In late April 2022, eBay will update how listing page views are counted, to largely exclude anything that’s not a potential buyer, giving a more accurate view of your selling activity.
The current page view numbers on your listings count various types of traffic, including a significant amount of non-human traffic – one example is programmes called “bots” that scan websites and have accounted for approximately 40% of internet traffic.
Although this non-human traffic is currently counted as a “page view,” it doesn’t represent real shoppers or lead to sales, and recent analysis has shown how much it inflates your page view numbers.
As part of eBay’s continual efforts to bring you better data to run your business, they are updating to a new way of counting page views that will better filter out non-human traffic and more accurately show views by potential buyers.
While the amount of non-human traffic on the internet is considerable, it also varies across categories and products. As a result, while most sellers will see a significant drop in page view numbers, the impact of filtering out more non-human traffic may vary. Importantly, the actual traffic from potential buyers to listings isn’t changing. We’re just updating what types of traffic we count as page views to more accurately show views by potential buyers.
Page view counts based on this approach have been available in the Seller Hub Traffic Report and Promoted Listings reports for some time. The changes will increase the consistency of how page views are counted and displayed across eBay.
Lifetime views are switching to a 30-day rolling view count
Your eBay listings currently display lifetime views, which leaves out important information about recent performance trends. Starting soon, this will be adjusted so that your page views show a rolling 30-day count. eBay are also adding a new listing traffic history report, where you can access page view data for the previous 2 years.
This updated 30-day view count makes it easier to see trends as they’re happening and adjust your listings to perform at their best.
A new listing page traffic report
Using 30-day rolling data can make it easier to spot trends and optimise listings. However, eBay know some sellers prefer to have data that spans a longer period, so a new listing page traffic report will show the past 2 years of view counts for each listing.
The new report will show a breakdown of views, including trends over time, for each individual listing. You’ll be able to filter for page views over various timeframes, from the past 24 hours up to the past 2 years.
One Response
eBay performs several venue services for sellers: it gathers traffic, provides a structure around the transaction (checkout, payments) and a level of trust. You might build this out of different services — for example Google Adwords for traffic, Shopify to do the transaction and Trustpilot to provide a level of trust.
When compared with these other services, the level and quality of reporting of traffic and the ability to do experiments and increase sales is a long way behind on eBay so while any advance is to be greatly welcomed, there is a considerable amount of work to do before this meets the industry standard. eBay needs to be less precious about its data, stop trying to pre-package everything and share with sellers raw information that will help them to increase sales on the platform.