Will the views/impressions problem be addressed

[sunday_jewelers_llc]

It seems like more and more people are having problems with views and impressions. Mine are down over 50% compared to last week with no major change in listings. Why hasn't this been addressed?

[ddrigon07]

I have the same exact problem! I don't know what is going on....all of sudden nothing is getting views and stuff i have listed previously would of had 100's of views. 

[randysauto01]

I started an experiment about 10 days ago, after it was mentioned by a long time buyer, in a thread similar to this. And it was related to PL's. At the the time, of my 24k listings, I had only 2k of them promoted.

We had tried the PM listing feature on roughly 3 or 4k items when we first started on ebay.

It never really translated into much difference in sales, or at least, not to the effect we had hoped, only about 25% percent of our sales for months after that, were from PL.

But I thought what the heck, I'm going to run some more. So over the course of a day, I expanded our PL's numbers up to just over 12k items. Much to my dismay, my views and sales across the board, are almost identical to what they were previously.

I've got about 10k more items I could promote, but it makes one wonder if its worth it. Especially with the whole roll out of the pay per click scheme.

[adsteam@ebay]

Hi @randysauto01,

Thank you for your question/concern, we will share your feedback with the proper teams.

As a reminder, a number of factors can cause an increase or decrease in your Promoted Listings Standard visibility, clicks, or sales. You can learn more here.

Promoted Listings Standard promotes your listings with ads across the eBay network. Promoted Listings Advanced targets the top spot in search.

[this*old*attic]

I hated the whole Promoted thing when it rolled out, but when I came back to selling a few months ago I rethought.

Let's be honest. Because people promote, everyone else's items for sale go scrolling right across your listing.

So this time I promoted everything.

Sales aren't great, my category seems to have tanked plus I haven't really researched prices, etc.

The point, though, is every item I have sold was promoted except for the one totally trendy, desirable item I had up. That means every other sale was made from someone else's listing, and not found in Search at all.

I don't like it, but I just build the promo percentage into my prices. I'd be crazy not to.

[glasser]

eBay will soon be like Amazon where search results, at least top ones, are all promoted. Relevance in the results will drop from the customer standpoint becuase monetization of clicks is in eBay's best interest as well. 

I some times search on Amazon and get one result in top results that actually match my search parameters even when they are quite specific, 

It makes it very hard for buyers and sellers. Buyers have a hard time find the right item at the right price and sellers are stuck competing, read paying, rather then following best practices.

In the end big sellers with dep pockets can get their item to the top of the list all day long. 

The new PL is going to really cause a lot of pain.

[my-cottage-books-and-antiques]

@this*old*attic For the sake of accuracy: PLs DO show up in search, as well as places like Listing pages, checkout, etc. You are probably right, though, most of your PL sales are probably the result of placement somewhere other than the search results page. I've been saying for years that the reason to use PLS--for long tail, one off sellers especially---, is the placement beyond the search results page. With a fairly narrow search, my long tail items are usually going to be on the first page organically, just because there usually aren't a lot of them. The benefit comes from the other placements, and many of the sales are probably more of an impulse buy than a purchase made because the buyer was looking for the specific item.

So, I agree with your basic premise: PLS can be a very good tool for selling long tail one offs. 

[mr_lincoln]

---

@glasser wrote:

eBay will soon be like Amazon where search results, at least top ones, are all promoted. Relevance in the results will drop from the customer standpoint becuase monetization of clicks is in eBay's best interest as well. 

I some times search on Amazon and get one result in top results that actually match my search parameters even when they are quite specific, 

It makes it very hard for buyers and sellers. Buyers have a hard time find the right item at the right price and sellers are stuck competing, read paying, rather then following best practices.

In the end big sellers with dep pockets can get their item to the top of the list all day long. 

The new PL is going to really cause a lot of pain.

---

Good point @glasser on Search results ... I am seeing more and more issues when doing Sold search research ... I'll be looking for a specific train with MPN and the list that gets returned "may" have in one or two scrolls down.  Sure some get it right but more and more don't.  Or I get a few trains then a bunch of totally unrelated items ... light electric fittings.  I will wind up having to change words or their position in the title to get the correct items.

So many changes this year have added a lot of extra time trying to get simple tasks completed. 

[rosettamodes]

These canned replies are tiring. You can't metaphorically speaking, come out onto a balcony and look over a crowd of people all saying the same thing and speak boilerplate. No one is calmed by this,  nor informed. This cannot be news to Ebay, they should already have been amply informed by the many, many forum posts on here and on Reddit, as well as ecommerce forums, that something is amiss. This has been the entire past month. Stop. Listen. Then fix it. 

[glasser]

@rosettamodes The marketing speak from eBay is not really respectful to its sellers.  if eBay really viewed their sellers as partners, not revenue generating entities, they would be more honest and provide more data.

Instead they always say hey this new change will be good for you.  They should show the data from any tests they have run, and projections for seller ROI based on PL.

BTW, I am assuming after this change in PL to a pay per click model, phase 2 will be buy search placements outside of eBay (Google and Facebook) and thus get sellers to pay directly for what eBay pays now. This would be $100's of million saved for eBay's bottom line and more out of sellers pockets.

[adsteam@ebay]

@rosettamodes and @glasser -

I understand your frustration with the my response yesterday. When there are widespread reports of similar performance changes like this, we take action to investigate, fix any issues and strive to keep the seller community updated on the resolution in a timely manner. At this time we are actively investigating.

We thank you for selling with us, appreciate your understanding and commit to sharing updates as soon as possible.

[frugality_inc]

eBay's ad program is far worse than Amazon.

eBay sacrifices quality control for profit. Actually hurts the buying experience.

On eBay desktop and mobile app, buyer's have to scroll down just to see organic listings.

Pay to win program that only benefits eBay and rewards poor quality sellers that abuse PLs with top spots.

Don't even bother speaking with eBay. You'll get canned responses. All they care about is short term money. 

[samanthasb0utique]

Wow… yes, my impressions (organic & promoted) are down 70% since sept 20th and they keep declining. I have been selling on ebay for 10 years and I sell luxury handbags for a living and sell roughly $700k in goods in a year. $50-60k in a month usually… now I can’t sell anything. No buyer, no views, my items aren’t reaching anyone anymore. Something big has change. This has been completely catastrophic. It has to be the new rollout of the Cost Per Click promotion. I even tried that thinking things would get better! Nope.. wasted a lot of money with no sales. I wouldn’t be surprised if ebay makes my business go under pretty soon. Seems like they are trying REALLY hard.

[mr_lincoln]

I turned that Traffic tile off in Seller Hub well over a year ago and had to turn it back on to look at the report ... it's subjective which I figured out when I first saw it ... this one covers about a one  month period ...

I don't compare this month to last month, and I am glad they are doing away with the last 31 days sales thing, worthless info in my opinion.  I compare each month with that same month in previous years.  7 of 9 months this year have been the best ever months in the last 6 years ... that shows growth.

Last year was a bust for growth, sales actually went backwards thanks to Covid ... I hope this trend continues.

[randysauto01]

I can see how the 31 day view may not play as much of a role in what is considered useful, if a person sells typically seasonal items, or have much busier times of the year.

We have 2 wrecking yards and sell used auto parts, so we don't really have a "season" (not many people are looking to put an engine for 2005 silverado under the tree 😋). So we pay pretty close attention to the rolling 31 day calendar.