Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
@community_team The new ads experience appears to have gotten rid of the report that used to give sellers visibility to whether ad fees came from Direct or Halo attribution.
The link to the old report https://pls.ebay.com/plsweb/sales was still active up until 7/13/24, but has since been redirected to the new dashboard page which from my testing does not currently have any reports that shows Direct or Halo attribution.
Why was access to this report removed and when can sellers expect to regain visibility into this critical data?
If eBay does not plan to provide reporting that shows Halo or Direct attribution for sales, please explain why the decision was made to provide less transparency with the new dashboard.
The announcement about the new ads dashboard in the Seller Update said:
"Get ready for access to real-time performance data across all of your campaigns, empowering you to make data-driven decisions with more enhanced metrics."
I was hopeful that might mean we really will get real-time performance metrics instead of the "near-real time" 72 hr reconciliation period that was previously noted in the old dashboard but unfortunately that does not appear to be the case.
Now, not only does it still say "near-real time", it makes the time frame even more vague by saying some ad types might require even more than the 72 hr window without giving details about what those types are.
"Metrics are reported in near real-time. Allow at least 72 hours to reconcile, although some ad types might require more time."
That means sellers could see sales that were originally labeled "organic" changed to "promoted" and charged a fee well beyond the 3 day timeframe that had previously applied, which is bound to cause confusion, erode trust in eBay's attribution models, and could even lead to FTC complaints or other regulatory and legal scrutiny of eBay's ad practices.
Can you provide more detailed information around which ad types and in which scenarios sellers can expect reconciliation might take more than 72 hours and some guidelines around how much longer that window may be stretched out (a day, a week, a month...more?)
@valueaddedresource I also still can't believe the reference to "real-time". There are a lot of techies on these boards, the phrase "real-time" has meaning and that meaning is actually real time. Not once an hour, not once a day & most certainly not up to every 3 days.
For reference, in real time something would/could be updated 86,400 times a day, assuming seconds. I won't want to go into nanoseconds for the purpose of this. Real time means it's actually updated when it happens! Not 3 days later.
For eBay, why does eBay persist in referring to something as "near real time", when up to every 72 hours is NOT remotely close to real time or near real time? It's honestly embarrassing for a 'tech company' to use the phrase so incorrectly! Even once a day woud be nowhere near real time.
The reports in the new ad dashboard appear to have limited data visibility to a shorter timeframe than before.
Previously, you could see daily stats for any timeframe selected.
Now, you can only see daily stats if you have it set to a 7 or 14 day timeframe.
If you set it to 31 days, the data is consolidated to every other day and 90 days condenses it to a weekly stat.
This reduces the visibility and granularity that sellers used to have and may cause confusion if sellers can't figure out why the numbers did not match up to their actual sales for those days.
For example, this report shows $257.93 in sales on June 14th with the next point being June 16th, skipping completely over the 15th.
That account had only 1 sale for a total of $53.70 on June 14th and to get the $257.93, you'd have to count 3 orders from June 15th as well.
So this stat is actually for the 14th-15th combined but there is absolutely nothing on the page that would inform the seller of that fact, leaving them to do the math to try to match up the data in this report to other sources of information.
Rather than "empowering sellers with simplicity and effectiveness" this seems to be creating confusion with less transparency and granularity.
Why did eBay choose to limit daily visibility to 7 and 14 day timeframes and will there be additional reporting available in the future to add back this basic capability sellers had in the previous experience?
@a_c_green wrote:
@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:@valueaddedresource I also still can't believe the reference to "real-time". There are a lot of techies on these boards,
<$ME_raises_hand> 😁
@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:For eBay, why does eBay persist in referring to something as "near real time", when up to every 72 hours is NOT remotely close to real time or near real time? It's honestly embarrassing for a 'tech company' to use the phrase so incorrectly! Even once a day would be nowhere near real time.
Tech people do not write these announcements; Marketing people do. They like buzzwords, but too often do not actually understand their true meaning. If the person who wrote that particular announcement had had it reviewed by someone familiar with the actual "eBay Ads" functionality, they could have corrected the various misunderstandings or misuse of terminology before the announcement went out, but obviously they did not.
@a_c_green I'm well aware. It's just especially frustrating b/c I remember having this discussion publicly with Brian on these boards when they first used the phrase & us explaining to him that it's pretty embarrassing to eBay to use that phrase so incorrectly. So, to have them do it again & worse, is just a bad look for a company that wants to be known for their technology. Of course Brian is no longer there & even if he were, I'm sure he didn't approve every announcement 😐
