Have promoted listings become a waste of time and money ??

[british-ceramics-and-paintings]

In the early stages I think promoted listings were generally a success for sellers however as more and more sellers started using them they seem to have become a little pointless and very expensive.

Many of the items I sell are one off items however buyers generally find them in a general search, i.e. oil paintings or paintings which can return thousands and thousands of items. Despite selling one off items Ebay often suggests promoted ad rates of 11% !!

10.9% plus VAT plus 11% plus VAT comes to not far off 30%. 

Promoted listings do give you an uplift in impressions however I often believe they are pointless impressions where potential buyers don't even see your items unless they really look for them, i.e. low down on the page of another listing.

Promoted listings clearly helped a couple of years ago however like many things on Ebay they have become saturated.

Are they now worthwhile ?

All opinions welcome as I may well be wrong.

[elitegiftsltd]

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@sheba-knows-best wrote:

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@british-ceramics-and-paintings wrote:

Do you promote every item or just a selection of items ?

Thank you.

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I promote (at quite a low level) all but the most sought after brands. So if I had a Joules riding jacket, I won't promote. A buyer will find it soon enough.  And I only need one buyer. But a penny lane maxi leather (brand unknown) may need a bit of help. Although penny lane and maxi are common keywords they probably aren't known by enough buyers. Its this kind of thing you have to get a feel for. For me, there's another factor, I have storage issues as my items are large-ish. If I don't sell within 3 months my items will never get quite the lift on the search engine they got when they are brand new (although 'sell similar' helps) so although the right buyer will find 'penny lane maxi' eventually, its better for me to lose a few quid and get it out from under my feet in the first 3 months. I hope this helps.

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A good way of working things.

I usually have a portion of items on promotion, when I list a load of new items I often stick them on promotion until a sale or two then take it off promotion for a while. 

Buyers pay for the extra cost as they do for all the costs. 

[sheba-knows-best]

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@knit-in-styles wrote:

Thanks, I don't have that much promoted just now and the ones I couldn't find before were on my private account not my business account.

A quick example is 10 white shank buttons. I have these promoted. I put 10 white shank buttons in the search and the first page of 60 items they were not there. They appeared at the bottom of page 2 so basically appearing about 125th in the list.

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I don't mean to be dismissive. But '10 white shank buttons'? Really? Isn't that a bit like me saying 'leather jacket size 14'? Any sales would be pure fluke unless my selling price was tuppence. Is there no way of differentiating at all? Pattern? Brand? size? material? type of fixing ie hoop back? reverse colour? Quality?  weight? number of holes for sewing? I dodn't know, I use buttons all the time for fixing my leathers I wouldn't search 10 white shank buttons. Use every single character in your title bar. 

[knit-in-styles]

I have tried many of the things you mention and I have had very long titles which include colour, material, number of holes, pattern description etc and it has made no difference. I shortened the title on this particular listing last month to see if it made any difference. 

[sheba-knows-best]

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@knit-in-styles wrote:

I have tried many of the things you mention and I have had very long titles which include colour, material, number of holes, pattern description etc and it has made no difference. I shortened the title on this particular listing last month to see if it made any difference. 

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But all you have to do is search 'white shank buttons' and filter by sold to see what works and it's quite clearly not that.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=white+shank+buttons&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&rt=nc&L...

Believe it or not, I'm trying to be helpful. Promoted listings WONT work if they're a last ditch effort to rescue a listing that's losing on every other visibility metric as well.  You need fair selling history or to be newly listed, right item specifics, correct use of virtually all characters in your title, good fb, good price, free postage, lots of postage options, fast dispatch, listing to be no more than 3 months old, rest of your listings to be no more than 3 months old as well (as old listings will act as a drag on the whole account). etc etc etc.

Promoted listings can't weigh against all of these. And of course, few people win on all of the visibility metrics (I certainly don't, I'm not cheap, and I'm not fast). Promoted listings is just one tool, that someone who is good at buying low (so has margins to spare) can use to counteract other issues.

[knit-in-styles]

Thanks for your post and helpful advice, I appreciate it.

[teejalicious]

IMO, the promoted listings are great, especially if you get your titles right for the audience searches. The issue I have with them is the lack of information openly and easily available explaining how promoted listings are charged. When I first started using them, I assumed the % meant how often the promotion would show in searches that matched but this is not the case. The % is how much of the item value is added for a promoted sale. So my first promo was set at 100% on a multibuy item. Well did I get a shock when I sold £30 of it (after multibuy discount) to then be charged £37 for the promotion and the normal fees. Its a learning curve but can be expensive. Because what I sell ar ein niche areas, I now set my % to the 2% minimum. This hasn't effected my sales but has improved my takings.

So really, I think Ebay needs to explain, far more easily, how promoted listings are charged. 

[gt_preloved]

I think a number of people may be misunderstanding what 'promoted listings' actually do.

Search ranking is a complex area which PL may or may not contribute to but certainly isn't the only (or biggest) factor in how high your items appear in search results.

The benefit comes from promoted items appearing in the 'Similar Sponsored Items' and 'Sponsored Items customers also bought' sections from within competitor listings and also in similar potential spots on a buyers ebay homepage. 

2-4% seems to be a sensible amount for PLs and I'd echo the comments of others, that since enabling PLs there has been a massive uptick in my impressions count which has had a correspondingly healthy uptick in sales. 

[classicalmainly]

Promote listings was an attempt by eBay to allow smaller sellers who could not afford the high end subscription shop service to pay to promote their listings to gain the same or similar exposure as sellers with high end subscription shops, all that's happened is sellers now pay more to compete in the same space and why ultimately it only benefits eBay and they knew this - i also think they deliberately push your listings down ladder to make you think you need to promote - promote only really works if there are many multiple items and you want to attract a seller to your item, i have tried it and often i have promoted a listing and searched on friends computer and my item has not even come up on 'suggested' supposedly promoted listings. It's this type of tactic which has stopped me selling on eBay they are too greedy and want more and more of our money - i now sell quite well on Facebook market place without fees, you get a lot of time wasters but it makes up for it by not having all the hassle of buyers on eBay opening cases and getting away with conning honest sellers - eBay has had its day i think, will always tick over with cheap stuff and cheap imports 

[litp*records]

I understand much of what you wrote however having a higher level of shop subscription never meant your items were automatically pushed up in the results above others.  Shop subscription tiers are more about how many items you are allowed to list before having to pay [extra].  

[summer-garden-antiques]

agreed, but even after removing the promo they still charged me a silly fee as i had it on promo in the past , thier must be a legality clause here somewhere, if its no longer promo then the robbing b ,s should not be able to charge the fee! usual ebay rip off to milk every penny they can get!

[simplyessential_uk]

Their argument (even though we can not see any data to back that up) is that the buyer looked at it at some point in the 30 days so now you have removed the promo and they have come back is irrelevant as ebay argue that their "promo" of the listing gave you the sale the first time the buyer looked at it 

[summer-garden-antiques]

yep they got us, what i had to do was end my items then relist but for future reference I will never put anything on promo again the fees are silly, if someone looks for a product and the price is right they will buy so its a pointless thing to do!

[gt_preloved]

Think of the promoted listing fee as an introduction fee similar to estate agents. If an estate agent introduces a potential buyer to you, and you then decide to take your house off the market and sell it to that person privately - you're still liable for the estate agent fees. The same principal applies with PLs.  Otherwise, everyone could benefit from PL and evade the fees by de-listing and relisting.

PL fees are entirely within your own control, they're only 'silly' if you set them at a fee higher than you're happy with.

I'd echo my previous comment that PL is not about search ranking. To get your items higher up the search results, tweak your item title, add more item specifics, add more photos. Many options, but that's not the main benefit of PL.

The PL benefit comes from your items appearing on other people's listings and on buyers home-pages. 

If you don't think PL is working for you, it's really easy to end PLs and then monitor the impact on 'Listing Impressions' in your seller hub. If there's no decrease in impressions when you disable PL then indeed - they weren't working for you.

[summer-garden-antiques]

do you know if thiers a way to permanantly fisable this feature as i know in the past espiecially when listing from a phone its too easy to accidently click through and accept promo listings

thank you

[nigel_paul_wright7557]

I have one promoted listing and another unpromoted listing of very similar items.

Sold 2 of unpromoted item but none of promoted item.

[gt_preloved]

There's no way to permanently disable promoted listings, but the default state is always not-promoted.

[watchfan700uk]

Follow my rule and you wont go wrong

only promote DEAD listings

those that don't sell

and you can only win

[goingfishing]

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@gt_preloved wrote:

The PL benefit comes from your items appearing on other people's listings and on buyers home-pages. 

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 So not at the top of search results as a 'sponsored' listing? 🤔

[keelinge]

I decided last month that I was going to stop promoting.  I only really used the 2% base level of promotion but the figures just didn't add up. Although items were showing as promoted it didn't really positively convert to sales. When you read into it, it only shows in 'non searched impressions' and I got to thinking if someone isn't searching for it..  they probably don't want it. 

So 1 month in and my impressions have plummeted by 85.3% with page views down by 15.1% sales have dropped by 3.5% but my fees have dropped by 13.5% in relation. My click through rate has increased from 0.1 to 0.9 and sales conversion now stands at 1.8.

My conclusion is that promoted listings were not worth it for me. They were increasing sales marginally but not with any benefit to myself or my buyers and at the end of the month I have slightly more money in my pocket than before. It has taken me years to brave trying this experiment but now I have I'm pleased. It will make me more focused on keywords, titles and getting my products in front of the 'right buyers'. 

[jewelsandamuletswithlove]

I had someone outwith eBay do an ad flink or me at the bottom of the page loads of sponsored listings of the same product some selling the product for less than I can buy it! Unfair that they should do this when you are already paying for a listing and an eBay store!.