Download "report" CSV for "Marketing" "Campaign" is either wildly changed or broken

[ducks2k]

I started a marketing campaign last week and have been studying it closely. The download report has a number of significant fields involving impressions and clicks.

On Sunday, the report went "down" (report "failed" - says eBay problem) for most of the day - all other report downloads were fine. It had worked well most of last week and produced numbers consistent with the Advertising Dashboard. I was just starting to get useful information about organic and promoted sales.

On Monday, the report was executing again, but I can't can't confirm that any of the numbers are non-random. The impression and click numbers MIGHT be something like "since midnight", whereas last week they seem to properly represent the whole campaign. None of the dashboard options produce similar numbers. The file does identify two sold items which it claims are sold via promotion (probably correct), but nothing in the organic sold, which there were. I need to go back and check last weeks files to make sure that they reported the organic sold items.

As a programmer who goes back to the days of looking at the blinking lights on the cpu, I am suspicious of the amount of time it takes to produce the marketing download report. An all-active-items report takes a couple of seconds for my 5,000 items (ducks2k). The marketing report on the same 5,000 takes about a minute to produce a comparably sized file. This might be a priority/background thing, but it is suspicious. It was the same minute last week and this week.

Is there ANY documentation of the fields in the marketing download report? Most of the field names are reasonably self-documenting, but there are some subtle concepts of organic and promoted that have me a bit puzzled.

I am aware that eBay does not want to publish the definition of "best match", but your concept of "similar item" is amazingly strange. I, and most sellers, want to structure our listings to best fit the buyer's needs, so understanding why a buyer sees what he sees is important. This is not "beating the system", but, rather, "properly presenting our items".

[ducks2k]

Well...  The "broken" part appears to be wrong.  What I was seeing was the default setting for the report which is "this week".  On Saturday, I was seeing everything cumulative since the campaign started on Wednesday, and then either Sunday or Monday, "this week" had reset and the numbers were small.  It is annoying that I have to change the default each time, but that is consistent with other report initiations -- too many clicks required -- each option tends to require a click to drop down and a click to select.

I did confirm things like:

1. In the Advertising Dashboard, the date selections are "7 days, 14 days, 31 days, this month, last month and custom".  For the report, they are "today,yesterday,this week, last week, this month, last month, 90 days and custom" -- only very slightly overlapping, so it is not easy to compare the two.  The Dashboard is a 1-click bookmark, whereas the "report" is many clicks and a minute of processing then running my own code to analyze the results in the downloaded file..

2. Yes, the promotion and organic numbers for impressions, clicks and sales are all there, and appear "not unreasonable".  A lot of the numbers will require a lot of thought and just plain guesses to figure out what they actually "mean", but the data is there.  I really wish there were clear definitions of what each data field represents.  Yes, good field naming, but there are a lot of subtle things going on.