Notice something with Promoted listing impressions dropped significantly after raising but.....

[incrediblefinds199]

I wonder if anyone else is seeing this as i am, so i have been promoting my listings for a couple years now. I have about 700 items listed now(700 is what i normally have listed), and i raised the ad rate later last week on some of the oldest listings up a couple percent. I noticed a significant amount of impression increase. so i typically average around the same everyday, its always around 350,000 per day rarely hit a day lower than 300k Sundays typically over 400k. so this past Sunday i raised everything.  since that my impressions have been around 100k, its so odd. sales seemed the same, the thing that shows up odd and makes me think this might be a glitch. As far as page views, its been on a constant average. the pages views have been higher the past 3 days than any other day this month. sales seem about the same as well.  i am just curious if anyone notices last two days significantly low impression. as long as page views and sales stay the same that's fine.

its all seems a bit odd, i have been posting a bit more than normal as well!!!! then to see the graph plummet like that, just gives you a bad feeling, if you know what i mean!!! 

I also wonder if i did not play around with the numbers if it would have done that!!!! 

[valueaddedresource]

---

@incrediblefinds199 wrote:

yeah i feel the same, my views since this all started have gone up significantly, my views yesterday were almost double my best day this month. 

---

@incrediblefinds199 let us know if those higher views for yesterday stay the same in your reports over the next few days please.

The last time we went through some obvious problems with eBay's reporting, sellers noticed that some of the stats changed significantly after a few days - eBay's excuse for it is that it can take 72 hours for the reports to reconcile.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Significant-Drops-in-eBay-Impressions-and-Organic-Page-Views-A...

For page views, we count the number of visits to your listing and for impressions we count when a link to your listings appears (e.g. it's displayed on an eBay Search results page). We do not estimate or extrapolate the counts. We do provide the following message for our metrics “Impressions and page views are reported in near-real time. Please allow approximately 72 hours to reconcile.”

I've received several recent reports from sellers showing this is happening again - since around July 18th eBay has been showing what appear to be large spikes in external visits that are later "reconciled" down to less than half of what was originally reported.

These are all from the same account:

July 19 from July 20th report

July 19 from Jul 23 report

July 21 from the morning of July 24

And July 21 from the evening of July 24

The external views are the most obvious, but other stats change as well.

According to eBay, there's nothing wrong when this happens and it's all just working as intended with their 72 hour reconciliation. 🤔

Whether you believe that or not, I thought it would be worth mentioning for anyone else who may be seeing increases in external views...you may want to check back in a few days to see if those stats are really true.

[lpreowned_is_the_new_newl]

PL's are actually NOT blown out of proportion. I get sales from Product Listings advertising all of the time. Advertising is the cost of doing business.  Each one of us has to calculate if advertising is advantageous to our respective businesses and bottom line.  For me it's a no-brainer, and super inexpensive to advertise on eBay.  And of course eBay buyers will do their homework, but they can't do homework on a listing that is never seen under a pile of 100,000 listings.  PL evens the playing field for us smaller players.  I'm sure I will get naysayers, but it works for my business.  At least... until they started playing with everything.  Good news is, I see PL impressions gradually going back up over the last 3 days.  Hopefully the "experiment" is done, and I can get back to packing instead of typing.  

[lpreowned_is_the_new_newl]

No doubt, Rockstar!  Well said!

[sextons-sweet-deals]

I don't pay for promoted listings. I believe a real shopper will look and compare listing before buying than just buying the first thing that pops up front of all other similar listings. 

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@sextons-sweet-deals  It works for some sellers, others do fine without it.

[incrediblefinds199]

my external sites views are minimal they have not moved and are relatively the same through the past 3 months. its roughly 1-5% daily. my chart looks nothing like that. the dark blue is the smallest part and the rest organic and non are split relatively even for the most part. my External sites views have not really gone up just the promoted and no promoted. its just the one chart that is messed up, or might be messed up.  

[incrediblefinds199]

100% i was skeptical at 1st when i used promoted listings and when i finally did put into effect at only 1 and 2% i had a big boom in sales. 

I was in the middle of homework when this all happened i was using the chart to see if i go up in the percentage $$ of PL's and to see if the more impressions at a higher rate would be worth it. 

I also have seen PL go up slightly the past two days slightly though. for me Sundays are always much higher than the rest of the week. 

my sales have been relatively the same tho. 

[sextons-sweet-deals]

Not sure I understand your response. 

Your question was: So those Impressions are not the result of a PLS campaign as though you wanted to confirm that I was not paying extra for PL and collect some data to maybe send to eBay. 

I thought you were questioning my stats I posted:

1. I just checked my supposed impressions stat for the last month (june 24-july 24) and it claims 589,454. 

2. the 589,454 impressions would average out to about 19,648 per day average for the last month. 

[mcdougle4248]

This past Saturday was very unusual for me. Everything on the graph (except sales) was much higher than normal. The curious thing is that there was a technical issue with variation listings most of the day on Saturday causing my variation listings to lose functionality and unable to produce sales.  I have about 245 listings containing about 1400 items. 20 of those listings are variation listings which contain about 1200 of my 1400 listed items. So I expected the graph for Saturday to look much different than it does regarding impressions and views. No sales were expected considering the technical issue that day.

[valueaddedresource]

---

@mcdougle4248 wrote:

This past Saturday was very unusual for me. Everything on the graph (except sales) was much higher than normal. The curious thing is that there was a technical issue with variation listings most of the day on Saturday causing my variation listings to lose functionality and unable to produce sales.  I have about 245 listings containing about 1400 items. 20 of those listings are variation listings which contain about 1200 of my 1400 listed items. So I expected the graph for Saturday to look much different than it does regarding impressions and views. No sales were expected considering the technical issue that day.

---

@mcdougle4248 interesting, thanks for sharing! Let us know if that changes over the next day or so please. eBay says "72 hours to reconcile" but I've seen it readjust on the 4th day sometimes too.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@sextons-sweet-deals  Send data to ebay? No.

You seemed to think the numbers were unreasonably high, and in my first post I mistakenly thought you were using PLS...so I explained why PLS numbers would generally be much higher than non PLS. You have now said those numbers seem high to you and you don't use PLS. 

So, the explanation for high numbers is NOT PLS....since you are getting those numbers organically. I didn't really comment further because I don't know whether those numbers are actually high for the number and types of items you have listed. I have no benchmark. They might be normal for your type of stuff, I don't know. As I think I explained before, impressions are NOT views. Question: how do your impressions compare to your page views? ebay provides a stat for average click through rate, what is yours? 

[redlinear]

Can I buy groceries with impressions?

[lpreowned_is_the_new_newl]

The round about answer is...yes.  If I have a "physical store" and someone walks in the door, does a quick 360 and then walks out, that's an impression.  If another person walks in my store, does a quick 360, but then walks over to one of my items and picks it up, that action was initially generated by an impression, but now the action is a view. The customer then walks to the register and buys it, that's a sale.  Both of these scenarios BEGAN as an impression. When I'm buying something, I'll set my search up to look at 200 items. I just gave 200 people an impression, maybe 5 with a view, and 1 with a sale. In conclusion... No impressions no groceries. 

[simply-the-best-for-you]

---

@valueaddedresource wrote:

---

@incrediblefinds199 wrote:

yeah i feel the same, my views since this all started have gone up significantly, my views yesterday were almost double my best day this month. 

---

@incrediblefinds199 let us know if those higher views for yesterday stay the same in your reports over the next few days please.

The last time we went through some obvious problems with eBay's reporting, sellers noticed that some of the stats changed significantly after a few days - eBay's excuse for it is that it can take 72 hours for the reports to reconcile.

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Significant-Drops-in-eBay-Impressions-and-Organic-Page-Views-A...

For page views, we count the number of visits to your listing and for impressions we count when a link to your listings appears (e.g. it's displayed on an eBay Search results page). We do not estimate or extrapolate the counts. We do provide the following message for our metrics “Impressions and page views are reported in near-real time. Please allow approximately 72 hours to reconcile.”

I've received several recent reports from sellers showing this is happening again - since around July 18th eBay has been showing what appear to be large spikes in external visits that are later "reconciled" down to less than half of what was originally reported.

These are all from the same account:

July 19 from July 20th report

July 19 from Jul 23 report

July 21 from the morning of July 24

And July 21 from the evening of July 24

The external views are the most obvious, but other stats change as well.

According to eBay, there's nothing wrong when this happens and it's all just working as intended with their 72 hour reconciliation. 🤔

Whether you believe that or not, I thought it would be worth mentioning for anyone else who may be seeing increases in external views...you may want to check back in a few days to see if those stats are really true.

---

@valueaddedresource   Yet the top of the page says:  

"Metrics are reported in near-real time, allow approximately 72 hours to reconcile. All reporting data will be in your site timezone"

I have never seen a "Tech" company with such a laughably bad idea of what "real time" means.   I remember the other fiasco in which they touted that the dynamic rates were updated in real time.   You & I pushed back & it became clear they had no idea what real time meant.   Now 3 days is "near real time"  😃

FWIW my chart has not changed & was down to 1/2 of normal impressions since the 18th.  It's gone up a bit, but nowhere near normal & the chart has NOT changed. 

[valueaddedresource]

---

@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

---

---

@valueaddedresource   Yet the top of the page says:  

"Metrics are reported in near-real time, allow approximately 72 hours to reconcile. All reporting data will be in your site timezone"

I have never seen a "Tech" company with such a laughably bad idea of what "real time" means.   I remember the other fiasco in which they touted that the dynamic rates were updated in real time.   You & I pushed back & it became clear they had no idea what real time meant.   Now 3 days is "near real time"  😃

FWIW my chart has not changed & was down to 1/2 of normal impressions since the 18th.  It's gone up a bit, but nowhere near normal & the chart has NOT changed. 

---

@simply-the-best-for-you agree, it is laughable...mostly in the "you gotta laugh to keep from crying" way. 🤣

If such a big tech company can't pull off anywhere near actual real time data, that's not great but at least be honest about it, right?

Get rid of the "near real time" thing and just lag the traffic and ad reports a few days like they do with the Listing Quality Report where they say something like "The report is generated based on listing status as of Jul 23, 2023 at 12:20am PDT and is updated once every two days."

That at least would set the proper expectation to say "sorry, the best we can do is show you the info from 3 days ago today"....embarassing of course and not ideal, but I'd rather have that than to possibly be shown arbitrary (incorrect) numbers for a few days only to have them revised later after "reconciling" which of course leads to wondering if any of the numbers can really be trusted at all.