The Promoted Listings Landscape Is About Change.

[kawartha-ephemera]

These screenshots were released as part of a recent virtual presentation for Developers. My guess is these new PL products will be announced very soon, maybe as soon as July. 

These changes definitely have the potential to disrupt our current selling strategies and the amount of visibility we as an individual seller will get on ebay. On the other hand, some sellers may gain more off-site visibility.

We're going to need to re- think our PL strategies. Thoughts?

[ricarmic]

Looks like it will be time for more experimenting perhaps. 

I was quite enjoying the success of my current PL strategies...... 

[reallynicestamps]

I certainly found PL increased the number of Views I was getting.

But not sales of PL items.

What did, for a time, increase was sales overall.

It looked like PL encouraged customers to look at my Store where they were finding other stuff to buy.

All the benefits of PL (more sales) without the drawbacks (paying the PL fee).

This is anecdote, not data.

The pandemic surge makes pre-PL and post-PL numbers difficult to compare.

[kawartha-ephemera]

From what they're saying right now, the effect of the Advanced PL on the original Standard PL as we're using them today might not change too much at first, with just the top search slot in play that doesn't worry me. But if ebay finds sellers become willing to enter into silly bidding wars over the top slot they may soon open up all sorts of placements all over the site ... that possibility concerns me.

The one that I feel will really impact visibility of Standard PL the most is the opening up of auctions to the game. If there's much uptake there that will cut visibility for sure ... that one could severely limit PL impressions on site. It will be interesting to see how sellers react to these changes, the original PL roll-out took quite a long time, a couple of years to gather a high level of seller uptake. It will be interesting to see how long it takes for these changes to gather steam.

[kawartha-ephemera]

My PL campaigns didn't gather a ton of sales in the beginning either but I too saw an increase in impressions and views from all sources including organic. These days sales are roughly two thirds organic, one third PL . 

[hlmacdon]

Advanced will be relevant for items with standardized MPNs where you are competiting with other sellers on the exact same item and are hamstrung by things like MAP pricing. Otherewise I wouldn't bother unless you have an exceptionally high conversion rate from clicks. Ebay is a tirekicker marketplace for most things and outside of the most competitve skus a CPC model is a poor choice for most sellers. Cross merchandising is the real thing that gets you PL sales, and standard will continue to fill that role for now. Effectiveness of PL outside of cross merchandising has been watered down now with best match changes not handling OOAK items very well and boosting listings that make no sense for the buyer.

[kawartha-ephemera]

I agree most sellers of ooak type items are unlikely to make use of this cpc version and I for one am not too worried about the top search slot, but if they start auctioning off the top 20 that would be disappointing and I really don't want to see those expand into the "similar to" carousel. The number of useful cross promotion slots are not infinite. They're not saying how the auction version will operate but I forsee those taking up quite a lot of slots in the ooak categories.

[hlmacdon]

My bigger concern would be when they start collapsing MPN products to a buy box. This is the first concrete step they have taken towards that, pay to position will become discount to position.

I guess we'll have to see how it plays out in practice since they will trying to pair search terms to MPNs to rank and things are bound to go astray there like the do with current promoted listings for non MPN items. If you have that plus too many "pay slots" at the top it becomes self defeating and you'll just irk customers to the point where they will shop elsewhere or bypass the entire mechanism via ublock and such. At that point you are better off not using promoted listings period depending on your demographic, since they only show a promoted listing as the "sponsored" version and not the non-sponsored version. Spammy marketing has unintended consequences.