My experience promoted listings experiments

[ricarmic]

As seen in other threads, I had about 180 promoted items running with a small number of them very productive (ie 😎 the rest having little to no activity. (the % for them is usually around 10%)

So I decided to try a bulk 1% promoted experiment that I started on November 9th, promoting just under 1,500 items 1%. (these are the 1,500 longest listed, non promoted items, running for more than a year up to about 8 or so years).

So far a burst of impressions and clicks but no sales yet. I would expect the click rate to be worse than usual because of the age of the listed items.

That experiment runs until November 25th.

At some point, I'm going to start another one with another 1,000 items, the stuff that is a year to two years listed.

I may also at some point also put it on the "newest" under a year listed stuff too.

I'll provide updates as anything interesting (to me at least) happens.

[kawartha-ephemera]

A most interesting subject and experiment. I have just completed a little experiment of my own on a much smaller scale. 

I Promoted a very small number of .com listings for 14 days at the trending rate which  for this category is roughly 6%. 

These were UK postcards, not something that appealls to most American card buyers but historically I've done ok selling this sort of thing to UK and American buyers.

These few listings had been first listed well over year ago, maybe even two years ago and have been relisted multiple times since then, sometimes by auction, sometimes as 30 day BIN. Since the spring they've been listed for 3 month stretches as GTC. This year I have sold zero of  these or related listings in this category on .com so I thought why not give PLs a shot.

Results; initially over the first 3 or 4 days the PL impressions were low but were rising nicely each day, zero clicks recorded but then the number of impressions was very low so I was not surprised by this. Then beginning about day 5 it seems search began to lose interest which quickly accelerated with each passing day recording fewer impressions than the day before. Soon impressions were virtually non existent. At that point I decided PL was perhaps harming visibility, for sure PL was not helpful at that point.

My conclusion, at least on .com is that there is little point in Promoting old listings UNLESS there are other unpromoted listings consistently selling alongside the PL listings. I theorize that as my sales on .com have been stagnant for months search is penalizing my listings there PL or not. 

If my theory is correct your PL experiment may fare much better, I hope it does.

My PL experience has been much, much better with .ca , night and day difference.

[ricarmic]

Hi Kawartha, your post got me thinking....

I have a couple other experiments that represent 140 of the 180 older promoted items.

These represent the very oldest 8 to 10 year running items. (with next to no sales at all)

I went and looked at the impressions to see if there was a downward trend over time and there has not been.

There are some peaks and valleys but no trend and the average seems to be pretty consistent.

That would lead me to believe that they aren't being punished over time for lack of sales in terms of visibility at least?

[kawartha-ephemera]

Your observation is interesting and mirrors what I saw with my .ca experiment which is the opposite to my experience with .com.

So far on .ca I'm experiencing a lot of PL impressions with very, very few click throughs but this does not seem to bother the search performance and sales of non Promoted listings, in fact non Promoted impressions and sales have improved.

Only 2 weeks of history though so we'll see what happens. I've also noticed that whenever a group of auctions end sold, there is an immediate spike in PL impressions.

[ricarmic]

Hi Kawartha, again your post got me thinking so I checked the stats for the best selling group (they're all in the same "campaign").

I do not see any large correlation between increased impesssions and sales of them, however the impressions reached the highest number (in the last month) in a given day, the day after (the first full day) I opened up the other 1% mass promo, so "impressions draws impressions" seems to be the case - I've always thought anything "positive" increases ones visibility, sales like you've noticed, listing more items, lots of bids on items etc etc.....

[kawartha-ephemera]

It's impossible to pin down just exactly what weighting all of those factors you mentioned have but for sure they all seem to factor in to search results.

Here's a PL factoid to ponder on  .... a small currently running campaign of mine in the postcard category has a click through rate of just 0.09% , that's not a typo ... 4,225 impressions and just 4 clicks .... either collectors really, really dislike PLs or my listings are really, really uncompetitive!

[ricarmic]

Just an update that in the last 2 days, 3 of the 1% rate promoted items have sold. 

Odd that it took 10 days before one sold then 3 sold (all different one of a kind items)

As well in 2 of the 3 cases, the buyer also purchased another lot of equal or larger size.

The first experiment runs out on November 25th. I'll likely run one for about 1,000 or so of the "newer" items if time permits after the first one is finished.

(the view rate is fairly steady, higher on weekends as one would expect)

[ricarmic]

Final wrap up number, another 3 1% sold, so that makes 6 "1%" sales. 

The experimental campaign stopped on November 25.

For the effort it took to create the sale, and given that the 6 that sold were all over a year listed, I will continue to run these kind of 1% promotions. The sales volume is a low % compared to the 1500 that had the promotion, but it was still worthwhile time invested vs return wise.

My current thinking is to run the 1% groups for a specific short time periods of likely less than a month each and I'll overlap them so there's always a batch of 1%ers running. That's the plan, all I need now is the TIME to do it!!!