I wanted to share this with everyone in the hope it could help others increase their sales and margin on Ebay.
Firstly, you can see what I sell and it is pretty much unique second hand items that do have some competition but not as much as those selling new goods. This may not apply to everyone, but you may find it interesting.
Will try to keep it as concise as possible!
These are my sales for last year. In April last year something happened, my organic sales plummetted compared with Jan-March (Ebay changes) and this resulted in me increasing my promoted listings percentage.
I had it set at 3.5% for ages then early last year changed it to 6.5% as it became more competative.
In May last year I increased the percentage to 11.5% which saw my sales recover and I kept it that way until November.
The graph speaks for itself, clear patterns! But in November I changed tactics. I had listed everything as promoted all year, so if its new, get it on, and bam! Promote it!
In November I started listing new items and not promoting them, notice the organic sales increase.
Then in mid December I lowered my promoted listings percentage down to 6% from 11.5%.
I noticed that when I searched for any of my items, they only ever showed up as promoted. The only way anyone could ever buy an item from me and it not be sold as a promoted listing would be to have me saved as a seller and look at my new items. On another thread I mentioned this:
August last year was my best month, ever. 87% of my sales were promoted and 13% organic. 477 transactions so a pretty big sample.
Each and every of the organic sales came from a repeat buyer or was for an item where I had sent an offer, obviously to someone who had watched the listing more than the 31 day cookie window apart from just 1 sale. So I can't explain that 1 sale and how they found my item, we don't have that detailed a level of analytics but I suggest everyone look at their own results and see if there are any similar themes.
So 1 sale out of 477 came from an Organic non-repeat buyer.
My two months of listing new items and not promoting them seemed to create no change in sales so I turned off all promoted listings on 15th January. Here are the results:
The results:
- Impressions down a whopping 87.7% eek! But hold on...
- Page views up 2.8%...
- Click through rate went from 0.1% to 1.3%
- Conversion increased 0.1%
- My sales increased volume £££ by 21.5%
- There was a big increase in the numbers of Top 20 search spot impressions (Up around 50,000) and rest of search impressions (Up around 100,000) vs previous month.
I thought if I turned off promoted listings my sales would fall off a cliff, it turns out they don't.
My theory about search spot impressions increasing as a number is this: by me promoting at a low rate over 10% less than recommended, my promoted items were buried somewhere in the search so that the better paying % items appeared first. But by unpromoting them, they appear organically higher up than if I were to have promoted them as a low percentage. I don't have any other explanation for this unless anyone else does.
Selling costs:
My selling costs in May-Oct last year were 29.1% per month on average, the past month without anything promoted has been 17.7%. A difference of 11.4%...
It is difficult because I cannot say what my sales would have been had I kept on promoting everything and kept selling costs high at 29.1% but my sales value £££ is the same as it usually is.
But for the past month if my sales had been the same as they are now but I had promoted everything as before, my Ebay fees would be £2159 higher just for this month.
Final thought
For me it seems promoting just gives you millions of impressions, mainly irrelevant and non-search.
We do not know where the customer comes from when you sell a promoted item, do they come from a search result or from a non-search promoted placement such as within another listing?
I'd be willing to bet they almost all come from search results based on my past month of data, because search impressions are way up and sales volume is up.
By promoting my listings, am I just allowing everything that is ever found in a search by a customer be sold as a sponsored? From what I can tell the answer is yes.
If I were to promote everything of mine now at 1% say, would my Top 20 organic search impressions suffer and bury my items on page 17? Therefore actually hindering my sales and not helping them.
Something is not adding up. Promoted/Organic traffic to listings does not correlate between Promoted/Organic sales.
On websites, organic traffic has a conversion rate of 16% vs a 2% conversion rate for paid for traffic, so why the disparity on Ebay?
This data and pattern won't apply to everyone but its worth experimenting and exploring your options.
@hudsonsclothes wrote:Yeah so just on day one impressions are less than 2k. They were 77k yesterday however to me that number doesnt really matter, page views however are almost the same as yesterday and they're obviously all organic now which is good and the 2 sales made today I havnt had to pay out a percentage for PL. I'm going to stick with it for a while and see how it goes
We're in the same business. I commented on this a while back. Turning PL off killed my organic impressions as well (see chart below). Page views were less affected but still bad. Sales worsened (from already bad) But this was in the summer... defo ebay is always tweaking. That's why these experiments, IMHO, will have different results at different times and with different categories. So for instance, many preloved sellers (if not all) have free selling fees right now. Hmmmm.. what affect do you think that will have on what they are prepared to pay in PL? My bet is that they are paying more... how do you think ebay is expecting to make up what it is losing in fees? No flies on 'Greedbay' as some would say. They're even giving 1-1s to try and promote their tools 😀
I'd still love to hear from someone at Ebay as to how turning off promoted listings affects organic impressions and traffic. The two things are totally separate, or they should be, it is clear manipulation to force you to promote...
Here's a 90 day period for me, for 2024 I'm up about 8% on sales.
There are so many factors at play, I can't be the only one that has had success from turning promotions off... I know it depends on what you sell, how fast stock is sold and added etc.
I do not want to ruin my momentum and experiment again by turning it back on, my theory would be if I promoted at a low rate, my impressions overall would decrease as my organic placements are better than promoting at low rates which push you onto page 2-3 and beyond.
