If you have multi-quantity with variations in your listings, your Promoted Listing is likely NOT getting displayed once someone selects a variant in the left-hand navigation. I sell shoes, so in my example:
- Search "Jordan 11 Legend Blue"
- Make sure your search/sort method is "Best Match"
- My multi quantity, multi variation listing will likely appear as one of the Promoted Listings on the first page. If not, it likely will after a few refreshes.
- Now select a size from left-hand navigation: select US Shoe Size (Men's) Size: 12
You'll now see some Promoted Listings. However, if you look closely, it will ONLY show Promoted Listings if that listing has no variants and is only specifically a Size 12. It will NEVER show a multi-quantity multi-variant listing as a Promoted Listing (like most shoe sellers have) with Size 10, 10.5, 11, 12, etc., once someone has selected a size.
Almost any shoe shopper will select their shoe size when shopping. Once they do that, you have no chance of being a Promoted Listing anymore. I've tested this over and over, with every shoe style I sell and the effect is the same. It's nothing against my account or my search rankings; every multi quanity, multi variant listing is being surpressed in the same way.
It appears this "feature" (bug?) was likely implemented around the time of the Fall Seller Update, and curiously right around the time when eBay started making it known that they could no longer accurately report Impressions data, only clicks and sold.
Before they started publishing that they were having issues reporting Impressions, I could see in my dashboard a sharp drop off in Impressions sometime in August or September. I can't remember exactly now because they've disabled the Impressions on the dashboard. I thought the drop off shown on the dashboard/reports was simply due to the issues they were mentioning with REPORTING only, not with actual functionality, so I wasn't going to worry about it. But now after a couple of months of sales dropping DRAMATICALLY, and it not picking up now as it usually does around Black Friday and through the holidays, I spent more time today investigating if my ads just weren't showing up as much anymore. Sure enough, it's because my Promoted Listings are never, ever shown when someone is searching a specific shoe size -- only when someone has not yet selected a size. This is somewhat of a worthless impression, because most folks will issue their search and then quickly filter by size without looking at anything on the page until they've filtered.
eBay - Please help! Your seller's holiday season is on the line here.
