I'm seeing a few posts today about what appears to be eBay testing an infinite scroll design with "load more" button vs the current pagination display but mostly in the buying boards and it occurred to me this type of display may impact sellers as well, specifically when it comes to Promoted Listings impressions.
If you haven't seen what the test looks like, basically instead of numbers at the bottom to navigate to the next page of search results, the user just gets a button to load more results which are then displayed on the same page allowing for infinite scrolling.
In the monthly chat about ads last November, I had asked about how the scrolling ad carousels on listing pages are counted for PL impressions, and if it was different than how they are counted in search.
I’ve been seeing increasing use of scrolling ad carousels on listing pages and have a question about how these impressions are counted. In this example, there were over 100 total ad slots including carousels, about 60 immediately viewable without scrolling right in the carousels.
Seller Hub defines impressions as “The number of times your promoted listings have appeared on any eBay site.”
If my listing was in slot #79 would there still be a Promoted Listings impression counted in reports even if the buyer never actually scrolled right to bring it into view on their screen?
Similarly in search, if the promoted version of my listing appears on page 2 for a given search, but the buyer never navigates to page 2, would that still be counted as a Promoted Listing impression since it technically appeared “on any eBay site” as part of that search?
At the time, the ads teams answered:
Yes, in the first example that would be counted as an impression. Anytime a listing is populated into an ad carousel it would be considered an impression. To answer the second part of your question, listings appearing are only counted as an impression if the buyer navigates to the second page. We hope this helps.
That answer made some sense as technically ads in scrolling carousels are all on the same page (single URL) whereas with paginated search, each page of results is a separate page with its own individual URL string that changes when you navigate from one page to the next.
However, with the infinite scroll design, search results are now also all technically on the same page and the URL does not change when you click the "load more" button.
Does that mean any Promoted Listings ads in search results will now be counted as having an "impression" even if the buyer never "loads more" enough times to bring it into view on their screen, just like the scrolling ad carousels on listing pages?
adsteam@ebay devon@ebay can you provide some additional information on this test and if PL impressions will be counted differently with infinite scroll search vs pagination?
However, with the infinite scroll design, search results are now also all technically on the same page and the URL does not change when you click the "load more" button.
Does that mean any Promoted Listings ads in search results will now be counted as having an "impression" even if the buyer never "loads more" enough times to bring it into view on their screen, just like the scrolling ad carousels on listing pages?
Logically, an impression should only be counted when the link to the listing appears on the page that a user can at least potentially view and potentially follow, even if the user never scrolls all the way down to see it. The link would still have actually been delivered by eBay to the user, in that case, and could be counted as an impression.
I can certainly understand a seller wanting eBay to affirm that specifically and officially, though.
So a typical search result page causes 60 (or 120 or 240) impressions, corresponding to the results shown, plus any carousels or sponsored listings not directly counted among those results. If the user goes to page two -- or uses the "Load more" link to accomplish essentially the same thing -- that would count for another 60 (120/240) impressions plus, only for those specific additional results actually delivered.
If that were not the case, then a search for hat on eBay would instantly result in up to 13 million "impressions". That would make no sense, particularly since eBay will only actually serve and display, at most, 10,000 search results at any one time for a given search. Back when eBay showed 200 results per page, max, if you went past page fifty, there was an error message indicating this, which, it turns out, still appears when you hit about page 45 using 240 items per page:
