@pinetreecottage wrote:
Just listed a quilt. Right away, I looked at the listing, to make sure all was correct. To my surprise, it showed 17 people had looked. Obviously, that's not right, so here's a thought. To all of us sellers, who may think nobody is looking at our stuff, just ignore the counters. It's too discouraging. The important thing is sales.
I've noticed this in the "hits" counter too at the very start of a listing, but only since about early 2013. My theory is that it's connected with the new "Feeds", i.e. any view of the item on the "Feed" adds to the count immediately since newly listed items seem to get posted on the "Feed" page very, very quickly. I use Auctiva so I add an Auctiva counter to my listings, which these days almost always has a different number from eBay's counter. This tells me the "Feed" may indeed be the generator of all those instant, early hits.
Although I don't get too excited about visitor numbers, I do know that an item which generates a lot of hits within the first day or two will usually sell quickly, and one that gets fewer hits is likely going to take a long time to sell. In that sense, counters are helpful. However, in response to "Inuk's" comment, I think counters may be a lot less meaningful for items people need more, and far more significant when you're selling items people may want but aren't necessarily looking for (i.e. discretionary or luxury spending).
Personally, I've found the Omniture statistics are worth almost the whole cost of a store subscription. Like 'bb', I keep a regular watch on them. They not only show how many buyers have dropped in, but what they were looking for in the first place, where in the world they are, search keywords used, sites from which the traffic arrived, how many were new visitors, what items were most popular, etc. This is valuable marketing information, and helps a great deal in making decisions on what to list.
I've found the Listing Analytics tool interesting but much less helpful, perhaps because it duplicates a few of the features of Ominiture, but in a far less elegant and accessible way.
My real issue lately is that, although the numbers are up, sales are down, and I'm experiencing complete "dead zones" of 2 or 3 weeks in a row that rarely occurred in previous years. This despite having tried out free shipping, discount sales, reductions in prices, more and better photos, etc. etc.
As I've hypothesized in other threads, I really do think something here on eBay has shifted radically, especially affecting those of us who sell OOAK items.
