How can anyone trust E-Bays numbers, when errors like this happen all the time.....

[j.p.greenwood]

I made a post about this a while back, but wasn't 100% certain then.

Now I am 100% certain.

In the 'Active Listing' page, you have a field that lets you know how many views an item has had, it's a useful indicator of activity of a listing, especially as E-Bay are now very aggressively pushing their campaign to get members to buy 'promoted listings' through the assorted banners, popups and 'floating boost overlay' on items.  I'd personally never buy any promoted listing service as I don't need it.

However, a couple of days back, the attached had values of 84 and 42 for the two items, the reason I know for 100% certainty is the 84 is double the 42 and I noticed at the time, funny the things that stick in your head to make something memorable.

Today, the values are 77 and 42.  So, if I was a member even thinking about using a promoted listings campaign, why on earth would I do it on a platform where I just cannot possibly trust the numbers they provide.  Paying for advertising, where there's no proper transparency, auditing or third party monitoring is just a foolish waste of money, if you've spent any time talking to people in the advertising industry you'd understand how little they really care for anything except finding any way to separate you from your money.

[theelench]

Aren't these numbers supposed to reflect the views over the past 30 days ?

So it's possible to that as day 1 drops off and day 31 is added, it's possible for the number to go down if less people viewed it yesterday, than they did 30 days ago. ?

Although the numbers now are said by ebay to be more accurate than previously.  There is still the question about can you believe any number that ebay gives.

[rjwilmsi]

I would assume it's incompetence/IT issues rather than malice. View counts are probably handled by some sort of logging system (log a record when user clicks) that only aggregates the numbers later e.g. there will be multiple databases involved that have a delay in replicating between each other. So one time you get number from database 1, next time from database 2 and one of those is lagging behind the other. eBay is a large company running a large site so there will be clusters of databases and multiple layers of technology that they will then be struggling to keep working and in sync.

However, I do agree with the wider point that eBay determines when advertising listings have been clicked on/whatever meets their criteria of the advertising having worked, then charge the fees, so they are very much marking their own homework. But, as I understand it more broadly the whole world of online advertising is full of problems (click fraud etc.) and dubious parties involved, so I'm not sure that eBay are any worse than anything else going on.

[j.p.greenwood]

You're right and I hadn't realised that, but this makes it even funnier, I had to go back and refresh the page and this is what the refresh showed, so my original point still stands.

I also see the 'suggested ad rate' has also changed for the second item, in the 31 minutes between the two screen grabs

Too, too funny.

[j.p.greenwood]

That's why I mentioned third party monitoring/auditing/oversight whatever.

Even though I'd never use promoted listings (if I want to use money effectively I'd discount the price in a listing) I know from hats I've worn many years ago in my career that the words advertising and fraud are interchangeable without legitimate transparency tools.

[superchallenge]

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@j.p.greenwood wrote:

I also see the 'suggested ad rate' has also changed for the second item, in the 31 minutes between the two screen grabs

Too, too funny.

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I don't really see why that's funny or strange about the change in ad rate, if I'm honest.

The suggested ad rate will likely be based on a number of criteria, mostly competing items or category competitiveness. It probably updates fairly regularly, and it isn't outside the realms of possibility to think that it simply updated at 9am, and now takes into account a bunch of items that were relisted or freshly-listed this morning. Maybe it updates hourly, or on the half-hour?

Regards to the views, there's also the possibility that views are recalculated to only include "valid" views. A company I work for do this regularly. Their system will show 100 views of something, then they do a daily run to remove any views from known (or newly discovered) bots or crawlers, and the view count drops to 89. Not saying this is what's happening, but it's a possibility.

Though in fairness, I don't pay attention to the view counter on eBay, given how often it has absolutely no correlation with how many sales I make.

[a45heaven]

I reported that to Kat two weeks ago, she confirmed a 'View' was when a potential punter clicked onto the listing - but she never got back on to why the Views on an auction can be seen as reducing - this is regularly seen  on SEVEN day auctions.

I assumed that for anyone who paid extra for promoted/ elevated status listings would pay as much as ebay could claim off them.

Its a shame when the platform and the Seller worked as a partnership, as both benefit from increased sales, that this cooperation was ending in favour of greed by one party.

[j.p.greenwood]

Don't know if you saw in my second post that the view count for the first item had jumped up from 77 to 87 which is more consistent with it being 84 a couple of days back.

You're right that 'internal corrections' can account for all these things, but that doesn't take away from the point that unless you can see what corrections are being made, why their being made and there's some mechanism to challenge the corrections, you'd be unwise to take any of E-Bays numbers at face value.

[j.p.greenwood]

Here are the numbers right now

It'll be interesting to see which way they move over the next few days.