@bojangled , Thank you for that. I had this big moment of self doubt on my understanding of how ROAS was being calculated.
I've been terrible for tinkering, I'm trying to be more constructive across the business at present. When I start a new trial I've started making a note as to what I'm trying to achieve, how I will monitor and what I rate as a success. I seam to remember picking up something about 1 month being the minimum time to trial advertising on eBay as new campaigns take around 7 days to be fully in force and then get optimised - I can't recall my source for that line of thought though. I did drop a pay per click campaign after 2.5 weeks back in the summer though - it felt like I was just throwing money into the wind.
I'm trying to look at platform turnover and profit/ period a bit more than just item profit. Its hard to quantify the halo effect of promotions, its one of those we know there is an effect but its harder to see exactly what. Like your 5 offsite clicks. Are those buyers now top of the marketing funnel, they've checked you out, know that you exist and some of them/ maybe one of them will progress further down the funnel at some stage and become a buyer. That clicked on item hits them again on their eBay summary page next time they open ebay.
Then there is that if an item is clicked on, it gives it a tiny boost as relevant to customers and pushes it slightly up in the visibility on eBay stakes so another buyer is more likely to be exposed and click.
Its all rather interesting and I'm for ever hoping to find those little golden nuggets that nudge things forwards for my business. I recently subscribed to Diib for my website and they give me these lists of objectives/ activities to work through to target site improvements. One of them is keywords and they have this chart of percentage of traffic you obtain depending on your key word ranking. I imagine that eBay search location gives similar percentages of traffic which is why the title tweaking and getting key words in place can work in very competitive areas of the site.
Thanks for a phenomenal thread - huge food for thought - which will now directly impact my business. So thank you to everyone who has commented with details, figures, charts etc
Hands up - my ROAS is a problem. Clearly the lowest on here. 8% in the last month (£8 for every £1 spent - for any newcomers to the thread!) 12% in the last 13 months. ALthough I noticed OJ also had 8% on some of her campaigns. To posters who are getting 40%... I'm floored.
When I'm floored... I get nosey... I wanna know how and why and how I copy it so I go digging. I took a looked at sold listings, I took a look at OJ's and SimplyEssential's charts. These are mine:
What this next chart shows is that at the start of September when I didn't get my annual pick-up, I went mental and threw everything at ebay.
You can see the result. I am wiping the floor y-o-y in terms of impressions. But maybe, now is the time to stop going mental - my sales are 4% up YTD y-o-y - and think calmly again...
I have uncapped dynamic on 90% of my listings and a 3% capped dynamic on 8% of listings which I call my 'cherry pick' campaign. (I explain what cherry pick is - and how I gradually grow that - earlier in this thread but it is basically items that I move out of uncapped within 1 hour - 1 week because I think they have traction.). Cherry pick - which I do move up and down (to keep my sales at 80K) has an ROAS of 20%. Just to absolutely make clear - dynamic is NOT PAY PER CLICK. It is simply PL which you can cap or uncap.
I think my strategy is 'kind of working' for someone who wants to pull a proper living wage on ebay. Looking at sold listings, I (think I) am outselling other posters here. Which isn't to brag - I know other posters are earning on different sites/own shops - I'm not.
THis thread has inspired me to:
a) think harder at getting my own online shop (which as long been the plan but selling on ebay gets in the way)
b) focus a bit less on the 80k sales and see if I can reduce PL to make 78k but without a drop in profits
c) Particularly focus on changing the % of my listings on cherry pick campaign. Also cap some of my other campaigns - as they are all on different campaigns this is quite easy to do with some 'dexterity'.
Just as an aside: Multibuys dont work for me. Coupons collect buyers but annoy some buyers who 'make an offer' and then cant use the coupon. So I am loathe to use ebay's other tools too soon. I dont like to remove make an offer as it works so well for me.
All in all, I don't like December selling - I don't like December buyers (I had £850 of returns in ONE DAY in January in 2022) - last year I turned off PL entirely at some point and set my dispatch to 7 days (you can see the dip in the chart) . There was also post strikes I wanted to avoid. I am wondering about doing similar this year to give myself time to get PL ready for January.
Anyway - I hope some of this is interesting/thought-provoking. It has taken a while to write - and makes me mindful of how much time other people have spent on this thread too - so THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU for taking the time - and bravely sharing information - to help me slow down and consider my PL spend/ebay strategy.
