Does anyone else here have the new Listings Quality Report that Harry Temkin demoed in the December Seller Check In yet? It is being rolled out this month and would be under Performance>Traffic in Seller Hub.
I originally had high hopes for this new feature but after digging into it for a few days I'm fairly disappointed.
I'll start with the instructions screen for this report for those who haven't seen it yet.
The first issue for me is that the report says we have 0% MPN filled in for our listings. In our categories, the field is called Manufacturer Part Number. It's a required field and 100% of our listings have that IS filled in.
Is this just a data mapping issue? Are other parts of our business being hurt because eBay doesn't have this field standardized across all categories? Should I create a custom IS, name it "MPN", and fill in redundant information just to make this report happy and if so, will it have any other effect positive or negative on our listings?
The description of the "opportunity" marks says they are simply measuring the difference between the top 10% and bottom 10% of listings. All that means is there is a difference, not necessarily that the difference has any particular meaning or relevance or that making eBay's suggested "improvements" will have any positive result.
The big red box may be meant to trigger sellers into thinking this is a critical issue on their account, but if you look at the sales conversion section it is pretty clear that Free Returns isn't driving sales conversion for the bottom 10% using it more than the top 10%.
eBay seems to be trying to give the impression that offering Free Returns will result in more page views, but again because all they are doing is highlighting a difference, there is simply no data here to actually identify *if* that difference is the cause of higher click through rates or just a coincidence.
In fact, this report shows that for this category, our sales rank is 2 out of 4,931 sellers, *if* that is accurate it would seem not having Seller Paid Returns isn't really hurting us too badly.
This report also seems to think we have 0% Promoted Listings enabled when in fact 100% of our listings are in active Promoted Listings campaigns.
I'm not even sure how to interpret the data about Google Shopping. It says Google Shopping Applies 0%, but then further down where it shows individual listings, every line has a check mark which one might think would indicate a "positive" or "yes" that Google Shopping applied. Maybe the check mark just means the listing is eligible for Google Shopping and the 0% section shows how many were actually sent to Google? I don't know, and there is nothing in the instructions or report that clarifies this.
Also, the instructions and Harry Temkin's video both say if you have listings that are rejected for Google Shopping, it will show a separate tab in the spread sheet so you can address any issues causing rejection. I do *not* have that tab, so I would have to assume none of our listings are rejected.
With multiple data points which are obviously not accurate, it causes me to question the validity and accuracy of the entire report and renders it pretty much useless to me.
On top of that, some of the elements of this report seem to be designed to nudge sellers to take action that eBay wants them to take by making it look like a critical issue to be addressed, when in reality there is no data here to show that making those suggested "improvements" will have a positive effect on your account.
Bottom line for me, at a minimum this report is not ready for Prime Time and should be taken with a gigantic grain of salt.
I'd be interested to hear if anyone else who has access to this feature is seeing similar issues.
@Anonymous thanks again for taking the time to respond. A couple points I'd like some clarification on and a few that were not mentioned in your response -
Column Misalignment - We have reviewed the column misalignment (Best offer, Sale event + markdown) between the items table and the seller level benchmark, and will provide a fix in the next version.
Can you expand on that a bit please? It sounds like you are saying this was just a formatting error where some of the columns were misaligned in the report between the top section (seller benchmark) and the bottom section (items table), and that is the reason the data doesn't match up in some cases. I just want to clarify to make sure I'm understanding that issue correctly.
LQR Data Update Frequency - The seller data (including Google Shopping data) takes approximately 48 hours to process. Our roadmap includes improving the process time. It is important to note that in cases where the seller does not make any modifications to listings, but items have sold or ended, this will result in changes to the benchmark data.
1. The report being lagged behind 48 hours is understandable if that is a limitation of Google Shopping data, but the wording on the report page needs to be made clearer.
I know this may seem like a small thing grammatically but the report itself is updated once every day, not once every two days. Maybe something like "this report is updated once a day and is based on listing status as of x date"?
2. You addressed items sold or ended, but did not address items that are relisted. GTC relists keep the same item number and on the seller side appear to be almost an instant process, but it seems that those listings may not always be picked up for this report if they are within the 24 hour re-indexing time.
More clarity on this and bringing more attention in the report to the fact that shifts in percentages may simply be due to a change in the number of listings being considered are needed. Don't hide it in the fine print, it needs to be obvious if that is the reason for a change in the benchmark percentages.
Other points from previous posts in this thread that were not mentioned specifically in your reply:
Promoted Listings showing at 0% when it should be 100%.
Google Shopping showing at 0% when it should be something higher than that.
Are these also part of the column misalignment issue or something else?
I am noticing that MPN is starting to show something more than 0% so it does look like that is being addressed already, thanks! However, the benchmark numbers are still not quite accurate (most are now in the 70-80% range when they should be 100%).
The listing section under MPN now leads me to have another question - what is the exact definition of "not provided?"
The wording of "not provided" makes it sound like the seller has not provided that information. However, we have provided Manufacturer Part Number for 100% of listings, so that can't be accurate. We also have some listings that say "not provided" for Brand but if I look at the listing Brand is clearly filled in.
Does "not provided" mean that eBay simply couldn't extract or recognize that information from that particular listing at the time of that report? If so, I would suggest different wording that makes it clearer that the issue is on eBay's side, not that the seller didn't provide the information in the listing.
Also there seems to be inconsistency now in the MPN field in that some listings just show a check mark (assuming that means "yes"?) and some will actually show the text/number filled in for that field. Again, not sure if this is part of the misalignment issue, but if not, it should be consistent. My vote would be to show the actual value filled in rather than a checkmark as I think that would be more useful information.
@mcdougle4248 not sure if you have any to still check at this point, but did your Google Shopping change at all?
@Anonymous - today's report which is based on listings as of Jan 16, 11:30 PST is showing just blank sections for Search Impressions and Listings Views for the Google Shopping column. It doesn't even have the Google Shopping Applied header for those sections.
It still shows 0% for the Google Shopping section for the Sales Conversions benchmark, but now shows just blank space instead of checkmarks for that column in the bottom Listing section.
My report looks about the same as yours. I do notice on your report for the Google Shopping Sales Conversion benchmark showing 0 percentages vs my report showing percentages in those fields.
@mcdougle4248 - I have a new opportunity! It looks like the Promoted Listings enabled column is now reflecting more than 0%, and along with that I now have a new column which is Promoted Listings Ad Rate
For clarity, we set our PL rates ourselves and do not use eBay's "suggested rate". Most of our rates are set between 3-5% based on several criteria, which presumably averages out to the 4% shown on this report.
The Listing Quality Report is suggesting that we should raise our PL rate to 6% to gain more impressions.
One interesting thing to note is that while eBay is suggesting this may provide more impressions, it also shows that raising that rate does not appear to have a positive effect for click through rates, and for sales conversions there is no difference between the top and bottom 10%, so clearly not a major factor there either.
Here is another category where PL rate is not being called out specifically as an opportunity, but it is still one of the available columns of data.
In this category it is even more clear that the bottom 10% is promoting listings at a higher rate but that is obviously not translating to increased click through rates or sales conversions.
Now for the really interesting part. eBay has been pushing their "new" Promoted Listings Recommendation Tool a lot recently. Previously eBay showed us "trending rates" as a recommendation. This new tool claims to use a more sophisticated formula to come up with a "suggested rate" instead.
In all of our categories, eBay's new "suggested rate" tends to average around 7-9%, with some going as high as 13-14%
So it would seem that @zamo-zuan is correct that this report is maybe giving us a bit of evidence that following eBay's suggestions often times does NOT help. 🤣
At the very least, it certainly seems to be indicating that many sellers are *not* going all in on eBay's suggested ad rates.
@valueaddedresource wrote:@mcdougle4248 - I have a new opportunity! It looks like the Promoted Listings enabled column is now reflecting more than 0%, and along with that I now have a new column which is Promoted Listings Ad Rate
For clarity, we set our PL rates ourselves and do not use eBay's "suggested rate". Most of our rates are set between 3-5% based on several criteria, which presumably averages out to the 4% shown on this report.
The Listing Quality Report is suggesting that we should raise our PL rate to 6% to gain more impressions.
One interesting thing to note is that while eBay is suggesting this may provide more impressions, it also shows that raising that rate does not appear to have a positive effect for click through rates, and for sales conversions there is no difference between the top and bottom 10%, so clearly not a major factor there either.
Here is another category where PL rate is not being called out specifically as an opportunity, but it is still one of the available columns of data.
In this category it is even more clear that the bottom 10% is promoting listings at a higher rate but that is obviously not translating to increased click through rates or sales conversions.
Thank you for taking the time to research and write your finds about the "Promoted Listing" program and their "suggested rates" in particular, a must read for anyone considering "promoting" and handing the venue more $$$ without receiving increase in CTR/Sales Conversions in return.
I have a new opportunity, too! According to the report twelve of my listings need recommended items specifics. I checked all of the listings and they have the recommended item specifics filled in. I also noticed that Google Shopping has dropped to only 8%. These listing have only been up since about 5:30 am on Jan 18th, so it could be they have not completed indexing.
Thanks @mcdougle4248 - it looks like the date/timing of the report has changed again too. 😕
It has consistently been updating for me at around the same time every afternoon and when it updates, it has been consistently for status as of 2 days prior. So yesterday and earlier this morning it was showing the report based on status as of January 17th.
It just updated about half an hour ago and now it is showing listing status as of January 19th.
Consistency is going to be critical for sellers to be able to monitor this report and try to get any use out of it.
By not having a report that shows what the status was as of the 18th, that makes it more difficult for me to track from day to day and report to report to see what has changed either due to changes we may have made based on the suggestions in the report or changes eBay is making to the report itself.
@Anonymous We need to be able to count on a relatively consistent schedule and time period covered for this report to be useful over time.
@valueaddedresource wrote:Thanks @mcdougle4248 - it looks like the date/timing of the report has changed again too. 😕
It has consistently been updating for me at around the same time every afternoon and when it updates, it has been consistently for status as of 2 days prior. So yesterday and earlier this morning it was showing the report based on status as of January 17th.
It just updated about half an hour ago and now it is showing listing status as of January 19th.
Consistency is going to be critical for sellers to be able to monitor this report and try to get any use out of it.
By not having a report that shows what the status was as of the 18th, that makes it more difficult for me to track from day to day and report to report to see what has changed either due to changes we may have made based on the suggestions in the report or changes eBay is making to the report itself.
@Anonymous We need to be able to count on a relatively consistent schedule and time period covered for this report to be useful over time.
Oh my, now it says it was updated today, but it's still the same exact file from yesterday's update. 😫
