eBay

silverpinups · ‎10-09-2019

I was in my Seller Hub looking at my listings and I noticed a trending ad rate % beside the listing.

One listing for example was 550.00 obo has 13,830 views, 16 watchers and a trending ad rate of 7.4% while the listing just below it was 95.00 obo had 906 views, 2 watchers and a trending ad rate of 10.2%.

What does this mean?

I'm old school and never really paid attention to this tech stuff but was just curious. I mean I still manually fill out CN22 Customs Forms and go to the Post Office to pay and ship my packages.. lol!

femmefan1946 · ‎10-09-2019

That the flurry over Promoted Listings is already over?

That PL or Views or Watchers notwithstanding, neither of those listings have sold?

I Promote a large percentage of my listings, but I won't go over one percent.

The first month I paid 58 cents in PL fees -- but my views, wathchers and sales did jump. In September I still paid under a dollar, but things continue to tick along.

kawartha-ephemera · ‎10-09-2019

Those are the rates (additional fee if sold by PL ad) ebay suggests are necessary to have the best chance of your PL ad actually appear in search results and in other sellers' listings.
What does their use of the word trending mean exactly? A cynic might say it refers to a percentage number based on wishful thinking on ebay's part. More likely their AI spits out that data.

The rate varies widely by category / subcategory /item. In my categories I've noticed the trending rate is much higher on ebay.com listings, same sort of items listed on ebay.ca show much lower rates.

tyler@ebay · ‎10-09-2019

Hi @silverpinups - a 'trending ad rate' is the average promoted listing percentage for similar items that sold via Promoted Listings. We look at listings sold via Promoted Listings in the same sub-category, price range, condition, and more. Then calculate the trending rate based on the ad rates of these similar items.

Thanks!

Tyler,

recped · ‎10-09-2019

tyler@ebay wrote:
Hi @silverpinups - a 'trending ad rate' is the average promoted listing percentage for similar items that sold via Promoted Listings. We look at listings sold via Promoted Listings in the same sub-category, price range, condition, and more. Then calculate the trending rate based on the ad rates of these similar items.

Thanks!

That might be true but I keep seeing +/- 7% as the "trending rate" from sellers who are only offering 1% and getting plenty of impressions.

Certainly SEEMS like 7% is just a rate plucked out of thin air with no basis in reality.

Of course I could be completely wrong and since I don't feel the need to use Promoted Listings I don't really care. Maybe I'm just lucky but the sales patterns I see on my items really hasn't changed much at all in the 20 years I've been here. The only real difference is that buyers don't "overpay" like they did in the early days of eBay and of course the fee bite is a lot bigger than it was back in the "glory days".

"What else could I do? I had no trade so I became a peddler" - Lazarus Greenberg 1915
- answering Trolls is voluntary, my policy is not to participate.

ricarmic · ‎10-09-2019

My own experience with the promoted %:

I have 4 separate multi-items sort of in a series, I noticed 1 of the 4 was selling via promoted listings a lot more than the other 3. When I went and checked the ad rate %s the one selling was higher than the other 3, and also higher than the trending rate which the other 3 were below (this was an accidental experiment).

I watch some areas where my most popular promoted listings are, and if my rates are the highest mine are all over the place. "Upstarts" come along somewhat regularly and put out more than I do (ie a higher rate), when that happens they're ahead of mine. I'm playing the long game, I pick my % and generally stick with it, eventually those paying more disappear for a while at least and mine pick up again at that point.

mrdutch1001 · ‎10-09-2019

My experience with promoted listings on another venue was that the suggested rate was always very high and I always chose a point which was much lower and more inline with what I'd be prepared to pay based on the value of the item. I used PLs on that venue for nearly a year and not one sale was realized from that venture. Although I have experimented with 1% here on eBay and acquired some impressions and a few clicks, no sales resulted and I choose not to use them as I foresee no real advantage to using PLs on eBay. Now that eBay has taken away the duplication of the regular listing with the PL listing, who knows the status of the value of PLs...

maybe the benefit is more now??

ricarmic · ‎10-09-2019

Part of the reason I use promoted listings is they are free to me up to a point (remember I have an anchor store) so my actual cost is a lot lower than the rate I'm paying, figuring in the discount.

I took a quick look and promoted listings were about 20% of my sales last month (in terms of count), so it is working for me.

Having said this there are other things at work on the listings that are promoted and working (only a small number of the total number of items I am promoting are working well).

Note that I use something like promoted listings on all the sites I live on, and part of my goal is to find new customers. Somewhere around 35-50% of my sales each month are repeat customers so finding new ones is important to me as well..... as a good chunk of them keep coming back (and buying non-promoted stuff).

I'm certainly not thinking about dropping use of them anytime soon anyway tho!

hlmacdon · ‎10-09-2019

@recped wrote:
That might be true but I keep seeing +/- 7% as the "trending rate" from sellers who are only offering 1% and getting plenty of impressions.

Average 1% ad rate and USD across the period depicted below. The number of listed products has varied maybe plus or minus 10-20 across that period. I have not found scaling the rate higher to produce better results. Ebay suggests a trending rate in the 5-7% rate typically for my category. Conversion rates are about on par with non-PL.

hlmacdon · ‎10-09-2019

@ricarmic wrote:

Note that I use something like promoted listings on all the sites I live on, and part of my goal is to find new customers. Somewhere around 35-50% of my sales each month are repeat customers so finding new ones is important to me as well..... as a good chunk of them keep coming back (and buying non-promoted stuff).

I'm certainly not thinking about dropping use of them anytime soon anyway tho!

Essentially this is the real value of promoted listings assuming you sell product that encourages repeat buying. A good sized chunk of my promoted listing sales are to new customers that convert to regular buyers. That offsets the increased cost of promoted listing sales to existing repeat customers that would have found the product anyways. Most people still begin their ebay shopping activity with a search so that is the downside, you'll sell to existing customers.