"target" daily budget

[wholesalepaper]

Hi,

I'm guessing most of you received the message below about "the target daily budget".

At the moment I have about 30 promotions running with the total daily budget of about £500 and from that budget ebay takes about £35-£40 in total daily.

Total fees I pay to ebay are just slightly above 30%, which is resulting in about £300 daily sales, so on average from those £300 daily sales ebay takes £90, so our daily average payout is about £210 after ebay fees (promo and normal fees combined).

I know that recently ebay removed the fees for the private sellers and it's obvious that they will be looking elsewhere for the lost revenue before all buyers and sellers run away from the platform, so is that one of those latest attempts to squeeze the last penny from the small sellers?

The date is worrying as well (6th November), which is in the middle of busy pre-Xmas period.

Can you please help me understand that message and should I now urgently adjust all promo campaigns, as they will use my entire budget even if my bids (CPC's) are set quite low? 

Thanks for your help.

[cooksongold · Accepted solution]

All its saying is instead of a daily budget, it'll essentially be calculated as a weekly one.

ebay will review sales patterns and if it ascertains that customers are more likely to buy on a certain day in the category you sell in - then they will spend more that day. This should ofset on other days where customers are less likely to buy.

I'm assuming this would all still require customers to actually engage and click on/purchase from your listings - so its not a given that the budget will be spent of course.

[dch2112011]

Basically what ebay are doing is multiplying your daily budget by 7 and converting it into a  weekly budget.

Reading between the lines this seems to give ebay more flexibility on how to spend your new weekly budget - if more buyers are searching for your product - ebay spend more of your weekly budget in one day and if less people are searching they spend less in one day - guaranteeing that you total weekly budget is not exceeded.

Which brings the question if you have three good search days and ebay double the budget for three days do the other 3.5 days get switched off ? or if they have 6 average days does the 7th get doubled to spend the budget ? 

I am sure the algorithm is in ebay's words 'dynamic' - ie they change the goalposts to spend the budget - one day 1 search is low but next day 2 searchs is double promotion - next week 100 searches is low - 200 searches is double promotion - who knows ?

It would be informative if ebay explained the parameters of spending the budget !

[cooksongold]

Which brings the question if you have three good search days and ebay double the budget for three days do the other 3.5 days get switched off

On the point above - it does state you can adjust the budget midweek - so if you did have a sudden spike at the start of the week and you felt this was due to seasonal or shock demand - you could increase for the remainder of the week I guess.

[dch2112011]

That is true but on what basis would you suddenly increase your weekly budget ? ebay spending your complete budget in 3 days ? 

The result of increasing the budget mid week would be a proportionate increase in spend on the remaining days which may not be increased sales days ? This could end up with your item sales costs increasing and no increase in sales -  it is gambling with the unknown - What is the exact criteria ebay use to increase budget spend daily  and where do they concentrate promotions with the increase in spend ?

[ojewellery]

I've only dabbled in pay per click advertising but when I've done it on Amazon it averages and carrys over unused budget - its much easier to work out your spend than on eBay where regularly for more individual items the calculated budget isn't used.  If sales start to pick up for a product and your ROAS (Return On Advertising Spend) is healthy, you may then choose to up the budget and monitor the ROAS.   So long as more spend = more sales, it stacks up. 

So long as the desirable minimum ROAS number is calculated within your figures any extra spend is extra money.

On that basis a future potential interesting development would be to have an option of a flexible upper budget based on ROAS.

[cooksongold]

The result of increasing the budget mid week would be a proportionate increase in spend on the remaining days which may not be increased sales days ? This could end up with your item sales costs increasing and no increase in sales -  it is gambling with the unknown

Well - yes, of course its a gamble. You of course don't know that the increase in sales will continue. 

As for criteria, I imagine ebay has a host of data on when customers are more likely to  buy from certain categories, or products at certain price points and more. Only ebay themselves can clarify of course - and I doubt they will.

[the-nutwood-collection]

That's how Google Ad Words works.  They take the daily budget, then take it as the maximum spend for the month.  However, like OPs, I always wonder whether they could gobble up my budget earlier in the month and then have no money left towards the end of the month when maybe traffic was even greater than the early surge.

I did try their dynamic allocation, which meant that they could exceed the budget spend if traffic was heavy - but that got scary.

[wholesalepaper]

Thanks for your help, I was worried that ebay will spent the entire daily budget even if the CPC's are set fairly low.  It's a bit sad that it's all about promoting listing this days, that's why amount of people buying on ebay is declining so rapidly, if you not spending £££ on promos, your listings are not visible.  Before top search results was only the sellers with the best buyers experience, timely deliveries, great feedback and best customer service, in short it was about great buyer experience, now sadly it's all about profit, so when you search for something on top you will get often terrible sellers, often dropshippers without any stock, or not located in UK, which spend lot of £ on promos, but offering terrible buyer experience...

[beastlybundlestcg]

i have recently done this and noticed the word change

i did 2 days worth of ads, 6 pound a day.. i owe ebay 46 quid after vat

yeah the word target instead of what it was before is for that extra squeeze, i unfortunately never got any message about it changing over to 'target' but it basically means they will take what they want regardless of what number you put in lol

just gave ebay 40 quid for absolutely no reason lol, no sales out of it

lesson learnt, imagine if i really did have it on for a week, not sure what the point of a target number is when they so blatantly ignore it. 36 quid is 18 quid a day on a target of 6

so had i gone with 60 they could go to 180? lesson learnt the hard way i guess, won't be doing that again, ebay can try siphon the odd 20-40 from people who are unaware i guess that will keep the profits up for a little while

[beastlybundlestcg]

worst thing was i was not on dynamic or on anything that would let them go over that budget. it was low for  a reason because i knew they would take the pee with it, just did not realise it would be as bad as that