay non-search traffic report
It looks like eBay UK have rolled out some features without announcement in Seller hub. I’ve now seen a few accounts that have more sophisticated traffic reporting. The report for one such account looks like this:
This is presenting the data in a way that’s similar to some internal tools that eBay employees can see. It breaks down impressions into organic and inorganic (promoted) and also impressions that are high in search, low in search and “non-search”.
What is “Non-search”?
It’s when the clickable thumbnail of your listing is displayed to an eBay user – normally we think of this as a listing appearing in search results, but items are also featured on other pages, like the homepage, item pages etc. The screen grab of an item page below, has all the “inorganic” (eBay Promoted Listings) impressions ringed in red, and all the “organic” ones ringed in green.
So why is this interesting?
It’s revealed some data that I don’t think anyone would expect, which is that for certain sellers, non-search traffic is HUGE, and far outweighs traffic from search pages.
Let us know if a) you can see the new report yet, and b) are you seeing the numbers in the same region as the accounts we’ve looked at?
11 Responses
I have seen a surge in promoted listing fees and sales as one of the boxes above on my listing page is ‘Sellers Sponsored Items’ so I’m paying to advertise on my own listing. I had an order last week with 8 items in it all sold with promoted listings.
Not sure how I feel as I’d be annoyed if I had upped my promoted listing fees to keep up with other sellers and pay the same fee on my very own listing.
I suppose with a name like that, he’ll have ‘allsorts’ of interesting tips.
We don’t promote anything on eBay anymore. Their fees are expensive enough already. We sell unique antique items. Why pay an extra 6-7% in final value fee when we have the only one of that particular type of item on the platform ? How can eBay keep recommending to me a suggested ad rate when there is nothing else to compare it with? If search worked correctly then buyers would easily find the item anyway.
How about if everyone promoted everything with maximum fees? Just a thought
@jonah this is about non-search impressions, not search impressions – it reveals that there a lot of impressions you cannot get through search and that most of them are promoted ones.
On the recommended rates, they’re based on the category you list in rather than the specific product
Certainly something happens we cant account for.
Every so often an item thats sat there for months ,
With no interest Receives various offers and sells
Thanks Bert, very interesting article.
I do not have access to this additional data yet but I suspect that my non search impressions are also very high as I use promoted listings across all my stock. (Can’t wait to get the additional data as it will be very useful information)
From my own analysis I do need to be careful with the increased impressions and views as I tend to find that when my conversion rate drops below a certain point my sales dip and I have to reduce my promoted listing % for a while to allow my conversion % to creep back up again – hope this make sense!?
The recommended promoted listing fees are a laugh in my sector video games.
You just have to ignore them as they are made up. Average promotion fee they claim can be 6% then you add in eBay fees you would make a straight loss. You make about 8% if your lucky on a AAA and 12% on back cat.
You simply would make no money.
We do 1% on back cat and do not even list AAA anymore on eBay.
@rachel -= makes perfect sense. I watch the conversion rates and try never to have more than 50% of my traffic from PL
@sam – I know… even the big sellers like Shop2 etc basically use the AAA as almost loss-leaders.. gets them better rates on other titles and customer loyalty. The reason the trending rates are higher is because of private sales and used, not new, mainstream
@Sam 8% on video games. I can only dream of those margins on video games sales.
Who cares. Ebays platform is the equivalent of the Dark Ages
We are seeing this aspect of the Traffic Report page with several of our largest clients in the US, with similar ratios as the one shown above.
Thank you for this observation. We closely manage our clients’ Promoted Listings campaigns, and I would not have guessed that non-SERP ad presentation would be such a large percentage of overall paid visibility.