Huge drop in Promoted Listing views/clicks

[tech_leaf]

Hey everyone,

I am reaching out to see if anyone has noticed a huge drop off in Promoted Listing views/clicks today? My account has had steady metrics for well over a year now when suddenly we saw a 60% decrease in clicks and a 70% decrease in impressions today.  My account is a high volume sales account, and this unexpected drop could really hurt my business as we do most of our sales here on eBay.

Hoping to gain some insight from other sellers here.

Thanks!

[nuclearomen]

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@dhbookds wrote:

There was a notice somewhere recently, I think in Seller Hub, that they are/were changing the way views are counted in that they will only show 1 count now, no matter how many times a buyer goes to the listing.......... so that may lower the totals from previous counts..........  I don't know if it was retroactive, but I presume not. 

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@dhbookds yeah i know, and the answer is yes, it effects impressions because they were counted for basically every click before, now they are not...this could have something to do with PLA the change, in an effort to curve the potential of sellers using PLA  to be targeted by competitors by continuously clicking on their PLA listings and charging up sellers CPC's. 

[threshold.sales.group]

Going forward the pay per click promoted listing will always be front and center, displacing the old pay if it sells promoted listings.  Unfortunately, that's a feature, not a bug. 

[Anonymous]

This has been happening for months, I got hit a few days ago.

It has been suggested that it is eBay's marketing plan for the roll out of PLA, to get sellers to try it.

Whatever it is, it hits swiftly and intentionally when it gets to you, not a natural occurrence.

Many of us (who can) are on a hiatus from selling right now until eBay fixes it or decides such a marketing plan is unfruitful.

Good luck to you.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@nuclearomen @dhbookds 

It would be nice if ebay would make an Announcement about this, but my guess is you two nailed it. What we are seeing is not so much a decline in views as a more accurate accounting, one which no longer includes bots and no longer includes a lot of duplicate clicks. If that's true, my takeaway is: 1. No need to stop selling until this get's "fixed", because there is no fix coming. This will be the new normal. Once we've been in this for a month or so, our graphs will look more normal....the count will be lower, but , once we have a month's worth of these adjusted numbers, the overall ups and downs will be similar to what we've been seeing. 2. This IS being done because of PLA, but not to convince sellers they need to use PLA. It's being done because now, with people paying for clicks, ebay can no longer count the bots and the duplicates the way it had before, because it would be unfair to people using PLA. 

I don't know anything about the "bots", but I do recall that usually if I posted a listing to Pinterest, it suddenly got a lot of views. That isn't happening now, which leads me to believe that there are bots involved at Pinterest somehow, and now I'm actually getting a more accurate count. 

So, while I'd love to see higher view counts, I prefer this IF it's actually providing a more accurate count. What it is telling me now is, I need to do a better job of getting views LOL

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@dhbookds @nuclearomen @valueaddedresource 

Another factor to consider: ebay has apparently revamped its "ad" business and I'd guess that advertisers don't want to pay for data that includes views and impressions from bots, so between the new "pay for clicks" PL feature and advertisers wanting more accurate data, ebay is feeling pressure to not just count clicks, but now ebay must weed out the "bad" clicks.

There's an article about the ad business in Business Insider, but I don't have a subscription, so I haven't read it. https://www.businessinsider.com/ebays-advertising-revamp-compete-amazon-walmart-2021-9

Also, there's this not terribly informative video put out for "ebayads.com"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03q3N-r6yAI

[Anonymous]

Maybe because folk are seeing some wonky things going on with the promoted listings. Been like that for some time, actually. Just answers are what we want. As far as selling what folk want here, when Pokemon cards and sneakers go for more than Picasso paintings, something's wrong.  

[valueaddedresource]

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@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:

@dhbookds @nuclearomen @valueaddedresource 

Another factor to consider: ebay has apparently revamped its "ad" business and I'd guess that advertisers don't want to pay for data that includes views and impressions from bots, so between the new "pay for clicks" PL feature and advertisers wanting more accurate data, ebay is feeling pressure to not just count clicks, but now ebay must weed out the "bad" clicks.

There's an article about the ad business in Business Insider, but I don't have a subscription, so I haven't read it. https://www.businessinsider.com/ebays-advertising-revamp-compete-amazon-walmart-2021-9

Also, there's this not terribly informative video put out for "ebayads.com"  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03q3N-r6yAI

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@my-cottage-books-and-antiques  I did read the BI article, they didn't go real in depth but @coffeebean832 actually uncovered some interesting info earlier this month in this thread:

https://community.ebay.com/t5/Selling/View-Counter-amp-Invalid-Traffic/td-p/32258920 

It's hard to say exactly how much of an impact it may be having, but it's definitely possible the new click filters are one possible factor at least.

We've all experienced how when you first list an item, usually you'll immediately get a couple of views - that's usually bot traffic either from eBay indexing your listing or possibly Google or other search engines indexing it.  That kind of bot traffic appears to now be being filtered out as well as other kinds of "invalid" traffic.

[nuclearomen]

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques  @valueaddedresource 
"bot" clicks are not highly active though they do (did) account for a portion of clicks, the main reason is due to PLA being a CPC model of PL and something I brought up while back was that all competitors would have to do was to hit up a competitor sellers PLA to cost them CPC on their daily budget. Ebay likely already foreseen this to be an issue anyways but I think because they didn't implement it as soon as PLA was activate for all that likely some big PLA sellers made formal complaint to ebay heads about it...before it gets out of control. 

Of course I (we) can only speculate to the entirety of the reason behind the change, but I think we can all agree that PLA's CPC was a big part of it. In hine sight, it's not completely a bad thing, even for sellers not using PLA's  because the impressions have been way off for quite some time now anyways only can gather that a percentage of PL impressions were actually accurate...this should help smooth out what listings impressions for PL are actually doing, especially when it will count only 1 click/impression to those who keep revisiting listings or sellers themselves using incognito views to raise impressions (yes, i know sounds silly but it has been happening). The impact will be seen, it already has, even my PL graph has taken decline, all we can do now at this point is wait for 30 days (really 15, half the time graph period) and watch to see how the impressions perform now to what will be the norm.