Another way to pay eBay: Adcommerce
19/03/2009 at 20:25
eBay UK has announced the launch of its new Adcommerce product which allows sellers to buy text links at the bottom of eBay search results using a bidding system mirroring Google’s Adwords.
Clearly part of eBay’s aggressive attempts to monetize the eBay site through the increased use of advertising, sellers (including those with imperfect DSRs) can enjoy enhanced prominence in search and get traffic by buying text advertising.
How does it work? You choose a search term and category you want your ad to appear in, add descriptive text and a picture. You then bid against other advertisers: high bids win. eBay information pages live here.
Traffic can be channelled to a Shop homepage, Feedback page, an item list (such as all your items) or your MyWorld page. One fairly disappointing aspect of the system is the inability to send your text ads to a specific Shop category or Shop search page. Equally, the adverts positioned at the bottom of page aren’t particularly prominent and are certainly less obvious than third-party ads displayed at the top of search results.
Also, as anyone who has had any experience monitoring and optimising a CPC campaign with Google will know, getting the most out of and getting best value from a system such as this can be both time-consuming and complicated. It also begs the question: if you’re going to invest in some search engine marketing, why do it on eBay? It’s only a small leap to take that money to Google and reach out to a bigger audience.
Has anyone tried using the new Adcommerce product? Any perspectives are most welcome. Will you be taking the plunge with Adcommerce?
Mark says
8:37 pm on 19/03/2009
We are using it on Ebay.com.
We have just set it up, set a budget and let it run for now…
Will try to analyze data later.
Mark
Mark says
8:37 pm on 19/03/2009
It would seem useful in swamped categories…
Dan Wilson says
8:38 pm on 19/03/2009
@mark ‘Will try to analyze data later.’
Which would seem like the only sensible approach.
Sue Bailey says
8:54 pm on 19/03/2009
Must confess I’ve failed to cash in all my £50 vouchers that eBay sent: I figured I’d let everyone else spend their money first, and I’ll bid when the field clears a little.
JD says
10:11 pm on 19/03/2009
No experience at this but would seem a tad churlish not to use the £50.
Day1
16 impressions, ave posi 3.62, 0 clicks – still got £50 to spend.
After rethink and some fiddling, including the picture which was absent
Day 2
5206 impressions, ave posi 3.67, 6 clicks – still got £49.94 to spend.
I am (fairly) certain that I got 2 sales from 1 of those clicks.
Am quite pleased with the impressions today!
Will let run over without fiddling for Day 3 and then up the cpc. to 2p to get that ave posi up for Day 4.
Sue Bailey says
10:39 pm on March 19th, 2009
Interesting figures: thanks JD.
Dan Wilson says
12:05 am on 20/03/2009
Interesting data. Did all business sellers get an Adcommerce £50 voucher?
Emily says
12:09 am on 20/03/2009
I am a business silver powerseller and I didn’t get a voucher
JD says
12:32 am on 20/03/2009
Emily,
I think that you should get one, they do not all go out at same time. Give PS Support call if you don’t get one by Monday.
All
BTW
Adcommerce T & C do not require you to be a business seller or to have good DSR. That makes it look like a grabber rather than a deal?
A good parody on eBay PS board just now.
ebuyerfb says
1:42 am on 20/03/2009
I tried the American version of this a few months ago. I managed to spend about $4 over the period of a month. I didn’t notice any changes in my sales but I didn’t really have a good way to track its effectiveness either. If I reach lowered in search status or sell a high margin item in a saturated market I might try it again.
clayton says
2:47 am on 20/03/2009
I’m in the US and we used it over christmas. We got over 4 million impressions, and a few hundered clicks I think it was. It didn’t end up being much money but I also put a pretty low cutoff for clicks, like .03-.05 cents.
As another user points out it’s hard to track how effective it is. While it reports lots of click stats (described by marketing acronyms annoyingly enough), it says nothing about conversion to sales.
Putting something on ebay is an advertisement. That’s what ebay is. Adcommerce is kind of like saying “Turn to page 5 to see our ad about shoes!”
One thing I would suggest is if you think there is a complimentary category that might have potential buyers you can put an ad there. Unlike listings, ads do not have to be relevant. So if you sold cool sprinkers you might put an add in the swimsuit category, especially kids swimsuits. Things where the buyer wouldn’t think to go there but might be intrigued by the suggestion.
Tim says
5:53 am on 20/03/2009
I tried the US version… not one click… maybe my choice of keywords was bad, I thought I’d make it a tough test. I spend heavily with Google AdWords, so I know how to do this.
eBay puts these ads below all the others ads, which are below the listings… and unlike all the other ads, I can’t direct traffic off site – or even to a category in my store. Seems like the stats are useless.
In other words… it seems like a typical eBay seller program: Grab as much money as possible from a seller and give as little as possible in return.
Whirly says
7:51 am on 20/03/2009
If you all use your vouchers eBay will have won again, it’s just another method to extract more money from you.
What are you going to do when your £50 runs out, but other sellers you compete with still have ad’s running? buy more? soon everyone will be using it, it’s all nice and fluffy now, but how much is a bid going to cost you in 3months time?
You already pay to advertise on eBay, don’t be a puppet and pay them twice.
Sue Bailey says
9:55 am on March 20th, 2009
IMHO, and having now looked at it further, not having any way to track effectiveness is just idiotic. Why on earth do eBay not have a tie-in with Omniture so that you can track buyers from click to sale (or see where they drop out)? Because it’s another half-assed implementation of a feature on eBay, or because they think it won’t actually result in many more sales and if we knew that, we wouldn’t buy it?
To answer Whirly’s question, I will be spending my free £50 and that willl be *it*. I do not think many buyers will click on the adcommerce ads as they stand, and certainly not in categories that throw up decent numbers of search results.
Pete says
8:59 am on 20/03/2009
We are Platinum sellers and we didn’t get our yet
Sue Bailey says
2:33 pm on March 20th, 2009
For people who have eBay UK Shops but no vouchers, James’ note from the PSB:
http://icanhaz.com/adcommerce-voucher
northumbrian says
9:00 am on 20/03/2009
whirlys spot on
if i were looking for as bath on ebay. dont matter how much money whirly spent on ad commerce, and even if his advert was noticed
I would check out at least one or two other sellers in the same game
ebuyerfb says
9:02 am on 20/03/2009
What eBay needs to do to be even more evil is do what Microsoft did with their Live search. Pay buyers to use it. So if you buy from someone using an Adcommerce ad you get a percentage of the FVF back.
northumbrian says
9:24 am on 20/03/2009
to my mind this adcommerce thing like the added insurance you get harrased about in electrical stores,
you have already paid ebay a listing fee, and possibly even add ons
so then you pay them even more to receive a service. that in effect you have already paid for
Jimbo says
9:56 am on 20/03/2009
The only way I can see it as being of any use is for advertising a range/brand rather than a specific product.
Possibly another “Norwegian Blue”.
DBL says
10:01 am on 20/03/2009
Like you Sue, I’ll spend mine later and see what happens purely from a reasearch point of view.
I’m not sure I’m happy with the hole idea of ‘adwords for ebay’ another cost I won’t be adding to my monthly bill.
Dan Wilson says
10:01 am on 20/03/2009
Also, a little bird tells me you can use the dollar and euro sign in your text but not a £.
DBL says
10:02 am on 20/03/2009
#21 Well that makes perfect sense
richard says
11:03 am on 20/03/2009
forget the vouchers, put them out of your mind, its not 50 squid of free advertising.
if it looks like its working ebay will give it a big tick, someone a bonus and stick it at the top of the page so you can all go bidding against yourself.
Sue Bailey says
11:07 am on March 20th, 2009
Richard, you’re probably right – but wouldn’t that be preferable to what we have now: off-eBay ads at the top of search results? At least if people are looking at my eBay competitors’ listings, they’re still on eBay: they might come back to me with another search, or when looking for another item. They’ve still got in their head that eBay is the place to shop. As things are, eBay itself is telling them to go shop somewhere else, and who’s to say they’ll ever come back.
Oh, and coincidentally, Google sent me $50 to spend on Adwords yesterday. Time for a little comparison, mefinks.
Chris Dawson says
11:50 am on 20/03/2009
I’d like to know when I’m paying for a title search keyword link that the adcommerce console tells me is being directed to
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/merchant/mountcomp?_nkw=Linksys&_sacat=0&_fromfsb=&_trksid=p3911.m270.l1313&_odkw=linksys&_osacat=0
why is the actual link live on my ad being directed to
http://shop.ebay.co.uk/linksys?_frdlpwl=1&_rdc=1
and WTF should I pay for clicks for that?
I mean to say I’m seriously hacked off and ready to start swearing is an understatement.
Whirly says
11:52 am on 20/03/2009
#25 It’s only just been launched Chris, you didn’t expect it to work did you
Chris Dawson says
11:54 am on 20/03/2009
#26 They could have got some idiot like me to test it before they launched it. I wouldn’t mind finding out it was a heap of shite if they told me it wasn’t tested. No wonder it still has a crappy “beta” tag on the adcommerce site
steve says
1:59 pm on 20/03/2009
hi do ebay have rooms full of people all clicking away,just wondered
Whirly says
2:21 pm on 20/03/2009
#27
keithf says
2:50 pm on 20/03/2009
Trying it out, it can be used as a means of getting international visibility, UK listings on eBay.com which accept paper payments and putting your listings in categories where they might otherwise be pulled for miscategorization..
Sue Bailey says
11:42 pm on March 20th, 2009
Also wondering what’s going to be done when some sellers click like crazy on their competitors’ links?
Whirly says
10:44 am on 21/03/2009
#32 The tills will be ringing at
eBay Faulty Towers.Adam says
12:17 am on 22/03/2009
We’ve set up a few of these new adds by key words and catagories.
It might be worth noting that you can link the add to any of your eBay pages so in our case we’ve linked a few to our ‘about me’ page which is the only place you can have a small, external link!
http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=supplementcentre
Judy says
12:58 am on 22/03/2009
#18 So there’s no way to analyse clicks-to-conversions?
That’s absolutely ridiculous, and ( as if we needed it) just more proof that eBay is merely money-grabbing with this latest attempt to gouge yet more money from sellers.
Sue Bailey says
11:22 am on March 22nd, 2009
Judy – currently there’s no way for *sellers* to see click-to-conversion. eBay are certainly tracking it (through the “rover” system they use for affiliates). It would be a very cynical person who would suggest that if the conversion rates are terrible, sellers will never see this information…
But at the moment, all the early figures I’ve seen suggest that buyers are just not clicking these links. Hardly surprising when they’re right down the bottom of the search results like that.
Also a note re. using Adcommerce to promote your listings in “alternative” categories:
https://adcommerce.ebaypartnernetwork.com/AdvertiserUserManualPagePopup?lang=en-US&subject_code=AdCreationGuideLines.GuideToKeywordOrCategory
forbids category and keyword spamming. Though it is absolutely not being enforced at the moment…
Whirly says
11:38 am on 22/03/2009
#36 So if you followed the rules you could only put ad’s on the pages you already have items on…It gets better
I would rather lend Sir Fred a tenner.
Sue Bailey says
12:11 pm on March 22nd, 2009
@Whirly – I guess it all depends on how you define ‘relevant’. For example – I might say that beads are relevant to jewellery-making, kids’ toys, even wedding stuff – even though none of those are the actual beads category. I’ll certainly be targetting crafts categories more generally. You might say that anyone interested in generally sprucing up their home might be interested in a whirly bath. Would eBay agree? Your guess is as good as mine. Suck it and see, as usual
Jimbo says
11:41 am on 22/03/2009
Not sure if anyone has had the problem of adding a link directly to a dept. within a shop. If you have you can edit the link for each keyword and send a link to a specific dept (at the moment this doesn’t seem to work at the top level).
Whirly says
1:38 pm on 22/03/2009
#39 Well I think I will let everyone else pay to find out if it works first, although how they go about finding out is another matter….
Would anyone here pay Google for adwords if you had no access to the conversion data?
Sue Bailey says
2:52 pm on March 22nd, 2009
@Whirly – I might if it were free. And early indications suggest that my £50 freebie may last f-o-r-e-v-e-r.
(I’m trying to figure out if “valid until 30th April 2009″ means that any unused portion of the £50 will vanish on 1st May.)
keithf says
2:40 pm on 22/03/2009
I think Whrly would have relevant categories in Health & Beauty > Bath & Body.
I’m trying out a country and western music cassette with 2 cowboy hat categories on eBay.com, amongst others.
Barry Mann says
3:57 pm on 22/03/2009
I never got no voucher.
I have had this live for a couple of days and I am getting a small number of clicks… I thought I’d jump onto adcommerce.co.uk to set up ROI tracking and I couldnt find it…. I emailed support and guess what – THERE IS NO ROI tracking!!!
This means it is impossible to determine what your ROI is and how many sales it got you! I had a fiddle and thought I would try Google Analytics on it … but this isn’t possible either.
This is exceptionally poor….like a step back into 1994
“I know half my Ad budget is wasted, but I don’t know which half”
Whirly says
4:04 pm on 22/03/2009
#41 Sure I get that ,but, you can’t track a click as no data is available.
#42 I can understand peeps using the freebie, times are hard for many sellers, I just hope they don’t get bled dry, the people most desperate are the ones most likely to keep on buying bids after the freebie runs out.
Imho If you can’t track you may aswell stick a blank cheque in the post.
Barry Mann says
4:06 pm on 22/03/2009
I agree. I wont be carrying on with this unless I can compute incremental sales.
Also – tell me if I am mad but if the customer goes to the “next page” button wouldn’t you be BETTER off being lower down?
Sue Bailey says
4:22 pm on March 22nd, 2009
@Barry – I thought the whole point of Best Match was that the customer never had to bother going to the “next page”?
It gets more like a farce every day.
And as above, anyone who hasn’t got a voucher is advised to contact PS Support and ask for one.
Barry Mann says
4:31 pm on 22/03/2009
I am shocked by how poorly executed this is.
keithf says
4:43 pm on 22/03/2009
Could this work for finding out it the ads are bringing you sales?
Would be for a featured shop using the Bidding Buying Activity by Original Entry Pages report in Omniture. The original entry page would be a custom shop page, not used anywhere else, from which buyers would then look at your listings. Whatever shows in the Omniture report for that page, if it does, would be a sale from the ads.
Sue Bailey says
4:51 pm on March 22nd, 2009
I think Keith’s onto something.
But even so, it’s ridiculous that sellers would have to concoct something like that: the info should be built into the adcommerce dashboard.
And I’m surprised Barry’s shocked. Something on eBay’s implemented in a really dumb way. Imagine
Sue Bailey says
7:24 pm on March 22nd, 2009
Really, this gets more farcical by the minute. It appears that they’re manually vetting (at least some) ads – and yet people have their website URLs as the title (tho they’re linking to their eBay shops).
*And* (for those who haven’t already figured it) there is no place in the adcommerce admin section to input your fifty quid voucher. Apparently we’re meant to just sign up and use it, and the fifty quid will be knocked off at invoicing time.
I. Think. Not.
Whirly says
4:46 pm on 22/03/2009
#47 I am shocked your shocked Barry
That is quite an empire you have.
Whirly says
7:38 pm on 22/03/2009
When I tried it my User ID/Shop address was to long to fit in the box
keithf says
7:46 pm on 22/03/2009
I started a campaign on ebay.com using keywords. Scotland and Scottish were ok. Scotch became Inactive (Terms Violation)
keithf says
8:04 pm on 22/03/2009
Sue, looks that there’s some vetting going on. In my Omniture report for referring domains for today there’s one for adcommerce.us, 3 times. A username and password is required to log in.
Sue Bailey says
12:09 am on March 23rd, 2009
Well, it’s been an exciting evening here. 4k impressions have garnered us 8 clicks. I have no particular reason to think that any of them have bought anything (everyone who’s bought today has been a repeat buyer), but of course, it’s early days.
PMSL. I’ve spent 90c – about £49 to go before I can stop this nonsense.
keithf says
5:14 am on 23/03/2009
Just tried an ad to a single item with the price in – no £ sign. $ & € are there.
Whirly says
5:44 pm on 23/03/2009
#56 Keithf, that is all part of the *Buyer Experience* eBay believes buyers spend more if they are made to feel cosmopolitan.
Sue Bailey says
6:20 pm on March 23rd, 2009
Ah, is that the explanation, Whirly. I thought it was that buyers spend more if they have to guess the price, just like sellers buy more adcommerce ads if we have to guess whether they’re working or not.
JD says
7:37 pm on 23/03/2009
Am quite happy to get my name and logo on 10,000 impressions a day for 2p.
Bargain.
keithf says
8:50 pm on 23/03/2009
I’ve been putting some ads on eBay Germany but I wasn’t able to find them. I was looking in the wrong place, they’re not at the botton of the screen, they’re at the top of the screen, before all the listings including featured first!!!
Sue Bailey says
8:52 pm on March 23rd, 2009
Mind out the way of the stampede to Berlin, Keith
Jimbo says
9:22 pm on 23/03/2009
#60 keithf were you going with German keywords?
keithf says
4:22 am on 24/03/2009
#62 Mainly categories, 1 with keywords which are 3 versions of a category name.
JD says
10:54 pm on 24/03/2009
I set up an AD on the German site this morning.
After a couple of hours it started to show in searches. 2/3 hours after that, and with nearly 700 impressions but no clicks, it stopped appearing on the German site.
It is still shown as live in my Dashboard but is definitely not appearing on the site and the impressions are stuck. No emails received re any problems.
Anybody got any ideas as to what has happened please?
Sue Bailey says
11:17 pm on March 24th, 2009
No, but the same thing has happened to me on the French site. I’m trying to summon up the will to deal with eBay Support, but honestly, it’s a struggle.
JD says
11:30 pm on 24/03/2009
I sent an email to AdCommerce support but no reply as yet.
Looking at the AdCommerce chat board I expect a non-specific cut and paste reply.
I am thinking that my Ad may have been reported by someone paying for featured first and a tad peeeeeed off to see my Ad appear above!
JD says
11:37 pm on 24/03/2009
PS My impressions to date are over 42,000, total ‘spent’ less than 20p.
Just 16 clicks, most at 1p. My bids are now 2p and am definitely appearing in a higher posi. My German impressions while they lated were average 1.38.
This may never get beyond the beta.
I wonder how the earning power compares with (outside) sponsored links?
JD says
11:39 pm on 24/03/2009
Further thought:
The click through rate must almost be on a par with that for a phishing email !!
Sue Bailey says
12:39 am on March 25th, 2009
JD, I think the clicks in your cats. are a bargain! I’ve spent about 3 euros on 28 clicks, so average is about 11c. CTR is as appalling as you suggest.
If it weren’t free, I wouldn’t be doing it, and even while it is free, I’m not even sure it’s worth my time.
JD says
8:21 am on 25/03/2009
No reply to my email, however the German Ad is now appearing again.
northumbrian says
8:54 am on 25/03/2009
exactly
its not free!
time is the most expensive thing available, and this ad commerce thingy wastes it
JD says
9:33 am on 25/03/2009
I guess my first few (thousand) eBay listings were not very time efficient either!
northumbrian says
10:36 am on 25/03/2009
our first few thousand ebay listings made us a lot of money we know because it went in our bank and we spent it
you cant bank clicks you can only guess at their value
JD says
10:53 am on 25/03/2009
I bet you cried the day you paid for your first computer!
JD says
11:58 am on 25/03/2009
I have had a reply from AdCommerce support!
Some of the reply is enlightening (the bit about the ‘experiments’ on different sites), some is standard claptrap.
Dear JD,
Thanks for your email.
I noticed that some of your keywords’ average position is 0. This means
that these keywords are not displaying. Only the first five bidders are
displayed. An average position of 1 means your ad has been showing up in
the leftmost spot (in the case of left-to-right display), or in the
topmost spot (in the case of top-to-bottom display). Just try to keep
your position between 1-5.
I suggest that you try different daily budgets, and cost per clicks. You
can see how your keywords are working in certain days by using the
filter.You have to experiment which are the best options.The reports are
updated every 4 hours.
Please keep in mind that ads are targeted differently for different
users, so you may not be able to see your ads while they show for other
users. On eBay.de AdCommerce ads are displayed in a different way than
on ebay.co.uk or on ebay.com. All user can see the ads but only 4 times.
I hope this is helpful. If you need any more information please get in
touch.
Kind regards,
xxxxxxxxxxxxx
eBay AdCommerce Support
northumbrian says
12:54 pm on 25/03/2009
74
nope
though I did smile a little the day I bought my first Aston Martin
Kidscollectables says
3:41 pm on 25/03/2009
well I have had my adverts pulled already – for using CAPITAL LETTERS – wtf – here is the email:
Dear KIDSCOLLECTABLES,
We wanted to inform you that after review we have decided to deactivate one
or more ads in your AdCommerce account due to non-compliance with one or
more of the following ad creation guidelines:
1. Repetition of words, symbols and punctuation is not allowed. For instance
“Great deals starting at $10!” is allowed, but “!!!! Great deals $$$ !!!!”
is not allowed.
2. Capitalization should be limited to the first letter of a word. For instance
“Free Shipping Offered!” is allowed, but “FREE SHIPPING OFFERED!”
is not allowed.
This means that your ad will no longer be displayed. For your reference, these
ads are marked as “Inactive (Terms Violation)” in your AdGroup Dashboard.
Thank you for your help in making AdCommerce a better and more relevant
place to shop.
Sincerely,
The AdCommerce Team
all i can say is – account closed as far as I am concerned – spent a couple of hours on the adverts – waste of time – they should put clearly on the create advert page ‘do not use CAPITAL letters’ or something! – i see there are plenty of other ads with capitals – so its either an ebay bot or some sad individual actually reporting my advert!
i will keep my money and spend it on a couple more listings instead!
JD says
1:36 am on 27/03/2009
#77 I have read the guide and the example in the guide uses ‘US’ as an ok word. Presumably all abbreviations can be upper case?
Back to my German AD, after the poor initial reply from AdCommerce Support, I have been monitoring impressions more closely. My Ad is definitely being made live only for a very few hours each morning. The impression numbers do not increase after mid morning.
A further email to AdC. Support got a totally crass reply telling me that some of my keywords had zero impressions (well I knew that) so I should change them, that I should up my CPC (with an average posi of 1.45 I know that I do not need to), that my Ad was definitely being shown and I could rely on their data (irony – I am using their data to prove that my Ad is not being shown). Fact is I have data every hour or so they only have daily data.
Spoke to PS Support who admitted limited knowledge and they would not give me a phone number or get someone to phone me. The suggestion was that I provide my detailed data and ask for a ‘personal’ reply from AdC Support.
Do they really want my money?
Anybody got any similar data or suggestions?
ebuyerfb says
2:37 am on 27/03/2009
I guess that means “Best deals on eBay!” can’t be used since it has a “B” in the middle of a word? I’d never say that (I’d either be lying or losing money) but I do see that all the time in auctions.
Sue Bailey says
11:24 am on 28/03/2009
And FWIW…
Someone on the PSB has spoken to Support and been told that conversion data will be made available at some point. It isn’t available now because this product is newly launched. It’s not newly launched in the US – do they have conversion data there? Errr, no.
Piss-up, brewery
northumbrian says
11:41 am on 28/03/2009
well as the old saying goes a fool and their money are soon parted
Sue Bailey says
4:42 pm on 30/03/2009
I asked Mark Lewis this afternoon about the lack of conversion data: he didn’t have an answer for me but referred me to a colleague who’s leading a session tomorrow…. Anyone taking bets on a straight answer?
Whirly says
4:50 pm on 30/03/2009
#82 You would have more luck getting Lord Mandelson to explain how he pays for his houses!