Promoted Listings - not even working?

[gottasellemall69]

Started looking at year's performance, and noticed something kind of interesting.
I'm probably telling on myself, because it's not a "bad" thing, but-

To preface, I promote basically all my listings, at a very low % have them all under one continuous campaign, and have not touched/edited the campaign itself (just added more listings to it) since I started it, but one would think the whole eBay 'halo listing' aspect of Promoted Listings would factor in to this somewhat.

About halfway through the year I'm noticing my Promoted sales just drop off a cliff, since like May I have not been charged for basically any Promoted sales.

So while I am personally not complaining, it just struck me as odd that almost no sales have been via PL, even though as I said I promote literally every single listing I have.
Is this just a me thing or is PL broken or do others have this as well?

[iamcara]

Well I know that many people would advise against this, but I use a Dynamic Ad Rate for my pay-at-sale promoted listings, which means that most of my items are at around 10% to 20% in fees.

I think maybe the general promotion campaigns don't really work if you go too low, especially if the types of items that you are listing are not very popular or have a lot of competition.

I wonder where you are getting your "organic traffic" from? That's what's more curious to me.

I also use pay-per-click advertising (which most people seem to be vehemently against) but I have my own reasons for doing this as well. The thing about it is that you might see results from a click that you paid for months prior to making the sale.

[gurlcat]

I WISH.  Several months ago I dropped my promotion rate and that should have made fewer items sold via promotion -instead it made MORE of them, which I find extremely suspicious.  

[ewsupply]

The dynamic ads are pretty good. They just work and setting up just one campaign is also doable, it will just tag the appropriate auctions based on your rules set and ensure your listings will be marketed accordingly. My sales did incr slightly after switching to that campaign method over the past yr and I still do continue to explore the different combinations available to sellers for marketing.

[robbie31415]

Yeah.

Honestly lowered to 2% expecting fewer sales but higher rate of non promoted sales.

Amusingly my promoted sales went higher with a lower rate.

Another thing which I find suspicious is that the organic traffic increases when you increase PL.

If it's operating as advertised then there would be no organic movement only the promoted would increase/ decrease.

But the fact that I double my PL % and my organic traffic doubles.

Something is not quite right.

[gurlcat]

Yes that phenomenon of organic being tied to promotion is something zamo-zuan has shared exhaustive evidence for. 

Honestly I don't know why more people aren't at least slightly disturbed by the whole setup here, how one company can legally be the same one to sell and assess the success rate of promotion.  

[gottasellemall69]

I think it's more a matter of "what can we do about it" haha, eBay's kinda got us pigeonholed in that respect. 

[gottasellemall69]

Once upon a time I did mess around with dynamic ads, and yeah they did seem alright, especially for more "in demand" items, but I just can't justify going all in like that when a lot of the stuff I have is just a couple bucks, going with eBay's recommendation or even a few % less doesn't really fit into my model (right now, at least).

As for where the traffic is coming from, I do use a few tricks (including schema markup in HTML), which I have noticed does net some external views even with what looks like eBay removing external visibility unless you use PL, but that's hit and miss and still wouldn't necessarily fall under "organic". So, your guess is as good as mine! 😅

[gurlcat]

Yeah exactly.  

[ewsupply]

@gottasellemall69 

With promoted/dynamic ads in general, really it's a matter of seein if it works for the items that you're sellin. For me when I just started out, did not put ads into play but over time depending on the item, general availability in the marketplace it was really somethin to consider. So you gotta see what works for your business.

[fbusoni]

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@gurlcat wrote:

Yes that phenomenon of organic being tied to promotion is something zamo-zuan has shared exhaustive evidence for. 

Honestly I don't know why more people aren't at least slightly disturbed by the whole setup here, how one company can legally be the same one to sell and assess the success rate of promotion.  

---

@gurlcat 

I'm sufficiently disturbed to not pay for eBay software.

Because that what it is -- software.

I sure as heck don't understand how to use it.  I mean, I can read the instructions, but as with most software, that's only half the battle.

What I do know is that it was created in the first instance to help eBay with a guaranteed revenue stream. 

I suspect that more people are not raising h e l l  because everyone is focused like a laser on making money.

A new toy is quite a distraction.

[the-hook-and-the-loop]

eBay still hasn't figured out that while they chase sellers down for that extra promoted %, they are losing tens of millions, daily, in organic sales that would have been.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@iamcara  I'm one of those who usually advise against pay per click for sellers of single quantity , long tail items. (I can see more value in PPC for sellers of multi quantity items, especially non-long tail items)

But I'm always happy to learn new things, and I'm wondering why and how exactly you use PPC, since a quick glance at your inventory suggests you sell mostly single quantity, long tail items?

[lakefor94]

I do a 2% on everything and don't allow it to run forever. I think at some point the campaign slows down. 

I end them after 45 to 60 days, and start the same about 48 hours later.

I make sure all other changes I want to make are complete such as any adjustments to handling times for various business shipping policies. 

Just ended the 2% campaign I had started on August 26th. Will start another on Monday.

[mr_lincoln]

Hi @gottasellemall69 

This history of my experience with eBay's PLS might be of interest to you.

-PRIOR to 2022 and the full launch of PLA, the way Views are counted and the doubling and tripling of PLS "suggested rates" I ran one 30 day PLS campaign PER QUARTER.   Like you I put ALL my BIN items on the campaign and selected ONE ad rate for all.  That would be between 5% and 10%.

-Those campaigns performed great, long tail items sold more during them then in between campaigns, I AVERAGED 2-3 sales PER DAY!  The drove traffic and were a nice quarterly boost.

-Then the changes in early 2022 happened as mentioned above.  PLS sales DROPPED to an average of 1.5 or less per day, BIN sales between campaigns began to evaporate.  My ad rates no longer did much.  This continued through the first half of 2023 and between my 2nd and 3rd quarter regular campaigns I ran a short 17 day test campaign upping the ad rate to 12% ... BOOM!  sales shot right back up to 2-3 per day.

-It became very clear that unless one uses their suggested rates, meaning paying them MORE per transaction sales may not happen very much, at least for what I sell and how I had previously used PLS.  

-My 3rd quarter PLS campaign I went back to my lower ad rates and yep, sales fell off, VERY noticeable if one is paying attention.

-That is when I decided to abandon PLS altogether and did NOT run my regular 4th quarter PLS campaign ... well guess what happened next?!?  Just after the time I would normally launch my 4Q campaign I got not one but TWO of the following eBay messages:  "We've missed you try Promoted Listings Standard again"

I got that message again in 1Q24 around when my 1Q campaign was normally launched.  THAT is an extremely targeted message.  It told me a lot about what the venue's programming can and does do. 

Since early 2022 my sales have slowly and steadily declined ... and we are talking thousands and thousands of dollars worth of lost sales. 

While I LOVE selling on eBay the operative word is selling and the disappointment is that growth went in reverse and has not recovered in over 2 years.  Selling is not sustainable for what I sell if I have to pay over 24% in Fees to sell items on the site (that's selling FVFs and PLS ad rates combined).  I was forced to move inventory elsewhere to maintain cashflow.  The last year of growth I had was 2021 and right now 2024 is around $ 17,000.00 behind that last growth year.  If I have a good 4th quarter that might get reduced to around $ 12,000 but there are no guarantees. ... that my friend is not chump change to be sure.

While I "get" the fact that the venue's income is mainly based on fees but I don't appreciate what I have seen happen in that regard.  I can't fault the venue for trying to manipulate things in favor of trying to obtain higher fees to increase the income ... some say they do really well with PLS and that's great, for now but my experience is that it can change.