The listings quality report will be deprecated on February 28, 2023.
I noticed in the Seller Hub that they are deprecating the listing quality report. This report shared how you as a seller performed under certain categories and showed what may be rejected by Google Store search Results.
Has anyone seen any formal announcement about this that they can point me to? Do we know if there will be an equivalent replacement?
"The listings quality report will be deprecated on February 28, 2023. Users will no longer have access to this report as of that date."
13 comments
meme6253
·3 years agoIt Never seemed fully accurate to me, But I would always check on it, Hopefully they will replace it with more accuracy!, It seems like views & watchers are also inaccurate, views seem to disappear before the thirty days, There is Much needed repairs here & Hopefully they will start doing something about it!
iamonourside
·3 years agoI've been trying to use and understand the LQR, periodically downloading it over the past two years. It isn't something that needs to be followed monthly, let alone daily, for a small seller like me. I've followed community posts about it as well. In that regard, I thank @valueaddedresource and @my-cottage-books-and-antiques for posts on the matter, and @zamo-zuan on posts on analytics generally.
I'm a very analytical person but still found the LQR report to be hard slogging, second only to the traffic report. The report suffers from poor layout, incomplete and inaccurate labeling, obvious data errors, and lack of data notes answering obvious questions.
Yet, the report is helpful on the margin soI am disappointed it is being discontinued. My bet is it is being depreciated exactly for that reason. (IMO, eBay word choice is never accidental, nor about clarity and simplicity, and everything to do with [attempted] manipulation of the readers' minds.).
The report is marginally helpful in the things eBay wishes I didn't know: That promotional listings and other marketing efforts make no difference in sales. An observation that @valueaddedresource hit upon in his/her post back in May 2021, "eBay is showing 0% of listings using Promoted Listings "
https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/Introducing-the-Listing-Quality-Report/m-p/31829954#:~:text=eBay%20is%20showing%200%25%20of%20listings%20using%20Promoted%20Listings
zamo-zuan
·3 years agoThank you for the kind words.
I think you worded it nicely. We all may have had criticism of it, it at least was an attempt at actionable information. For some reason eBay does not give sellers very much actionable information.
With that said, I can only comment on the category we sell in personally (all categories are different) but in our own category and others I've observed, nearly half (or more, at times) of the top 10 slots have been exclusively promoted listings. And much of the other oddities in the report don't match up to the reality. I can assure you that PL are potentially the biggest factor to getting sales (at least at the most competitive levels of a category). Even our Organic Impressions have a negative hit on them if we lower our PL investment.
As the post you link mentions, the report seems to indicate that PL doesn't have an effect on conversion rate, if we actually do the math from our conversion rates, the rates for PL's are astronomical. I've shared an example of this on here:
So the information from the reports doesn't match reality. We've been doing this a very long time. Long enough to know that the average conversion rate - even for our listings were naturally ranked #1 in search organically (before PL existed) - is in a best case around 3-3.5%. I do not believe for one second that this conversion rate is natural. There must be more factors in PL than simply impressions, it seems to be as if they use completely different matching algorithms, or else they wouldn't have over double the conversion rates.
But there's also the factors of the lack of transparency in how eBay works. We can't even trust the traffic page. This came to a head when they had some errors in the display earlier in the year. The data being fed to the graphs was different than what was shown in statistics, and different from page to page, report to report.
This came to a head a few months back when eBay had an error with Promoted Impressions showing up, and when this happened, all of the views magically became organic views:
This was an extremely startling discovery. As you can see, while impressions vanished, the views didn't disappear, they just turned in to organic views.
This seems to imply that the calculation for the View display is "Organic Views = Total Views - Promoted Views".
Which begs the question, why on earth would they calculate it that way...? That type of calculation is certainly not in the interest of accuracy. Since they are related to the promotion features, by all intents it should have an accurate reading of how many Promoted Views there was - not calculating it based on other unrelated numbers. The only reasons that make sense are either they're expecting a discrepancy, or the numbers are extrapolated.
And then given that the views happened to convert at the time that the Impressions disappeared, that gives some evidence to back up the suspicion of them being extrapolated. Taking a look and comparing the traffic fluctuations (or lack of) from day to day, seems to also make me very suspicious of them being extrapolated. All of the traffic seems to be within a similar variance, without any of the more drastic fluctuations that are expected in real traffic numbers. Please note, this is just a suspicion and there's no way to prove it. But there's nothing to really disprove this theory after looking for anything that might disprove it, and some evidence that seems to back it up.
This is exactly why there should be more transparency, and some honest, accurate numbers shown to us. Sellers should be receiving more information, not less. Especially information that might actually be actionable. And if there's issues with the information being displayed being inaccurate, we should be able to point this out for eBay's tech team to fix.
But this is also most likely the exact reason they're removing this report and have been removing most of the reports that give sellers in-depth information. Because the more information they show, it becomes clearer that there's a lack of accuracy and honesty, or an abundance of glitches that have persisted for years.
blacktopautoparts
·3 years ago@zamo-zuan, I think your last paragraph pretty much sums up as to why reports like the "(Dis)Quality Report" is going away. They already know that many of us have called them out on the inconsistent data found in that report vs. when compared to all the other reports on the site. The more information they show to us, it becomes more and more apparent how things like the Service Metrics are skewed in their favor. Instead of being transparent with accurate data, we are getting data that mismatches other reports and then it makes you wonder as to where they are getting this data from.
zamo-zuan
·3 years agoSadly they have proven there will be a pattern of incorrect data before removing the feature all together, rather than fixing it.
Of course there will be no explanation of the problems either. The few times the tech team had responded they had given easily debunkable information without any follow up. And I'll be honest - it seemed quite clear that someone with technical knowledge wasn't even the one giving the answers as they would have been well aware the data itself was in the client/browser and able to be debunked. No way to follow them up and get actual answers, it becomes clear the situation was handed off to a PR team rather than the tech team.
They actually used to have indicators of which listings eBay's search algorithm seen as a problem, had Zoom meetings with me about those features as we were apparently one of the top users of the feature, gave me a preview of the LQR before it was released and reassured me the old pages weren't going to be removed... Then they removed the other pages/reports for the LQR, and are now removing the LQR... This meeting was less than 2 years ago.
It's odd that sellers are getting less and less information, rather than more. They've even gutted Terapeak from what it used to be.
All I ask for (and think sellers deserve) is some accurate data, for any discrepancies to be looked at and repaired, and it'd be nice if the reports/pages with actionable data was actually kept in the system rather than removed.
holyat2006
·3 years agoI always found the listing report to be useless and just noise
zamo-zuan
·3 years agoLet's be honest here. EBay doesn't make replacements when they remove this type of thing.
They didn't make any replacement for all the growth pages they removed.
They didn't make any replacement for the listing recommendation export they removed.
They didn't make any replacement for the Year to Year market/seller comparison charts/Sellers Hub suggestions they removed.
It seems every time they have a section with information that is actionable (and useful) they remove it... And all that does is make it harder on sellers as we have no guidance on what eBay's system might be seeing as problems or benefits in our listings, as well as making it harder to assess issues that inevitably face our stores every time new glitches arrive in each update.
Again, let's be fully honest. Listing information has taken a back seat to promotions in eBay's strategy. So they're adding more and more tools to the Marketing tabs, and the Listings report does nothing but guide peoples attention elsewhere and/or prove that those things don't really matter as much at the end of the day.
They had their "Automated Listings Suggestions" that nobody did, but don't worry, there's multiple new listing tools in the pipeline to "replace" the removed listing quality report!
toomuchstuffagain35
·3 years agoIf a site like Bonanza can provide a "listing quality" assessment (right there when you're doing the listing) and a report that shows which listings were rejected by Google and why, you would think a supposed self styled "tech company" like ebay would be able to as well.
But what do I know?
After all how many years did Bonanza have a background removal tool before ebay got hip to it?
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·3 years ago@toomuchstuffagain35 I'm actually been wondering if they aren't going to incorporate some of the LQR into the Listing flow....
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·3 years agoebay's Brian Burke, from today's (Jan 3, 2023) ebay for business podcast:
"My understanding of why it was is being retired is it was a beta so it didn't go out to everyone. We learned a lot from it and they're gonna evaluate what pieces of it to include down the road or in the future. But for now the listing quality report will be retired."
So, sounds like there might be some sort of replacement or partial replacement in the future, but for now, I guess ebay decided giving us a lot of free data about our business wasn't such a good idea.
valueaddedresource
·3 years ago@my-cottage-books-and-antiques I guess we've reached the "if we just call everything a permanent beta test, we never have to explain anything or be accountable for deliverables" phase of the tech-led reimagination. 😂
This is a 2 year old feature that had been rolled out to most sellers for single item buy it now listings in multiple countries, promoted extensively by third party partners like Teikametrics, List Rank Sell, Frooition and more, had official tutorials and instructional videos/content created and had promised improvements that were supposed to be included in the Fall 2021 Seller Update (that never happened)....if this is still a beta test at this point then my 21 year old son is still a toddler. 🙄
"Evaluate what pieces to use down the road in the future" is likely code for package up data we provided for free for two years and find a way to monetize it, either directly or by dangling it as an incentive to get sellers to upgrade to a higher store level or participate in new and ever increasing ad revenue generating schemes or....
namtrag1
·3 years agoDeprecate
Does this mean that eBay is going to disapprove of this reporting or are they getting rid of the reporting?
I think the authors of that news item better read the dictionary for use of a better word to explain what they are actually doing.
simply-the-best-for-you
·3 years ago@namtrag1 Deprecate is perfectly acceptable & normal in IT/Programming terms. It is a VERY commonly used phrase. They likely just used the Developers/IT phrasing rather than marketing speak.
ETA: Oops, didn't realize this was older & that @valueaddedresource had already explained it. Sorry for the dup.