Potential problem with Promoted Listings impressions!

[zamo-zuan]

I've been collecting information about what could be a potential problem, and thought this would be a good time to try to get some awareness out there of a potential problem.

I'll start off with some images, as images could describe a situation better than words can:

As you can see, as of September 3rd promoted impressions have suddenly taken a dive.

To explain, the blue bars are "Organic Impressions". Meaning the how often your items are appearing in search when buyers "naturally" search for you.

The green part of the bar are "Promoted Impressions", which determine how often you're appearing in your Sponsored/Promoted listings.

It seems the organic (natural) traffic has not experienced any change, but overnight there was a drop of Promoted Impressions!

Who is being affected:

Most of the sellers I know are in Motors, so up until this point I've only found other sellers in Motors who have been encountering this issue. That is partly why I am posting here; if you find you are experiencing this issue, please reply to this post and let us know what category you're selling in! Just because I haven't found this on other categories, does not mean the issue isn't happening elsewhere!

Do Trending Rates help?

It doesn't seem trending rates cause any differences for this issue.

eBay's stance:

Until this point, eBay has not given any official word on this. There's no way to tell if this is truly a bug, or a change they made, or if it's intended. I have asked the forum mods on here last week, and they had not replied. I have reported this issue to phone CSR's, and they have not received any updates from the tech team yet.

Might this also be the natural ebb & flow of eBay, or the current situation our country is in?

That does not seem to be the case. As you can see above, the organic traffic (the blue bar) has been 100% stable through this time.

This means the same amount of buyers are searching now as they were prior. The primary difference we're seeing here is for the promotions only.

This suggests, at least for this specific problem we're facing, that it is not a natural ebb & flow or economic situation. If it were, the organic traffic would have decreased. This would have also shown in the conversion rate, rather than impressions, as impressions are appearances in search, conversion rate are purchases.

Organic traffic being unchanged is hard evidence that buyers are still searching just as much as they were prior. Whether they buy or not is a different question, but that would be altering conversion rate, not impressions.

Furthermore, the change happened literally overnight, on a Thursday which is the date that is traditionally the day of the week eBay does their changes. 

Could this be some type of penalty or punishment? 

I've checked with eBay to make sure we have no penalties or punishments on our account, and they've said we have none. Furthermore, it seems to be category wide, so it doesn't seem to be any sort of penalty, unless if a penalty is somehow applying to the whole category.

Which type of listings seem to be the ones targeted by this change?

Sadly, due to changes in eBay's traffic page, this is IMPOSSIBLE to tell. 

EBay's traffic page does NOT allow sellers the ability to sort by impressions. It does NOT allow you to sort by ANY value other than "Quantity Available". And it does NOT any  longer allow you to save a spreadsheet/report of your information.

So due to these changes, there's absolutely no way for us to research the problem ourselves and find out exactly what listings are being targeted.

We're 100% reliant on eBay to figure out this one, sadly.

Might they have changed Sponsored Listings somehow for this drop to make sense?

If that were the case, it would likely mean that peer rates would have more or less weight in the new system. That doesn't seem to be the case.

Furthermore, any changes to the Sponsored Listing system which decide which listings appear in search, would mean the Sponsored Impressions would naturally move elsewhere. So far, this seems to be a drop across the board of this category, from what I've seen. As mentioned, I don't know if this is hitting other categories, but if you are experiencing this PLEASE let me know.

Why do I suspect this may be a bug: 

1) As mentioned on the phone by an eBay rep, losing impressions for Promoted Listings not only hurts seller profits, but also helps eBay profits as they are entitled to the trending rate for promotions.

2) Organic impressions are unchanged, while promoted listings are much lower. This raises the question: "Where did all the impressions go?" as it doesn't seem to be a shift in who's receiving the traffic. It seems the promotions just *poof* and vanished. 

3) Sponsored Listings are still showing on the search pages, but have some MAJOR issues. I have a Video linked here to display example what I mean. You can see here, some doubles ARE showing up in the Sponsored Listings section. Not only are they duplicates, but the price seems to be wrong on some of the Sponsored search results, and some of them report "Free Shipping" when the item was NOT free shipping. I searched down the page for additional listings so you can see multiple times on a single search page had this problem.

4) So far, this has been category wide across Motors > Parts & Acessories. But this problem has NOT been observed outside of this category. 

5) One person who I discussed this issue with was also selling in Motors, but was not in P&A. Rather they sold items such as wax/etc. They reported that they DID have this problem at first, but the problem resolved for htem over the weekend of 9/5. Considering it was fixed on that category, suggests it may be a problem that was not yet fixed on our category. Or at the very least, some changing/experimentation is going on.

6) It's likely that issues that would cause such a drastic change in impressions, and therefore changes in sales, would have some sort of warning from eBay. Not to say eBay doesn't change things that could alter your impressions (they do often). But if it were intended for Sponsored Impressions to go from 281,000 to 35,000 overnight, they would have likely informed sellers. 

7) Motors > Parts & Accessories is one of the biggest selling categories on eBay. It simply serves no logic that eBay would WANT impressions to drop for such a large category! And that's assuming we're the only category this is happening to. I've yet to find out if there's others being targeted by this problem! 

What do I hope to achieve with this post and/or what can I do to help?:

I have reported this issue last week, and eBay has been direct with us and said that their queue for tech support is based upon how many reports they have of this problem, and he mentioned something about there still being a follow-up on the case, so that means the report was still in queue. 

In other words, unless the people who are experiencing this problem are able to discover it and report it, it may not be fixed any time soon.

This means it's of the utmost importance for us sellers to check if you're experiencing this problem, awareness is the first step! Then if so, make sure to report it to eBay! I would also appreciate it if you could post here as well, including the category of products you sell in, as any information we could provide eBay about exactly what the problem is could hopefully help in getting this issue resolved as fast as possible!

As mentioned earlier, again I have to stress that one of the biggest problems here is with the changes to the traffic page, we are 100% reliant on eBay to figure this one out. They took away the tools that would allow us to go through our inventory and find out which listings exactly are the ones that lost Promoted impressions. 

Thank you and wishing all the best of luck on eBay. Hopefully we figure out this problem and get it resolved, or at least get an official response, as soon as possible! 

[lofficesupply]

I know this is a  slightly different issue but after 4/30/21  My sales, impressions, views have dropped to zero. I decided to promote a couple of my listings to see if that would make a difference and it made my impressions go up slightly but my views have increased by 1 or 2 and sales are still at zero. I'm in the category of work gloves and disposable gloves. 

Two weeks ago, I did get a vero notice where they took down that post which falsely claimed I used someone's copyrighted photos (I take my own or use creative commons). And a few days later I received a request from a branding agent about where I bought the gloves in the ad that was taken down.  I didn't respond as the listing had already been removed and I had no intentions of selling that brand anymore. However this shouldn't have affected my account since this was the first time it happened and when I called customer service they can't see holds, warnings or flags on my account.

I would attribute my problem to this vero issue if it weren't for the fact that it seems to affect a large portion of the sellers that sell brand name gloves. Also after reviewing Terapeak I see the number of sellers go down to the point where 78% of the sales are by 10% of the sellers and I've seen that number be as low as 57%. 

I started writing this reply a couple of days ago and have since sold two items, so hopefully I eBay is done with there "testing period". I really don't like how there isn't any transparency when it comes to how eBay will decide when or why they favor your account and when they decide to make it unsearchable. I'd even take an admission from eBay that they do this to accounts, at least the customer service reps wouldn't think you're making things up.

[nuclearomen]

Since my last post I have ended promoted campaign in as a last resort effort / experiment and see if sales decline or pick up. I noticed that when I would at times past 2 weeks place the promotional campaign on "Pause" sales/views would increase and when I "Resume" sales/views both decrease and become stale with no views at all. I have created a few campaigns since the Spring Update, around 30 days when sales fall to nothing I have ended and created new...but this doesn't perm fix the issue...there is nothing we can do for that. The changes that ebay made to promotional listings management is the issue and has affected the way promotional listings draw views / sales.

It's my belief that in an effort for ebay to grab more money from sellers as sales decline from economy and everything else they created options in the update to change your campaign management to a "daily" option, which allows ebay to at random fluctuate any percentage they see fit to charge at any given day/time to their "suggested" percentage on a promoted sale. That in turn they have given anyone with a "daily" election higher priority over normal non-fluctuated percentage rates (meaning those who elect a percentage that stays the same all the time). This would explain why they haven't done anything to fix promoted listings with tech support or uniformly for the site. It's a money grab that they fully intended implement. Once people realize what is going on they then have more and more sellers placing their campaigns into the "daily" option and ebay makes millions more per quarter for it. The issue is, as it has always been. Their "Suggested" rates are intentionally set to high for the product, thus deceiving sellers of the actual sensible election rate of 1 - 2% on any item. You see this clearly as the one thing that doesn't change with promoted listings is the "suggested" rate at time of listing creation with be high to extremely high (3.5 - 12 and up %) but after even only several days of listing being active you will see that suggested rate fall until eventually it rests at around 3% or lower (many resting at 1%). And of course, the other thing is the rate of suggestion to terrapeak never matches up for an item, the sales history is either non-existent to too low of stats to justify their insane "suggested" rates. Course going by things/categories I sell or have sold in the past, but that's been my experience with research on promoted listings. 

Anyways, I ended campaign, may create a new one later today or I may just never use promoted again - at this point I'm not losing anything by kicking promoted to the curb. Where promoted once held a hand in delivering an increase of sales, it has since become a stale and useless tool since ebay decided to be more greedy - and that is the lesson to always be learned - more greedy ebay becomes the more they ruin a once a good thing. 

[katzrul15]

Interesting - I ended my PL campaign that was a dud, created a new one and my sales came back pretty quickly.  This week has been way up from the prior 3 weeks.  

[lofficesupply]

My issue started when I didn't have any and ironically the sales I did get (now a womping 3, one a day after the 7 days of no sales) weren't any of my promoted listings.  I hate to use words like shadow banned (blocked) but I know what happened to me is what it's like when eBay punishes you.

I'm cancelling my promoted listings since they aren't giving me any more views. 

[lofficesupply]

Crazy thing is my sales dropped after two of my most successful days ever.

[nuclearomen]

@katzrul15 
there no rhyme or reason to explain what works for one and doesn't for another. Only gather a huge headache trying to figure out what is going on and how they are working. 
As a last try effort I began a new campaign today, but this I'm trying it using the automated by category option (still only elect 1%, ebay gets enough money as it is). I had 2 sales today, 1 was on promoted but it was from the old promoted campaign I had ended (hadn't created a new one at that point yet). Ebay still charges any buyers who clicked on that promoted listing the promoted percentage elected for 30 days even after end a campaign. The only way to fully end that is by ending the listing completely and create a new one. The other was not on promoted (and never is from this particular buyer (repeat customer)). 

@lofficesupply 
all issues on ebay start when we didn't have any... ebay loves to create them, it's their entertainment while pounding down coffee and doughnuts all day and smoking weed on their "work from home" CA agenda... but anyways, ending campaign will show what happens, either your views/sales pick up or they get worse (can't really get much worse if 7 days of no sales). You can then either decide to do a new one or not. Can't say either way what will happen. Just know what my experiment with pausing the previous campaign periodically did for me and what it was doing when it was running. 

[diocksgems]

I'm from Jewelry & Rings Category and I'm facing the same issue. Even the graph is the same like downward and went to zero.  I don't know what to do. I tried different campaign but still no impressions no page views. Bid strategy set Ebay suggested ad rate but still no sign of traffic.

[gazkat7683]

I am having the same problem across all my listings fell off a cliff overnight from approx 100000 promoted impressions to less than 50 about a month ago and has stayed like that, ebay have been no help what so ever and has pretty much wipped out my little business completely, and have no idea what to do or how to fix it have been waiting to hear back from ebay for a month now and nothing, I am devastated and am dead in the water for no apparent reason, any tips or ideas would be much appreciated.

Kind Regards

[nuclearomen]

e-nay won't help you with promoted listings - they fail to even fully explain best ways to set up PL etc... your completely on your own. The only thing you can do here is end the current campaign and then create a new one - you'll need to re-elect percentage rates but it's the only thing that may help "refresh" your sales towards PL. 

[leclisseebo]

This is like Groundhog Day all over again.. 

Had amazing sales all through the pandemic, then caught The Covid this March and darn near died. Was in bed for close to a month. Then I got healthier, began posting again and my sales were back to normal by May. Happy ending...right? Wrong.

On May 18th eBay flagged my account for "the potential..." of not being able to pay my eBay fees (even though I've been on managed payments since day 1 and they take subscription fees out of sales proceeds). The flagging consisted of blocking all promoted listings and putting my account on "low visibility". This being tantamount to an eBay imposed death knell. All because I got Covid. Thanks eBay.

Keep in mind that I'm a Trusted Seller with a 100 percent rating and have been record a negative feedback after selling close to 10,000 CDs in less than two years.

I found about the ban by noticing that my Promoted Listings Impressions dropped from an average of 130,000 PLI's per day to zero starting on May 20. I quickly called eBay to enquire as to what was going on and they told me that it must be due to slow sales. I referred them to the traffic graph that looked like a cliff , but they didn't budge from "there's no problem here...". After three days of calling and freaking out I finally got to a tier two Supervisor who within a minute explained the flagging an throttling of my account. He told me that nothing could be done until the algorithm batched the flagging error and removed it.

Because 90 percent of my sales are from Promoted Listings and my sales dropped 80 percent, "just wait it out..." was not an option. This flag was due to an admitted eBay error and I was going to make them fix it.

After being on the phone daily to eBay, I got through to a Trust and Safety Supervisor and after a two hour talk, he agreed to lift the flagging, Promoted Listings ban and the low visibility issue. That was on June 10. Issue solved by my undying perseverance, eh? Wrong. It is June 18 and my Promoted Listings are still at zero and my account is still on low visibility even though everything has been lifted. 

Yesterday I was on the phone with a Seller Team Supervisor who guaranteed me that the ban was fully lifted on June 10 by Trust and Safety. Now she is saying that there's a "possible" bug in the system an that it would have to be referred to the IT Department. She also advised me that there is no timeframe when this will be resolved.

I had a horrible case of Covid. 104 degree fever, hallucinations...the whole bit. Dealing with eBay beaurocracy for the last month has been far worse on my mental health than Covid. It's been that bad. I'm a great, honest eBay seller an eBay has ruined my business over an algorithm error and the don't seem to care if I go out of business or not. After a sleepless night I wake up each morning to virtually no sales and a Traffic Report with a flatlined Promoted Listings Impressions graph. Yay.

Words of wisdom...

- If your gut tells you you're having an eBay issue and eBay is denying it, keep pushing them until they give you an answer.

- Don't listen to eBay sellers on these forums who constantly blame their fellow sellers for the issue they're having. It's a sick form of Stockholm Syndrome and sellers should be ashamed to post such tripe.

That's all I've got to say. Within a month or two, if this doesn't get fixed, I'll be one in a long line of Trusted Sellers taken out by an algorithm. At least it wasn't Covid that got me.

Thanks,

lecisseebo

[lofficesupply]

lecisseebo,

Thank you for your reply, yea I'm still in some strange  eBay algorithm purgatory. The glove market is cyclical of periods of sale prices going very low (relatively) for a  couple of weeks then back up to a price where I want to sell them. This low swing seems to be lasting a little longer than usual so I don't mind the low traffic. However, hearing stories like yours makes be think maybe eBay is favoring larger corporations than the small business owner when it comes to certain categories. I wonder if anyone has ever sued eBay making eBay reveal how/why the secrecy behind the flagging of accounts. Or even an old employee that can or would explain it because a lot of their decision making or processes is doesn't make much logical sense even when you take into account doing what would make them the most money.

[zamo-zuan]

---

@leclisseebo wrote:

This is like Groundhog Day all over again.. 

...

Thanks,

lecisseebo

---

Very sorry to hear about your experience! I hate hearing stories like this, as the support given simply isn't satisfactory. There should never be a situation where there's "nobody to help you". 

Even if it was a bug in the system, if there's an issue on their side, they should go to extreme measures to fix it. At one point a large % of our listings were bugged and not showing up, even to the eBay MSO Sellers Health team, and it was confirmed by their own reports. 

Assuming the problem couldn't be listed, couldn't eBay do something - ANYTHING - else to help sellers? In the position we were in, we had new sellers literally copying our listings and having better performance than us. We would have been better off if eBay simply allowed us to use a new account until our main account started working again. I know for a fact they could whitelist TRS for sellers. But they won't offer that option.

It's sad that the biggest drops we've experienced could be attributed to technical issues, and not issues with our actual store or listings. We've been in the business for many years now and have a proven track record. Yet when things change by > 50% overnight, it's clear that eBay's algorithms are responsible for the issues. And we've had so many glitches that were confirmed by eBay CS on our record at this point, and no recompensation, even though we could prove that our losses were at a minimum of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars lost due to the glitches. 

Wishing you the best in hopes that your issue gets resolved ASAP!

[zamo-zuan]

---

@lofficesupply wrote:

lecisseebo,

I wonder if anyone has ever sued eBay making eBay reveal how/why the secrecy behind the flagging of accounts. Or even an old employee that can or would explain it because a lot of their decision making or processes is doesn't make much logical sense even when you take into account doing what would make them the most money.

---

The secrecy, as eBay explains it, is because their algorithms are a "trade secret" that could be used to manipulate the system and stock markets. So they can't reveal anything.

But an employee did slip up once: https://community.ebay.com/t5/Archive-Selling/Selling-Standards/m-p/23358986#M728102

For the record, eBay had claimed that it wasn't true at first. Then they DELETED the post, which made things even more suspicious. Then once the media picked it up, they had restored the post and claimed it was removed in "error" but had an eBay rep do an interview with one of the media outlets. The rep had claimed it wasn't true, but what he said didn't even make sense in context, making them more suspicious. Trying to find the article with the response unsuccessfully so far...

But based on that thread alone, you could see that they clearly do have limits.

And I made a huge post that is now archived of the problems we faced in 2018 if I remember correctly. At this time, one of the reps claimed we had a "risk level" associated with our account, which coincides with the leaked information above ("User Risk Code"). And for the record, after I publicly mentioned this information on the forum, that rep was never allowed to speak to us on the phone again...

[lillian.grace-devon]

I have found the same . I have an online clothing shop on eBay and have raised this today . I have used promoted listing tool 3 times . I have been charged over £100 for these with  a conversion rate of less than £60. !!! My profits are taking a dive . My overall impressions have dropped since September . I thought it was something I was doing wrong but this looks a lot more complex than I first believed 

[alphamicrocomponents]

Hello

I have had an issue since 20 Nov with promoted listings advanced tool - the impressions, clicks and sales have fallen to almost zero.  I am on the web chat or phone to the CS team daily and so far no change.  I was initially told that there was a technical problem and the tech team were "on it" and they had had many reports from sellers having the same issue.  I am selling in the disposable glove/mask PPE office supplies category.

I am looking for another platform as I have lost hope that ebay will ever sort this issue out for me.  It does seem that other big sellers of the same products are still coming top of the listings and sales are booming for them - so obviously not effecting all sellers.

In my more recent calls to CS they advised refreshing listings etc.  Have tried all that - including ending campaigns and starting new ones - but to no avail. Every time I contact CS they tell me they are raising an urgent ticket to the tech team to look at my account.  Frustratingly it seems that nobody can talk to the tech team - its all done be email - so I've lost confidence that this issue will get resolved, and more fobbing off to come I fear.