Welcome to Traffic Month, a month’s worth of insights on how we can partner to drive traffic to your listings and connect buyers with what you’re selling.
Over the next month, you’ll find helpful content across eBay for Business Facebook, podcast, YouTube, and here on our announcement board, including chats with eBay leaders and sellers, and more. If you’ve got questions, share them in Community, and we’ll address the top trending questions in Week 5.
What is “traffic”?
One of the benefits of selling on eBay is the 174M buyers—and millions more potential customers— we bring onto the platform, and how we make sure they keep coming back. Traffic is the number of users who visit our site organically or because of our marketing.
But it’s not about traffic for traffic’s sake. We’re focused on new and repeat customers who we think have a higher likelihood of buying on eBay. Using our own and third-party data, we can target our marketing to higher-potential buyers.
How do we find the right traffic?
We tell the world that small businesses are open and selling on eBay. This is especially important during this transition in our economy. Public relations plays an important role in amplifying the good news. We also spend tens of millions of dollars every month getting the word out through paid media and owned channels.
What channels do we use?
To bring in the right traffic and convert them to buyers, we most often take a targeted approach via digital marketing. The best investment of our marketing dollars is using them to put eBay and your listings at the most critical moments of customers’ shopping journey. Here’s how we do that:
Digital advertising
- We use digital advertising formats like web banners, the mini ads that play before YouTube videos (which have the visual impact of TV, plus the advantage of being able to link to our site) and online radio ads on platforms like iHeartRadio (which drive awareness).
- We target digital ads to customers who will have the highest likelihood of buying on eBay, including previous ecommerce shoppers and people interested in certain items and categories.
Search engine marketing
- When shoppers search for products using sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, eBay listings show up in those search engines’ results, in places like Google Shopping.
- eBay spends millions of dollars optimizing our search results and paying for text and listing ads to show up.
- Our sellers pay nothing for this additional exposure from eBay, unlike with some other selling platforms. Week 2 of Traffic Month will focus on Google Shopping, including how to ensure your listings show up, so come back for a deep dive next week.
Social media
- With nearly 13M followers, eBay’s social media channels give us extraordinary access to shoppers interested in our brand at a very low cost.
- We use organic and paid social media ads for two primary reasons. 1) To target broad audiences with more general promotional or marketing messages. 2) To target specific customers who have shown interest in specific items or categories.
- Week 3 of Traffic Month will talk more about how sellers can leverage this powerful channel to drive traffic to their listings.
Email marketing
- We send around 650M targeted emails each week tailored to customers’ viewing and shopping habits.
- We also send targeted emails encouraging customers to take another look at listings they’ve shown interest in.
Onsite marketing
- Once traffic has reached the site, we need to convert them into buyers by surfacing what they are looking for or providing inspiration for items they may like.
- We have a number of banners across the site we can target and personalize to different buyer segments and shoppable special interest pages we create for seasonal moments, like Fourth of July.
- We also incentivize additional buying through programs like eBay Bucks, PayPal Credit offers, eBay Mastercard, and coupons.
One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is how quickly we can see its results. We can determine which channel is performing best, then make quick decisions to optimize how we spend our marketing dollars.
For a deeper understanding of our marketing efforts, listen to this week’s Traffic Month interview with our Head of Marketing, Andrea Stairs on our podcast, or watch it on Youtube.
Do you have questions about eBay’s marketing or anything else related to Traffic Month? We want to hear from you in the Community. We’ll address the top trending questions in Week 5.
