Promoted Listing Attribution UPDATE

[parts-save]

Today the 24th eBay has made a terrible change. I think it breaches advertising regulations.

They have made it so if ANYONE clicks a promoted listing, then ANOTHER person who NEVER saw the promoted listing clicks and buys it within 30 days.. You will be charged the promoted listing fee.

Yes you read that right, even if the buyer NEVER clicked on or even SAW the promoted listing, and purchased through normal unpromoted method, you will still be charged the full promoted listing fee. Despite the ad having no affect on the sale.

This is actually scary because this surely cannot be legal?

Person X from Germany simply clicks your promoted listing and never returns to buy it, then 2 weeks later person Y from Alaska buys your item without ever seeing or clicking the promoted listing, buys the item normally. You will be charged the full promoted listing fee. Absolute insanity.

This basically guarantees you will always be charged the full promotion fee rate even if it did not cause the sale and the buyer never even saw it. That's crazy.

Do we all formally complain and forward it onto the advertising standards?

[bojangled]

@parts-save 

Lots of discussions already on the boards,

Ruffled a lot of feathers this one. 
https://community.ebay.co.uk/t5/Business-Seller-Board/Promoted-Listings-Changes-You-Must-Be-Joking-e...

[triple512]

I think it’s worse than first appears (and that’s bad enough!).

Priority campaign listings will take the top spots….but cost a fortune.

General campaign listings will form the rest of that search….but you’ll be charged irrespective of who buys your item if someone had already clicked it.

Non-promoted listings will be buried/hidden = no sale.

Already been rolled out in Germany and there’s an example of one seller (on the thread @bojangled mentions above) showing virtually all organic sales stopping after roll out.

Smacks of desperation from eBay, probably as less businesses can afford the PL costs and remain competitive but this move IMO will just lose them even more sellers/buyers.

[censualite]

Removed all promotions, Using external analytics to generate traffic

[smartgreenltd]

Ebay are getting too greedy, to get top slot you have to be a "priority campaign", whih i tried but ran up a huge bill so cancelled. I think the adverts are a pain, it means you get lots of links on your listing which when you are paying to be a pro-trader and paying when you sell, does not seem right. I am cancelling all advertising on eBay, they already take too much when we do all the work. I think they have just shot themselves in the foot with this one

[tub-at-home]

I have occasionally used promoted items as this seems to be the only way I get views on some items. I will no longer use it after this though. I still have I think just one item on promotion & when that ends that no more. What is very annoying is that ebay puts the "promote" option on every single listing, I want an option to decline even seeing it. Non promoted listings seem to go at the bottom of the pile.

[technthread]

The thing is if you’ve resigned yourself to some items becoming unlikely to sell without promotion, you may as well play the game and increase the price by 2-5% and promote at 2-5% and see how that goes.

I know it isn’t a popular change, I don’t like it either, but once people’s sales plummet they will come back to promoting items anyway so my view is just suck it up and get on with it. In some cases by promoting I have sold items that seemed unsellable with organic views only.