Promoted Listing impressions in the tank with no explanation

[2011jleach31]

I was wondering if anyone else is having an issue with promoted listing impressions recently? I normally have about 40K promoted listing impressions a day and about 13k Organic. All of a sudden on around the 13th of July the promoted listing impressions are gone, down to about 3k a day and nothing has brought it back. I have spoken to the promoted listings department and that achieved nothing (was told it may be because of the change in the way they count views back in April). I even ended every one of my almost 500 listings and relisted as sell similar and started a new campaign and still nothing.  This is killing my sales as most are via promoted listing. Out of Ideas at this point. 

[simply-the-best-for-you]

@zamo-zuan 

Hey Zamo, 

Just as a comparison, here's one from someone who has not seen any of this weirdness.  This is my 2 month chart 6/1/22-7/29/22.   I also did the whole YTD & it looks basically the same.  My category tends to be very slow late July/August, so the slow decline is expected.  

This is pretty much what my chart always looks like, pretty static Organic impressions, always much lower than Promoted impressions.  Mine always looks like you'd expect it to look.   Just posting this so you can see that those of us who are saying we don't see this weirdness, really are not seeing the weird charts that some of you are experiencing.  

[2011jleach31]

That is almost exactly when it happened to me and my chart looks very similar. 

[forgottenape]

yep thats the one. sad when your organic beats promoted and yet promoted gets 80% of the sales....makes you wonder. also occasionally ill have days where it spikes astronomically then disappears after 2 days.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@simply-the-best-for-you  Yeah, that's pretty much me as well, although I have a few scary looking dips which are readily attributable to the fact that I let campaigns end and don't always start a new one immediately. But while the campaigns are actually running, no dramatic dips as seen in some of these graphs.

And of course, the fact that impressions are so much higher for PLs than organics is explained by the fact that organics basically only show on the search results page, whereas PLs can show on the search results page and quite a few other pages.

I think ebay would be wise to create a team to look into these drastic decline situations---maybe they could find a reporting glitch, or maybe they could find a PLS search algo oddity, or maybe they could even find that it comes down to a major competitor or two has raised his PLS rate dramatically. I don't know. But ebay has more data than I do, and has the best chance of finding why these situations arise (and also finding whether they actually are widespread or not)

I don't hold out much hope that ebay will do anything like that. But it might go a long way towards getting some answers.

[forgottenape]

it induces some panic but it may be nothing. it could be the graph is messed up and not showing true figures. my sales are down but with the time of year and the economy the way it is that could be the reason. sales on other platforms have also decreased by a lot. it could explain why 80% of my sales are showing as promos. perhaps whats showing is just a glitch and not showing true figures. fingers crossed

[blingfling123]

Is this an aged campaign? Have you ended the campaign and re-started it?

I have seen this in the past and just ended and redid the campaign and stuff went back to normal. 

[forgottenape]

good suggestion. thank you. ill try that see what happens

[mandisattictoyz]

 same, eBay on Facebook looked at it for 2 hours, they said it’s most likely a change in algorithm but couldn’t give a definitive answer.  Promoted listing impression don’t just drop by half overnight.  Nobody has any knowledge on this and it’s disturbing.

[mandisattictoyz]

Reset everything all you want, only organic will spike after.  I wish some tech would look into this

[jennlynne2]

My impressions dropped over 60% with very few sales and offers. I’ve contacted eBay twice over the last week and received a ticket number. They said the graph wasn’t normal and they’d look at it within 72 hrs up to 90 days. They did a refresh on my account too (supposedly). I had a drop off around the 18th. It basically flatlined on the advertising graph. I ended my old promoted listing campaign and started a new one. I ended every item and “sold similar.” My graph barely fluctuated. The organic is running higher than the promoted. The only way I’m getting a spike is by ending and selling similar every day. The graph on the advertising dashboard is going up again. I am thankfully getting a few sales and offers again even with the graph being messed up, but that’s because I’m ending listings and showing activity.  The graph on the traffic page is actually showing impressions almost back to normal (organic vs promoted).  I’ve included a couple of photos. The first is where you see the drop and I started a new campaign on the 19th. The second photo is the new campaign. 

[forgottenape]

i started a newer promotion with about 60 of the 2600 items i have yesterday  and it snapped back to normal at least so far. it could have worked or this thread made someone look

ebay.........................its always something

[retromaxgaming]

Hopefully what ever the issue was is resolved now. It’s only been one day so we’ll have to wait and see.  

[paraquip]

Something is surely broken on the ebay website.   My metrics are way way out of whack

My sales are down over 70% since July 1.   But look at this metric particularly in non-search impressions.

 My impressions are up 103,000%.  Over the weekend my metrics started to change like they are fixing 1 category at a time.

By the simplest of math....... seeing a 103,000% increase in impressions basically says the listing was not viewed at all.

Some of the items that saw improvements in sales are actually because the item impressions recovered.

Others are still flat dismal.

HK

[zamo-zuan]

---

@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:

@simply-the-best-for-you  Yeah, that's pretty much me as well, although I have a few scary looking dips which are readily attributable to the fact that I let campaigns end and don't always start a new one immediately. But while the campaigns are actually running, no dramatic dips as seen in some of these graphs.

And of course, the fact that impressions are so much higher for PLs than organics is explained by the fact that organics basically only show on the search results page, whereas PLs can show on the search results page and quite a few other pages.

I think ebay would be wise to create a team to look into these drastic decline situations---maybe they could find a reporting glitch, or maybe they could find a PLS search algo oddity, or maybe they could even find that it comes down to a major competitor or two has raised his PLS rate dramatically. I don't know. But ebay has more data than I do, and has the best chance of finding why these situations arise (and also finding whether they actually are widespread or not)

I don't hold out much hope that ebay will do anything like that. But it might go a long way towards getting some answers.

---

Question regarding this. You mentioned dips from when your campaigns end. When you see these dips, if you start the campaigns up again, do they restore to the same amount of impressions they had earlier?

The reason I ask is because for over a year now, if we change our campaigns to a lower rate then move back up, or if we even edit a campaign, there's a drop and it does not restore to the prior values and takes 3-6 months before it begins to gain momentum and move back up.

Regarding looking in to the declines, I'm certain there's different algorithms in place, I just don't know what determines who is included in those algorithms. The "test" eBay had mentioned we were in years ago where 1% was no longer giving traffic is an example of this - not all other sellers in our category were included, but on the forum post there was some others in Motors that had the same activity. Including some bloggers such as hubcapjoe who even made a video on it.

It doesn't seem very fair to include only some sellers in a test such as that, and not all in the category. 

And the strangest part of all of this, is our graphs at the time coincidentally look exactly like the graphs of some of the others with this 2% minimum change. So it seems likely at this point that this whole "test" they did was for the 2% minimum changes that they did recently. Because that was our experience for years now.

For all who are experiencing this current issue, it should be resolved.

And in our own personal situation, at the end of the day, we experienced these kinds of minimums before other people did, if we even edit our campaigns we see a significant drop that will take months to gain back the traction, and our organic traffic is linked to PL. Some of this was going on for 2 years now, others for 1 year. If eBay continues to neglect this situation, I hope we get an explanation as to why we're not allowed to play on the same field that others are. 

[zamo-zuan]

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@forgottenape wrote:

it induces some panic but it may be nothing. it could be the graph is messed up and not showing true figures. my sales are down but with the time of year and the economy the way it is that could be the reason. sales on other platforms have also decreased by a lot. it could explain why 80% of my sales are showing as promos. perhaps whats showing is just a glitch and not showing true figures. fingers crossed

---

Let's be honest here. If 80% of your sales are promos, that is a sign that promoted traffic is favored over organic traffic, and that your category has shifted towards promotions. 

One thing that eBay has been consistent with is their promo numbers, and you could be sure they're taking their fee from those 80% of sales.