help understanding organic impressions

[iamtoplease]

I turned off most of my ebay promotions recently (9/22/22)  as a test.  good news is that the page views didn't really change. but you can see that the organic impressions dropped significantly. can anyone help me understand why turning off promotions would impact organic impressions? i would have thought that organic impressions  wouldn't be impacted.  below is the traffic chart. thanks

[davenportpm1]

Not sure if I trust these numbers or percentages. I try not to look at them all the time because most of the time it either depresses me or get my hopes up. Also, around 4-5 days ago, I saw there were ZERO promoted listing impressions the whole day, and all of my listings are promoted; but yet I sold 4 things that day. Today I took a quick look this morning and my impressions were down 11% after I read your posting, I see they are down 20.3%.  I can understand from one day to another but this huge difference within a few hours? It is very strange and makes me scratch my head in wonder. 

[zamo-zuan]

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@iamtoplease wrote:

I turned off most of my ebay promotions recently (9/22/22)  as a test.  good news is that the page views didn't really change. but you can see that the organic impressions dropped significantly. can anyone help me understand why turning off promotions would impact organic impressions? i would have thought that organic impressions  wouldn't be impacted.  below is the traffic chart. thanks

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Unfortunately we'd experienced the same thing in our testing. I've reported it here before. Here's a screenshot of what we saw:

In our case, we didn't even END a promotion, we reduced the percentage of the promotion! You can see not only did the Promoted impressions drop but so did the ORGANIC impressions! 

Afterwards we put the promotion percentage back up to where it was before, and as you could see, even though we were at the original percentage, we NEVER obtained our original level of Promoted OR Organic impressions again.

This goes against the very definition of Organic impressions! 

When I tried bringing this to others attention, the discussion ended up mostly being on if this was happening to everyone or not. But honestly, we should all be worried by this whether it's happening to them or not. Because it's showing that our Organic impressions - which are supposed to be UNPAID BY DEFINITION - are being affected by how much we invest in to Promoted Listings!

This might be a glitch, it might be intended. I'd be willing to bet intended because it's been happening for more than a year and has become more drastic over time. But either way, it should be addressed because it's absolutely dishonest and FORCING sellers to need to keep their investment in PL.

Many like to say "PL are just a choice", but it's really not when you're not even given Organic traffic without investing in PL.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@davenportpm1 wrote:

Not sure if I trust these numbers or percentages. I try not to look at them all the time because most of the time it either depresses me or get my hopes up. Also, around 4-5 days ago, I saw there were ZERO promoted listing impressions the whole day, and all of my listings are promoted; but yet I sold 4 things that day. Today I took a quick look this morning and my impressions were down 11% after I read your posting, I see they are down 20.3%.  I can understand from one day to another but this huge difference within a few hours? It is very strange and makes me scratch my head in wonder. 

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@davenportpm1  What day was that for you?  I had ZERO PL impressions on the 26th.  They 25th, I had 187K.  My typical is 150K/day, very static over the years, give or take 30K.   I don't see how it's possible that they were 0, when I have all my listings promoted, at high rates & over 1000 listings.  Just been wondering if anyone else experienced the ZERO & it sounds like you did.  Can you please check the date?  Thanks! 

[animesalesandmore]

really funky. Sounds like shortly they gonna charge promoted fees on organic sales.

[davenportpm1]

Hi! It was on the 26th. I stated 4-5 days ago but it was actually 2 days ago. Zero promoted listing impressions. Very strange but at least I had sales. 😄

[axiombody]

I tried promotions for a couple weeks but I noticed my impressions went up substantially but my clicks barely changed.  I notice you with promotions have 4mil impressions to my 1 mil impressions without promotions, but you only have about 1,000 more clicks.

As for your inquiry maybe the amount of impression raises your item organically in searches and when you have less impressions the search algorithm lowers your search results because it isn't being viewed as much.  Now thinking about it how can an item be found organically when it only shows up as sponsored.  My only guess is searches within your own store.

[zamo-zuan]

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@axiombody wrote:

Now thinking about it how can an item be found organically when it only shows up as sponsored.  My only guess is searches within your own store.

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That's something eBay seemingly found as a "problem" that they have "fixed" this year.

Want to see how? Choose any item of yours that is promoted and try searching it directly by eBay ID:

Even directly navigating to an item by eBay ID is now Sponsored. It's not like this item had to compete against any promoted/organic search competition. Just DIRECTLY navigating to a SINGLE item will claim to be sponsored. In case you were wondering why those people who reported purchases from Product History were counting as Sponsored Purchases... This is why.

So it's seemingly their intent to make it much harder to find items Organically. It's pretty discouraging to see how far they're going with the ads this year.

[iamtoplease]

i actually thought the opposite in terms of promotions helping my organic search rank.  you can see that with promotions, i get lots of impressions, but the clicks are mostly driven by organic impressions.  so when i turned off promotions, my click through rate skyrockets..making me believe my search rank should be even higher without promotions.   but the resulting drop in organic impressions is baffling

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@davenportpm1 wrote:

Hi! It was on the 26th. I stated 4-5 days ago but it was actually 2 days ago. Zero promoted listing impressions. Very strange but at least I had sales. 😄

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@davenportpm1   Very weird, it was the same day as me.  I had sales that day too.   Does your chart still show that?  Cuz mine has been changed...read on. 

@zamo-zuan  You may also be interested to know, that now my chart has been 'fixed' for the 26th & shows 156K PL impressions, which is right in my normal range.  Maybe it was just a reporting error.   Who knows. 

[zamo-zuan]

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

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@davenportpm1 wrote:

Hi! It was on the 26th. I stated 4-5 days ago but it was actually 2 days ago. Zero promoted listing impressions. Very strange but at least I had sales. 😄

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@davenportpm1   Very weird, it was the same day as me.  I had sales that day too.   Does your chart still show that?  Cuz mine has been changed...read on. 

@zamo-zuan  You may also be interested to know, that now my chart has been 'fixed' for the 26th & shows 156K PL impressions, which is right in my normal range.  Maybe it was just a reporting error.   Who knows. 

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Yep, it's "mostly" fixed but on occasion, certain single days won't be showing up Promoted Impressions still.

The PL impressions itself makes sense for a reporting error (in the sense that, for whatever reason, the PL impressions weren't being detected).

But we can see due to those random days not showing up that their formula for calculating Views is still the same as a few days ago. And that's the really worrying part. The fact that missing PL impressions (or views) results in the PL views turning in to Organic views. In the eyes of software developers, there's major red flags in using that type of algorithm.

That's the sign of the formula being at the very least, dishonest and inaccurate (as it's designed to claim any extra unaccounted for impressions are Organic, as Organic Impressions aren't actually "counted" but are the "left over" impressions after it counts promoted). There's quite a few shady reasons as to why their formula would work this way though... 

The second part that's a red flag is that missing PL impressions leads to missing PL views, which the most common explanation to this would imply that the PL views are extrapolated from the PL impressions. Which would be even more worrying. And as I looked in to this theory further, it seems all of the PL impressions > PL views run in to the same % range with little variance...

Also taking in to consideration the glitches I've reported in the past, such as PL leading to inaccurate Organic View numbers for some sellers, as well as last year when the "Organic View" numbers were a total of PL + Organic views... Taking this current formula in to consideration, it actually would explain those glitches perfectly...

So at this point I'm less worried about the PL impressions going missing. But it seems very likely that the missing PL impressions 'lifted the curtain' and exposed how their formulas work, which is extremely worrying.

I'm not sure if my explanation makes sense, but if anyone is curious, I have a spreadsheet with these type of formulas as an example, which lead to the exact behavior we saw in the glitch the other day, as well as the exact behavior we're still seeing in the traffic reports now.

[simply-the-best-for-you]

@zamo-zuan @davenportpm1 

FYI, I just saw this blurb on top of my Advertising Dashboard.  I don't think it was there earlier today.  

We are experiencing a system issue affecting the reporting of clicks and impressions. The historical data reflected on your advertising dashboard may be incorrect. We are currently working on a fix.

[valueaddedresource]

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@simply-the-best-for-you wrote:

@zamo-zuan @davenportpm1 

FYI, I just saw this blurb on top of my Advertising Dashboard.  I don't think it was there earlier today.  

We are experiencing a system issue affecting the reporting of clicks and impressions. The historical data reflected on your advertising dashboard may be incorrect. We are currently working on a fix.

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@simply-the-best-for-you sellers have been reporting seeing that banner since last Wednesday, so it's good that eBay at least acknowledged that part of the issue, but even though it appears they have fixed the display issue, there are still some serious questions raised by this whole thing.

Like @zamo-zuan pointed out, it appears rather than counting Organic views and Promoted views separately and simply adding them up to get the total, eBay is instead applying a formula which starts with the total and subtracts the Promoted to come up with Organic.

If you were to write it like a math equation it would be: Total Views - Promoted Views = Organic Views

We can surmise that from comparing the same days both before the data temporarily disappeared and after.

When there were no Promoted impression, and thus no Promoted views to subtract from the total, the Organic views bar grew by the same amount as the missing Promoted views - meaning the views were still there, but being reassigned as Organic since the reports were missing the data to "tag" them as Promoted.

So the question is - why would they use a formula like that to "figure out" the numbers instead of going the much simpler and more logical path of counting actual Organic views and actual Promoted views, then adding them together to get an accurate total?

[simply-the-best-for-you]

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@iamtoplease wrote:

I turned off most of my ebay promotions recently (9/22/22)  as a test.  good news is that the page views didn't really change. but you can see that the organic impressions dropped significantly. can anyone help me understand why turning off promotions would impact organic impressions? i would have thought that organic impressions  wouldn't be impacted.  below is the traffic chart. thanks

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@valueaddedresource   Thanks, I didn't realize that the banner has been there.  I'm not sure it has been for me since I've been in that screen a few times since Zamo PM'd me re; this.