Since April 6th, my eBay impressions have dropped significantly from an average above 1 million to around 500k, and now they hover at around 600k. Despite contacting customer service, I received an unhelpful response that everything looks fine. Frustratingly, I have continued to upload new listings every day, but sales have still decreased. On April 25th, a new issue arose where my organic page views showed 0, which is clearly not accurate. I reached out to customer service, but their response was again unhelpful and similar to my previous experience. These ongoing problems have made me feel unstable and unsure about eBay's reliability. I am now considering moving to another platform, but before making that decision, I want to know if others are facing similar issues.
@retro_entertainment_collectibles wrote:
@zamo-zuan wrote:
@ekmadonna wrote:UPDATE-- I finished yesterday with 216 EXTERNAL SITE PAGE VIEWS and only 113 ORGANIC PAGE VIEWS. Again in 9 years of selling I have never had a day when my EXTERNAL Page Views out numbered my ORGANIC Page Views! only a single sale yesterday with over 2600 listings and it was an item that has been on a WATCH LIST for awhile. Today is starting out the same with 50 EXTERNAL Page Views and only 13 ORGANIC Page Views.
In the way it's fluctuating, external page views seems to be being used as a "buffer" in between consistencies.
If familiar with DSLR cameras, external is basically sharing similar characteristics to how you'd use ISO.
This whole situation is just quite insane. It should be a huge revelation that these traffic statistics are being calculated/extrapolated at all. And for it to actually have glitches that expose the way it works, and they still not fix it, is insane.
Should we even asking for this to be fixed, knowing it'll just be made to add up correctly? Or should we be asking for *real genuine counts* of our traffic, and transparency to show that what we're being told is actually real, rather than the results of a balancing algorithm that's intended to make the numbers look nice and seem like we're getting value from our investment?
Note: That views external can very well be bot views even though eBay states not counting those and/or rejecting them that really depends on how those "bots" are operating and/or identification attempted. For example when I coded up a re-price many many moons ago (like 20) for Amazon it was a visual basic program and as Amazon AWS began filtering data coming back I altered the code to also scrape data. That would show statistically to them as views yet really were not. They were not even browser views, they were HTTP requests generated by the application and the resultant data parsed for the information.
So what I'm sayin' here is as eBay may have done away with bot counts or filtering off that doesn't mean the entities whomever they may be just went and stopped accessing eBay listings via the way the bots worked and were identified. Instead they may well work around it using generic HTTP requests scraping data vs using say the API(s) and thus that would appear as external views. Heck they could even automate core web browser control such as Firefox or others where essentially the user interface(s) are simply shells over the actual browser control.
If eBay's actions against Bots may have resulted in some entities who used Bots to access eBay data ended up costing said entities revenues in some way then odds are said entities will code around the filtering/blocking.
Not knowing anything about eBays internal code structure / Cassini etc if said entities whomever they might be are scraping listings thus creating external page views those views could in theory play into Cassini or other code. For example, if I coded an aspect of a search engine that used views vs conversions (in this case purchases) whereby 'nn' views without conversion end up ranking said object (item) in search rank weight well you can see the potential problem. In my example those external scraping views without conversion could lower rank weighting of said object and thus suppress it (or the opposite if coded that way, raise rank based on external views), thus the organic views get skewed accordingly.
Yep, but there's some inconsistencies with what we're seeing on eBay with those examples.
One note I'd like to share, someone I know awhile back made a script to test this type of thing (I believe it was 2-3 years ago now?) and even back then bot views were removed. So it's not like this is something new. But there was some strange results. Obviously this was off-eBay traffic. But the traffic charts also resulted in increased impressions/eBay traffic. (Though it was only bot views and no impressions).
With that said, the rebalancing is what makes it fairly clear that it's not just the removal of bots. Removing bots wouldn't turn 1000 organic views in to 400 organic 600 promoted, or 400/600 in to 1000. It also wouldn't leave the separate pages with inconsistent data.
There's also other subtleties if you consider how this would be coded. The most optimized way to work with this data would be through database queries... For what reason would they have each day individually looped with a calculation algorithm? And we can be quite sure that's what they're doing in this case, bc it's often times a chart where 25 days are showing up correctly, and suddenly 5 days are broken. If the data was resulting from a query to aggregate the results, rather than a function, it wouldn't be disappearing/recalculating like that. (I hope that made sense, if not I can try to explain with screenshots).
Of course, we can also look at the other traffic statistics. Under what circumstances should we believe that eBay's PL suddenly have > 12% conversion rate? An absolutely astronomical figure.
This also isn't the first time eBay had slipped up and shown the numbers are falsified/calculated either. I'm not sure if you saw what I had researched last year related to these issues. There were 4 discoveries that were made:
- Traffic does not reduce Total Views on days that Promoted Impressions are missing
- Turns what was previously Promoted Views in to Organic Views once the Promoted Impressions are gone
- Will display 0 Promoted Views when 0 Promoted Impressions
- Will display Promoted Views when Promoted Impressions are not 0
Here's some visuals:
So these discoveries have to be considered. And based on the glitches that began with this issue (on the earlier pages) we can see that these forums of calculation persisted from last year until this year. And only once they "fixed" it did more issues appear.
Your last paragraph is the problem. Because look at all the different numbers shown here (or shown on the current issue in my earlier screenshots with the ad page/traffic page discrepancies). It would wreak havoc on the rank weight if the wrong number is being used, and which number is supposed to be the right one? If eBay can't even get their traffic pages right (or fix the issues nearly a year after they first began) how much faith can we put in to them getting the right ones in to the algorithm?
My example of conversion rates supposedly being over 12% - that can be GUARANTEED that it isn't true. So why is that number being reported? And what type of affect is it having on the algorithm?
And it just so happens that the severe eBay performance issues are coinciding with these reporting errors.
BTW, I have to commend you for all the work you do on your site.
Whatever they have done, has gotten out of hand here big time. On Wednesday for example, we made all of our sales throughout the morning and afternoon. Then around 3 pm, we would have 1 sale trickle in every 2 hours from that point on. At that point questions stopped coming in and even buyer initiated (or AI initiated) offers stopped coming in too. We still ended the day at a decent amount of sales, but then yesterday we took a 50% drop in total sales from the day before. Yet again going several hours in between of no sales.
Today we are noticing the same old shenanigans. After continually looking at the traffic tab, our eBay traffic is down in the negatives, while the External traffic is up.
I just also noticed that as of 5/16 there are also going to be more category changes. You guys very well know that this has been something that they probably have been messing with on the Live environment for weeks since they never do anything on a demo testing environment. If you guys remember, they did this again last May 2022 with some drastic changes with promoted listings that ended up really hurting a lot of us throughout the rest of the year.
They added this to our account a few days ago, which is when I think some of these problems got even worse for us. Of course its the good old PLA, which for many of us selling used items it just doesn't work.
I have never seen a company mess with so much these last few years and we sell across multiple platforms. There are still so many old legacy pages, that you would think they'd be fixing those......but no, they have to keep fiddling around with things like promoted listings because they continue to run out of tricks in the trick bag to make it look like they are churning a profit.
Selling in the eBay Motors category, we should be killing it from end of February through end of August/early September. That is no longer the case. You get tired of keep trying to work around their mishaps to get sales. What they do not understand is that many of us do not just sit and rest on our laurels here, we are eager and aggressive to sell....but there are way too many roadblocks of late.
We already are spending so much via promoted listings, that I love when CS tells us to go and also spend money to promote our eBay listings on external sites. At that point, why are we paying them to do with promoted listings and the store fees, sub, etc. if they also want us to go out and spend even more money to promoted our items?
