Changes to Promoted Listings Advanced

[wiremeshshop]

""Starting 22 Feb 2024, your manual Promoted Listings Advanced campaigns will have more visibility across eBay.

Promoted Listings Advanced campaigns using manual targeting will be eligible to appear in additional placements on listing pages.""

Does this mean Ebay have improved the visibility for PL Advanced listings ?

Or is Ebay simply trying to get more money out of advertisers ?

[simplyessential_uk]

Its always the latter!

What you have to decide is whether you are prepared to spend more but doesnt necessarily mean you get the "right" visability so I would tread carefully and slowly,

I only Every use 2% PL standard and I am trialling switching off completely at the moment, My sales are down but thats fine, but I didnt see much improvement when I trialled it the other way and increased the % so its often trial and error

[wiremeshshop]

I'm finding the same. I've tried PL advanced but was money down the drain.

I've now got most lisings at 2% standard and monitoring performance. Most of our listings are similar with the execption of sizes/weights etc so I expected them to perform in a similar way.

How wrong I was!

Some are showing more impressions than others, some showing higher promoted than organic, but some suprisingly so much higher organics !

I've changed a few listings from 2% to 4% but no real rise in impressions, even one changed to 10% isnt doing much better. I even set one to 20%. Impressions shot up at first but it now seems to be falling.

I have a few multi variation listings also at 2% and they are delinately performimng better than single item listings.  

I have a few set to dynamic but don't see much more impressions, I've even got 2% listings doing as well (or better) than the dynamics.

It would be nice if I could view them all on graphs with a fixed sale rather than each one with a varying scale.

At one point I had two identical listings (with just the slightest word swap in the title) One had many impressions but the other almost flat-lined so I ended that one! 

[simplyessential_uk]

 

Ok this is interesting so thought id share

This is my latest 31 days sales.... can you guess where I started switching off PL?

[simplyessential_uk]

maybe this helps.... 

Im gradually reducing PL and just a few more to switch off but whats v interesting is how the green (PL) impressions reduce on page views but external (dark blue) increase. Clearly the "impressions" in the 1st box isnt necessarily "impressions" to the right ppl as my sales arent effected,infact it says up 21% on prev month. 

[wiremeshshop]

Its a complete mystery to me, I've had some listings promoted at 2% with high impressions which I've increased to 5% or 10% and it seems to make little difference. I'm watching a few which seem to be dropping daily then I'll relist them, maybe relist again and again until I see good performance.

[baby_buzz_direct]

I was shocked when I saw the latest report for our Ebay transactions. It showed a large amount of cost per click fees for a campaign that we had set up a long time (more than a year) ago just for testing purposes with the lowest possible CPC of £0.02 (we could not afford anymore for our low value items given that it takes 50-100 clicks to make one sale). Naturally, we got practically no clicks on this at all, so there were virturally no fees for this to pay. But since about a week ago (apparently following some changes Ebay made) we had 45 clicks each at a CPC of about £0.35, resulting in an ad fee for last week of about £16, and without getting a single order out of it. So Ebay did override our initial settings and just used their own recommended CPC, only limited by our maximum daily amount of £2.00. We will contact Ebay to ask for a refund of these fees, as it is clearly not legit to simply override our settings.

[fatbobfan]

My penneth worth and I made some of the mistrakes (imo) below with PL standard

Need to think about how your promoting, what are your promoting, against who/what, is it a competitive/saturated market. Is it not competitive? Is your inventory super specialist that you really shouldnt need to. 

Depending on your inventory and market, if your price competitive and accounts performing good in the algorythms eyes you should get good best match and price match results as standard, thats the first issue to address. 

Pay for click - Who is clicking? Buyers or Competitors? How many competitors will be checking you out?  Is it the type of inventory where clicks might be just 'tyre kickers' as the car industry calls them. Persons just browsing in the bus/supermarket/cinema queue bored?

Lots of questions in my head about it, guessing there are many more, I am replying as this morning I PL standard some inventory and in that box underneath is PL advance with the claim '

'50% more sales on average' ** (**with Promoted Listings Advanced, data from Sept 2022 - Feb 2023)

Did make me think make me think, that is a good buying period over Christmas but thats still a lot of business gained by using this tool, 50% more sales, thats a big claim

Still think sellers need to look into it thoroughly and understand it, have seen posts where they dont and it can be money down the drain or high percentage of a sale wiped out. Strongly beleive its what your selling, how your accounts performing and knowing your market place is the key. 

In the interest of being clear we dont PL advance,  dont think its suited to our inventory but it obviously works for some, we do PL standard. Agree with @simplyessential_uk in post 2  'Its always the latter' 

[baby_buzz_direct]

Just an update: I called Ebay customer support and we did indeed get a refund for the Ad Fees we incurred due to Ebay overriding our Cost per Click settings. We have disabled Advanced Promotions now altogether as we only had it set up for test purposes anyway. In any case, unless you sell items for £100+, you will just make heavy losses with Pay per Click (on Google as well).