Simply-the-best-for-you Volunteer Community Mentor
@iamonourside wrote:I've been trying to use and understand the LQR, periodically downloading it over the past two years. It isn't something that needs to be followed monthly, let alone daily, for a small seller like me. I've followed community posts about it as well. In that regard, I thank @valueaddedresource and @my-cottage-books-and-antiques for posts on the matter, and @zamo-zuan on posts on analytics generally.
I'm a very analytical person but still found the LQR report to be hard slogging, second only to the traffic report. The report suffers from poor layout, incomplete and inaccurate labeling, obvious data errors, and lack of data notes answering obvious questions.
Yet, the report is helpful on the margin soI am disappointed it is being discontinued. My bet is it is being depreciated exactly for that reason. (IMO, eBay word choice is never accidental, nor about clarity and simplicity, and everything to do with [attempted] manipulation of the readers' minds.).
The report is marginally helpful in the things eBay wishes I didn't know: That promotional listings and other marketing efforts make no difference in sales. An observation that @valueaddedresource hit upon in his/her post back in May 2021, "eBay is showing 0% of listings using Promoted Listings "
Thank you for the kind words.
I think you worded it nicely. We all may have had criticism of it, it at least was an attempt at actionable information. For some reason eBay does not give sellers very much actionable information.
With that said, I can only comment on the category we sell in personally (all categories are different) but in our own category and others I've observed, nearly half (or more, at times) of the top 10 slots have been exclusively promoted listings. And much of the other oddities in the report don't match up to the reality. I can assure you that PL are potentially the biggest factor to getting sales (at least at the most competitive levels of a category). Even our Organic Impressions have a negative hit on them if we lower our PL investment.
As the post you link mentions, the report seems to indicate that PL doesn't have an effect on conversion rate, if we actually do the math from our conversion rates, the rates for PL's are astronomical. I've shared an example of this on here:
So the information from the reports doesn't match reality. We've been doing this a very long time. Long enough to know that the average conversion rate - even for our listings were naturally ranked #1 in search organically (before PL existed) - is in a best case around 3-3.5%. I do not believe for one second that this conversion rate is natural. There must be more factors in PL than simply impressions, it seems to be as if they use completely different matching algorithms, or else they wouldn't have over double the conversion rates.
But there's also the factors of the lack of transparency in how eBay works. We can't even trust the traffic page. This came to a head when they had some errors in the display earlier in the year. The data being fed to the graphs was different than what was shown in statistics, and different from page to page, report to report.
This came to a head a few months back when eBay had an error with Promoted Impressions showing up, and when this happened, all of the views magically became organic views:
This was an extremely startling discovery. As you can see, while impressions vanished, the views didn't disappear, they just turned in to organic views.
This seems to imply that the calculation for the View display is "Organic Views = Total Views - Promoted Views".
Which begs the question, why on earth would they calculate it that way...? That type of calculation is certainly not in the interest of accuracy. Since they are related to the promotion features, by all intents it should have an accurate reading of how many Promoted Views there was - not calculating it based on other unrelated numbers. The only reasons that make sense are either they're expecting a discrepancy, or the numbers are extrapolated.
And then given that the views happened to convert at the time that the Impressions disappeared, that gives some evidence to back up the suspicion of them being extrapolated. Taking a look and comparing the traffic fluctuations (or lack of) from day to day, seems to also make me very suspicious of them being extrapolated. All of the traffic seems to be within a similar variance, without any of the more drastic fluctuations that are expected in real traffic numbers. Please note, this is just a suspicion and there's no way to prove it. But there's nothing to really disprove this theory after looking for anything that might disprove it, and some evidence that seems to back it up.
This is exactly why there should be more transparency, and some honest, accurate numbers shown to us. Sellers should be receiving more information, not less. Especially information that might actually be actionable. And if there's issues with the information being displayed being inaccurate, we should be able to point this out for eBay's tech team to fix.
But this is also most likely the exact reason they're removing this report and have been removing most of the reports that give sellers in-depth information. Because the more information they show, it becomes clearer that there's a lack of accuracy and honesty, or an abundance of glitches that have persisted for years.
@namtrag1 wrote:Deprecate
Does this mean that eBay is going to disapprove of this reporting or are they getting rid of the reporting?
I think the authors of that news item better read the dictionary for use of a better word to explain what they are actually doing.
@namtrag1 Deprecate is perfectly acceptable & normal in IT/Programming terms. It is a VERY commonly used phrase. They likely just used the Developers/IT phrasing rather than marketing speak.
ETA: Oops, didn't realize this was older & that @valueaddedresource had already explained it. Sorry for the dup.
