First set of results are in!
I started with books. Books are a situation where the prices are depressed compared to the past (thanks to the advent of a few huge paper recyclers who dominate the market with books they get for free from thrift-store disposal, and sell them for less than the CommBasePlus shipping cost for us plebs.) They are also a heavily standardized and cataloged category. The sort of place where - one would think - a boost from Promotions would help. Right?
And I have a lot of them, enough that their individual differences tend to average out. Nor are mine rare or collectible. For the most part, just good readin' books.
All right. I took one of my book categories with 1000+ listings in it, divided it in half very carefully (listing in alphabetical order, then taking alternate pages for each of the two resulting categories, to avoid bias). I then set one category at 5% promotion, already higher than I usually do. And set the other at 15%, three times that. Borderline excessive I call it!
And then I let it run for two weeks. The results are shown below.
As you can see, the 3x percentage DID increase impressions. About doubled. It also increased clicks...tripled.
But what it did NOT increase during those two weeks...is sales.
In fact, though the difference is probably to be seen as negligible given that the numbers are both small, the promotion with the LOWER percentage sold more.
Now look at the line graphs. The organic-visibility line is similar in its overall shape, for both half-categories. As it should be, since I was careful to avoid bias. But it's actually a bit higher for the lower-percentage promotion. The promoted impressions line is higher for the higher-percentage promotion. But this doesn't seem to result in more sales, though it probably results in more clicks. But those clicks don't end in sales. What happens instead? I don't know. But one possibility is that people are clicking, and looking at the listing, then seeing the same item at lower prices from those paper-recyclers I mentioned just now, at the bottom of the screen in the "other customers bought..." boxes. And then buying those instead.
I will be letting this run for the rest of the month. And at that point, probably, I will be setting both book categories down to the bare minimum promotion percentage. Because whatever the explanation for why this is happening - and my experience with my own and others' shopping behavior suggests some possibilities - the promotions do not seem to be spurring sales...
...at least as far as books are concerned.
