Have you ever had 1 or 2 items that had unbelievable views and you can't explain it?

[musicyouneed]

Have you ever had 1 or 2 items that had unbelievable views and you can't explain it?

[travis7s]

Not on your level but I have one with ~400 views and I usually only get around 10-50 per month.

I would guess that your listings must have been linked in a Facebook group or something else popular. Do you see a spike on "Outside of ebay" views in your Performance>Traffic stats in Seller Hub?

[mrdutch1001]

Likewise, I never see high views,mostly less than 50 views on any given item and my stats show very low views from outside eBay. However, I have often thought that any item that has received abnormally high views was either pinned to Pinterest, promoted by a social media site or pirated by a scam website.

[ricarmic]

This is interesting so I took a quick peek at mine. I don't know how to sort via views, so I just checked 500 or so items.

I did not see any of mine that were unexplainably high.

About half of mine are in the low to high 100s, about 10% are in the low 1,000s of views, which may sound awesome but keep in mind I have items that have been running for over 12 years now!!!

Generally the ones in the low 1000s are ones that have been running for a long time, or that I've had promoted listings and/or sales on them for a long time.

The biggest ones are the multi item listings that have been promoted for the longest time, and have a high sell through rate. They're running 10,000 to 27,000 views. They've all been running for about 9 years now.

[2nd-time-around-jewelry]

So many views can't be accurate. Anyways they mean nothing unless you get a sale. I would rather have only a few watchers but make some sales.

[ricarmic]

At one time a couple years ago I noticed serious spikes (like 10 times normal) in views of promoted items, the spike would only last a couple days and the spikes had happened 2 or 3 times over the course of a couple months.

Later I realized that eBay had sent out email blasts to stamp collector distribution lists (from either the American society or American catalogue producer I cant remember which) each time I saw the spike in views. So the email blasts were working as there were a lot more people viewing and/or buying as a result of it.

So sometimes ebay is doing things that cause bursts of views to come along, but music's exponential difference is hard to explain.  Certainly getting on the right social media burst would get a lot of views.

Although as 2nd time says, a zillion views are no good if there's no sale in the end (yet).....

Plus we all know that from "time to time" there are eBay glitches happening, I've seen items just listed with more than 25 views immediately, which is a glitch for sure.

[hlmacdon]

I have multiple listings with thousands of views but the are mostly just GTC listings that maintain their views. Considering ebay devs haven't quite mastered basic code I'd say anything way outside normal results is likely just a bug. Some spikes could be due to listings being periodically farmed out to google shopping feeds and such. Conversion rates are really poor on ebay so I don't put much stock into any analytics here. 

[ricarmic]

I just learned something yesterday that might explain this.

Someone noticed their count going sky high as well, and they discovered that if one googled "images" with part of their title, their picture came up on the first page.

So for example, in this example, it is perhaps "Frazey Ford image" google queries that caused the spike....

I did this for Louis Armstrong and I found a stamp from a stamp company that if one clicks a couple times it does go to their site... (I didn't look long but I didn't see any eBay items in either Frazey or Louis's image lists).

[kawartha-ephemera]

I spent some considerable time last week trying to determine whether or not my GTC listings had been indexed by Google. These listings were into their third month as GTC.

What I found was that the Image search (Image tab located next to the All results tab) results were by far the most effective way to search for ebay listings.

I found that Google did not remove results from image search like they do with the All results pages. This combined with the visual recognition and the fact that Image search provides handy filters at the top of the page makes for a much better search experience. Provided the search terms were somewhat unique I had no trouble locating my listings. This was GOOD.

Now, if the search terms happened to resemble any terms often searched for then it became very difficult to locate ebay listings. With Google they will hide the results you're looking for and replace them with paid ads. If one looks very closely Google provides a tiny link to the hidden results.... it's one thing to place some paid ads at home top of the page which is understandable but now they just flat out remove all the results that don't make them money unless the user can find and click the link to show the hidden results. This makes the All results tab less than ideal.

The Image tab search results do not behave in the same way. Instead if you use a somewhat generic search term you get only a few ebay listing hits that are not recently listed GTCs. And were not very similiar to what I was searching for. I cannot explain why none of the newer GTC listings appear when using more common search terms. The results were all old listings, still active but old... found one or two that had been running for ten years. Checked the listings' revisions to determine how old they were.

[kawartha-ephemera]

Totally failed to mention in the long winded comment above that yes I too occasionally see high view counts. The data seems fishy to me as the views never seem to turn into watchers or sales. Google image search could influence views to some much smaller degree I think.

[ricarmic]

Certainly if the views are a result of google view, I would expect they are "wasted" views as the searcher is looking for a picture, not usually an item of that picture, if that makes sense....

[kawartha-ephemera]

Yes, perhaps a good number of searchers are not looking for items to purchase, I sometimes research a subject through images.

I personally wouldn't use Google image search to find things to purchase but one could. The Image search format has changed from what it was not all that long ago, it is similar to Google Shopping now, even had an ebay filter along with others at the top of the page.

[tyler@ebay]

Hi everyone - 

Sorry to be late to this, but I wanted to confirm that there was a confirmed tech issue with random items reporting massive view counts. 

This should be corrected at this point, but if you have any others that you notice will you give me a ping?

Thanks!