Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
I can't read the article without signing up & I'm not going to do that. Is there some salient point in it that relates to eBay's search or the way they count impressions?
@katzrul15 wrote:
@lotzofuniquegoodies wrote:
@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
I can't read the article without signing up & I'm not going to do that. Is there some salient point in it that relates to eBay's search or the way they count impressions?
Apologies. I had no problem accessing. Came as part of a newsfeed from yahoo news on ca.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/gen-z-tiktok-search-engine-174559822.html
It just explains that the new go to for GenZ TikTok is the new normal vs Google for most searching.
Interesting perspective of what is to come.
-Lotz
Interesting read..........my son is senior in college - they debate/search/research everything on Bored Panda and Reddit. A lot is changing/changed.......
@katzrul15 @lotzofuniquegoodies
Yeah, my GenX friend thinks Instagram is a search engine. Color me old, so I have never been on TikTok or IDK what Bored Panda even is, though I'm on Reddit regularly, but aren't all those & IG, only going to search content on their own website? So they're not actual search engines? I believe that's how all their search functions work, so they aren't Search Engines. They are just search functions within an application.
I'm on Reddit for amusement & occasionally education. Scary to think that a generation is getting what they think is factual info from there 🤣. But I get it, even amongst my Boomer friends, most of them don't use email anymore.
@ducks2k wrote:@valueaddedresource- sadly, I was not seriously aware of the traffic report page, and none of my testing involved those numbers. I guess tonight I can see what I can figure about those. It is already getting busy enough in duck stamps that I can't isolate the stats for my actions very well. The biggest surprise to me on this morning's testing was pretty consistent undercounting of impressions, when we were speculating that they were counting links that were not even directly visible.
As a retired programmer who worked with some pretty large systems, I am amazed that they can even attempt to track impressions and report them in near-real-time. Ebay describes listings in the billions and "impressions" have to be several orders of magnitude higher than that.
So this topic is a bit controversial as it's only based on our own theories of trying to make sense of what we can observe, I just wanted to mention that up front, lol.
With that said, typically within 24-48 hours the traffic reports seem accurate, but until then they might undergo major changes.
One of the strangest observations is sometimes it seems you get a ridiculously huge amount of traffic, and then if you check a day later, suddenly everything has returned to "normal". It's as if you had suddenly lost 100% of your impressions.
I have some screenshots of this issue that someone had shared with me, here's an example:
Notice the 8th-9th have a sharp increase? Now this is a day later:
We've had that issue happen to ourselves on occasion, but as mentioned, that's from another seller who had showed me what was going on in their own store.
What this makes me suspect is that their impression numbers are an "estimate" and not actually a real number, as that's the only thing that makes sense for this.
Another possibility is that this impression number is NOT an estimate, rather it's a "pre-adjustment" impression number. Since they mentioned recently they don't include "bot views" etc, that may be calculated before they "make the numbers final" which might substantially change the count.
I also noticed similar happening in the promoted impressions.
Before:
After:
But there's also the fact that there's sometimes major issues/glitches with their traffic reporting, and it DOES seem to very likely have weight in the search results as well.
A couple months back I was reporting how the traffic pages had errors that were showing MANY different numbers and not actually adding up. Here's a image that captures what I was trying to say:
There's a lot to take in, but basically the bar graph size of Organic was incorrect. The daily numbers did NOT match the bar graph. If you inspect the graph itself to get the numbers eBay is feeding the graph, it said 1302, which was not reflected anywhere in the daily numbers. But strange enough ,if you edit things to set the chart to a single day, the Total Views on the left stated 1302 - Which MATCHED the numbers in the graph! Even though if you moused-over the day, it did NOT add up to 1302!
Now at the time this was happening there was some major issues in search in our category. We've done many hours of research on our category and track those who are highest ranked and those who have the highest PL exposure. Those who are high ranking organically were appearing very low. And those who invest the highest numbers in to promotions were appearing very low. And sellers who had inferior offerings were appearing up top. Basically, it seemed like being highly ranked or spending a lot on promotions was hindering sellers more than helping.
So taking this all in, it seemed very likely to me that they had mixed up a variable somewhere in Promoted and Organic impressions, where the promos were throwing the organic counts off.
I was able to confirm this when I spoke to another seller who did NOT use promoted listings - his charts were showing perfectly! The numbers all added up correctly, no inconsistencies in the bar chart, no inconsistencies when you "inspect" in the browser. The number on the bar graph matched the number shown on the mouse over! This was solid evidence that promotions were, indeed, causing the Organic numbers to show incorrectly, and Promoted impressions/views were having an effect on Organic traffic being reported.
So the question at that point was, are those numbers being used in the search algorithm as well? As a retired programmer, you may be able to understand what this means. As if the Organic numbers are being inflated by Promotions, the system would think the sellers are getting more impressions/views than they are actually getting, while making their conversion rates (and possibly CTR) seem much lower than they really are. Could this explain what we were seeing in search? And the answer is that yes it could - as it would explain why those who would typically be ranked highly due to PL investment/organic placement were not appearing up top - it would look like they already had more traffic than they did as well as make their listings look less appealing. The more traffic they got from PL, the more the organic numbers suffered.
This error was fixed a month or two back, and the same day it was fixed, search results started appearing as we would expect again. They actually made sense, with those who are top sellers in the category appearing highly, and those who have been known to invest highly in PL appearing up top.
So while it's hard to rely on those numbers as being exact based on how they're tallied daily, they can be useful in assessing problems and figuring out what's going on. They shouldn't be dismissed because they don't seem correct, rather the more major issues we're seeing in how they're reported is a solid indicator of what problems or glitches the system may be having at the time.
EBay had traditionally been known to mix up their variables. One from a couple years back (they removed the section) used to report "Active Listings Up" or "Down" by X%. But the strange thing was, at times you added a couple new listings, it might say DOWN 50%. Or at times your listings didn't change, it might say "Active listings up 80%". In testing, we had figured out that this number did NOT have anything to do with active listings! It actually was based upon search rank changes! If you had something that put a penalty on your account (A vero, or duplicate listings, etc), it coincided with a drop of 30-40%. 3 months later when the penalty expires, an incease of the percentage. And there was a tight correlation between this percentage and sales.
Basically, it seems eBay had mixed up a variable there, telling sellers it was active listings changing, but it wasn't. How could this number get mixed up? Well it's discussed often and accepted that adding more listings will help sellers in search results. The more listings you add and the more consistent you are, the more traffic and better placement you get, but it won't necessarily be traffic to the new listings - it'll be traffic for your store as a whole. It seems eBay's algorithm will bring more traffic to sellers for the more listings they have. Which means "Active Listings" are indeed linked somehow to the calculated search rank of sellers. It seems that, at the time, they had put the number for the rank as the active listing number, rather than the actual active listing number.
That's what it used to look like. But suddenly (I think last year? Maybe the year before) they removed it and said it could be back in Spring. Then they removed the notice that it would be back in spring. Now it seems gone for good.
Lengthy post, but I hope this all made sense to you and that a little history might be helpful when assessing these numbers!
@lotzofuniquegoodies wrote:
@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
@katzrul15 wrote:
@lotzofuniquegoodies wrote:
@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:
I can't read the article without signing up & I'm not going to do that. Is there some salient point in it that relates to eBay's search or the way they count impressions?
Apologies. I had no problem accessing. Came as part of a newsfeed from yahoo news on ca.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/gen-z-tiktok-search-engine-174559822.html
It just explains that the new go to for GenZ TikTok is the new normal vs Google for most searching.
Interesting perspective of what is to come.
-Lotz
Interesting read..........my son is senior in college - they debate/search/research everything on Bored Panda and Reddit. A lot is changing/changed.......
@katzrul15 @lotzofuniquegoodies
Yeah, my GenX friend thinks Instagram is a search engine. Color me old, so I have never been on TikTok or IDK what Bored Panda even is, though I'm on Reddit regularly, but aren't all those & IG, only going to search content on their own website? So they're not actual search engines? I believe that's how all their search functions work, so they aren't Search Engines. They are just search functions within an application.
I'm on Reddit for amusement & occasionally education. Scary to think that a generation is getting what they think is factual info from there 🤣. But I get it, even amongst my Boomer friends, most of them don't use email anymore.
I am in touch with several newer eBay sellers that use either Facebook or TikTok to advertise their listings. They do quite well by doing so. No thank you for me. I never fell into the social media frenzy and ummm instant gratification thang!! Strangely though, up until several years ago that (side advertising) was considered a big no no with eBay. Got your fingers slapped real fast if any kind of link was used in a listing. I guess they figured it was a losing battle and gave in.
Bored Panda I had also never of. Reddit whenever I have used, the information has been of the older variety so how accurate was, difficult to judge. I've had my aol accounts for going on 20 years. The looks I get when I give it out. Complete shock and amazement. Personally, will leave tweeting for the birds. Off I go hearing Rockin' Robin in the Playground in my Mind as my screen turns to a Touch of Grey!!!
Nothing wrong with using SM to advertise listings, that's a totally different leopard than searching within an application such as IG, Tik Tok or whatever & thinking that that's a search engine.
If people are searching IG, Tik Tok & Reddit & thinking that's a web search, then I fear we are closer to Idiocracy than I realized. Got a chuckle from your AOL use, my parents still use it too 😀
