WHAT DO THESE TRAFFIC STATS MEAN??

[silverpinups]

In the Traffic section in my Seller Hub....

On 819 listings from Sept.29th-Oct.27th.

I have 177,315 Listing Impressions on eBay

A Click-Through Rate average of 2.5% and Listing page views, 4,591

What does this mean? I'm assuming the Listing page views is the total page views on 819 listings from Sept.29-Oct.27th?   

[electronicifycanada]

It means your listings were showed 177,315 times through the month, out of those times, 2.5% of people clicked your ad. This is what it's basically saying.

[kawartha-ephemera]

As electronic has said, average click-through rate measures a user group's reaction upon having an opportunity to take action when seeing your item(s) in search or other places.

By clicking the column headers the listings can be ranked by individual metrics, for instance clicking on the impressions header ranks all listings from least to most, click it again to reverse the order. There is some limited ability to adjust the reporting period, last day, last week, 2 weeks.  Sometimes I notice a listing or two that should be generating a decent number of impressions that are not, causes me to investigate title, category changes etc.

These stats would be more useful if a listing could be tracked over a much longer timeframe, I'm thinking GTC performance here. Currently, the only way to do that is to check those stats say once a week to note how many impressions, clicks, sales occured and keep track of your findings somewhere else. This is not practical, maybe Terrepeak does a better job of this, I don't know. 

[silverpinups]

Are these traffic stats above average? average? below average? 

Can that even be established with this info?

[kawartha-ephemera]

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@silverpinups wrote:

Are these traffic stats above average? average? below average? 

Can that even be established with this info?

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I would guess click through rates vary considerably by category. What you or I consider to be average rates may be considered sub-par by sellers in other categories.

By far the most important comparisons are going to be in-house, I wouldn't concern myself too much with others' stats.  You're fortunate in this regard too because your offerings appear to be very consistent by category, subject, and listing format which really simplifies making sense of  stat AVERAGES. Because of this consistentcy general trends are trackable.

If you were to consider any change of strategy and I'm definitely not hinting you should ... if for example you changed product mix or initiated a social media blitz the effect had on impressions should be evident. We've no chance of sales without them so it's kind of nice to have statistical evidence of how a change in strategy influences visibility. 

Because my personal listing habits vary, I'm not able to draw too much useful info from stat averages, only individual listing stats are useful. 

To illustrate, right now my average click through rate is sitting at 3.0, this is currently skewed to the high side (in my world) due to a handful of recent auction listings that were popular. A more typical range for me is between 0.6 and 1.0 .... too many stale listings keep my percentage low.

Your 2.5% click-through rate seems good from my perspective .... but then maybe the subject matter draws a lot of eye-balls ... lol

[hlmacdon]

2-3% for both click through and sales conversion rates are not unusual. The sales conversion rate is more important (more specifically to you it's trend up or down) as that gets weighed more heavily and is a good indicator of what might be wrong with your listings, ie: if you have a lot of views but really low conversion that might indicate something isn't setup properly or perhaps your image/description need tweaking.

At a base level the algorithm wants to direct buyers to listings that have a high chance of resulting in a sale. Ebay cares about it's bounce rate, not your personal success as a seller. If you are garnering a lot of views and page clicks but no sales, your listing "hotness" signal to the algorithm is going to be on the frigid side and you'll get pushed down. For example if a given seller decides to take poor quality listings (ie price is way too high) and spam a very high ad rate, they are eventually going to drop heavily in visibility because ebay doesn't want to direct buyers to something that isn't going to convert over other listings that have a higher chance of resulting in a sale. When you promote listings you want to take a longer term comparison of your stats before and after the promotion to see if they are trending downwards. If you are getting increased visibility, ie: due to poor matches of your listings to other listings on individual product listing pages of other sellers, that isn't going to help you. You want to increase visibility while at least maintaining sales conversion rates, but ideally increasing those. 

From working on sites that are in the millions of products and hundreds of millions in annual sales I'll just say that generally page clicks and conversion rates are quite low on a per product basis. The more relevant thing you want to look at is how your rates improve when you give a given product high exposure (ie a banner ad or sales/promotion page listing). We don't get that exposure on ebay generally, but the boost in best match visibility and cross promotion on other seller pages are what we have to work with.

The problem I suspect many sellers are having is their impressions are getting inflated via cross promotion (often times not relevant cross promotion either as a lack of a unifying item specific like a part number/UPC means false positive cross promotions) and promoted listings, but the lack of positive "hotness" signals to the algorithm in terms of page clicks and more importantly purchases are creating a vicious cycle of downranking. When you have single quantity listings that don't have their own sales history/trend to them I believe that hurts you as well.  If you are given an endcap at the front of a retail store and don't sell eventually your endcap is going to get relocated to the back of the warehouse. This assumes their algorithm is even working as intended. Algorithms are only as useful as the people coding and maintaining them.