promoted listings experiment
I normally do not use promoted listings but I wanted to run a experiment.
This is a item that has been listed since 7/9 and I promoted at the suggested 12% on 7/11.
Today 7/16 I put my selling account on one screen running chrome and my buying account running safari on the other screen then I used a 3 word search that I thought a buyer would use on each account using best match.
On the selling account my item was the 5th item down on the first page, on my buying account my item was 44th down on the 5th page 60 items per page or 284 from the top.
15 comments
onefootflipper
·1 year agoSilly question, but if the item is so saturated that there is a 284th from the top then why in the world do you think that a 12 percent promoted listing would put you on top.
kabilab
·1 year agoI began selling from my current account in the fall of 2013. My sole purpose was the liquidation of store stock that had and was accumulating. In March of 2024, I began promoting at 2%; the results having exceeded my wildest expectations. My average monthly gross has slightly more than tripled. My net for the current yr. is at +64%, all from liquidation stock. Promotion has been a winner for me.
At some point in my self-employed voyage through life, I learned that for me, I would rather try and fail than to wonder "what if?"
gloryglorygifts
·1 year agoInteresting! Thanks for sharing your findings.
12345jamesstamps
·1 year agoWhen a promoted item sells the 'promoted eBay fee' is taken from 'available funds' in seconds.
Thus, one can have a negative available funds for a day or two.
I decided to offer free domestic and some international shipping instead.
This balances out my eBay fee where I am only charged on the item...not with shipping and not getting a promoted rate immediately from 'available funds'.
It evens out.
I still have promoted items...quite a few actually.
But lately, almost everything sold has been not promoted.
So I think the free shipping is working.
redlinear
·1 year agoWe've tried all that on several pc's at the same time and i-phones.
Results are all over the place.
Promoting doesn't seem to help much with Search Result Placement.
About the only place I think promoting helps, is when your item shows up inside of somebody else's listing (cross promoted).
Think of it like this: Listing an item is like you buying 1000 lottery tickets. Search is the drawing.
When you promote, it's like you buying another 100 tickets. Depending on the % of promotion depends on how many hundreds of extra tickets you have.
Chances/Odds are better at being seen...somewhere.
But 100% promotion? That's still not getting you anywhere near ALL of the tickets.
lakefor94
·1 year agoTry a incognito/private window and just go to ebay.com without logging in to an account. Search from there.
Should give you what a buyer might see.
tobaccocardyahoo
·1 year agoBest Match takes into account past searches from the logged in account in some way.
The difference between accounts is not surprising.
Ebay shares too little information to know exactly why you saw the exact results.
The percentage you are paying for promotion also has an effect, and once again, we do not know how that works.
If you are at 2% it may only take effect for some portion of the searches which include your item. Or some other metering scheme.
I did my own test of PL and decided it was useless for what I promoted.
the-hook-and-the-loop
·1 year agoI find the value in promoting is having your listings shown in sidebars or "similar items" or "we think you may like this". When paying eBay high % PL, they will broadcast your items to a large audience (kind of like they used to for just subscribing to have a store).
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·1 year ago@the-hook-and-the-loop
Agreed.
Especially for single quantity, long tail items. For those selling relatively uncommon items, the item may well appear on the first page of search results regardless of PL usage. The thing is, with a lot of long tail items, day after day, no one is actively searching for that item. So it doesn't matter that they show up on the first page. BUT...if they are looking at a different item, and your long tail item shows on that listing page, even though they weren't searching for it, they may decide "Wow! I never saw one of those before--- I want that!"
It's about as close as we can get these days to the days (VERY long ago) when a buyer could browse all the newly listed items in a general category and stumble across stuff he didn't know he wanted.
I strongly suspect the majority---or a substantial minority---of long tail items sell , not because someone was searching for that exact item, but because they more or less stumbled across it.
It is the only reason I haven't given up on PLs completely.
isaiah53-57
·1 year agoVERY old news - Same old smoke and mirror and duplicitous bull$#/+ they have been using in a debased shellgame to keep the site palatable for the past 10+ years. No need to post it - Most here know this and those who post otherwise know it also - Just part of the gamesmanship
bashort
OP1 year agothis is a repeatable and I think that I will just sell a few below cost one at a time to help search rankings.
The great thing about that is that when I decide that the promoted price is over, its over, no extra 30 days to worry about
siamjane8
·1 year agoThank is an amazing experiment- thanks for sharing. Its been long know that ebay shows different listing to different people based on many criteria and AI programming but this just proves that its all balogny! So ebay makes your promoted item show up in the top on your account to justify the extra 12% promotion fee but in reality to everyone else its on page 5 and you continue to wonder why the item wont sell....... I tried promoting years ago and vowed to never even look at it again!- we sold a few more items in a months time but lost so much more in fees that we made less money lol- that business sense for you!. Also that was years ago when less people promoted- now its is so saturaded that you often get LESS visibility that in an organic search- go figure
bdmh-enterprises
·1 year agoCookies and browser history play a BIG part in determining relevancy in any search engine. Something like viewing the listing previously in only one browser will give it a boost over the other browser. If you do a "clean" search in each browser the results should be fairly close.
It's very hard to determine where any particular person will see a listing in results because of the personalization of them.
selsa84
·1 year agoPromote it at 100% and come back and let us know what happened. Have a great day
selsa84
·1 year agoI don't think I've ever been to the 3rd page in a search let alone 5th page.