@dtexley3 wrote:
@gwent22 wrote:
Thanks for your question!
Ad rate is one factor that is considered for Promoted Listings placement, but is not the only factor. Other factors include listing quality, relevancy, and more. Optimizing your listings for Best Match remains an important best practice. High quality listings have a higher potential to get more clicks and ultimately more sales.
With this change, if your organic listing naturally ranks higher, your Promoted Listing won’t appear in search, but can still be shown across other promoted placements onsite. Conversely, if your promoted listing ranks higher, your organic listing will no longer appear in the same set of search results.
This is a very difficult recommendation to meet in reality. Other than "good photos", "accurate description", "competitive pricing", etc, we have little if no "best practice" information to follow to optimize listings for Best Match. Every time we ask for more insight in how to do this we are met with "it's proprietary, we can't tell you anything". Also those that track how their ads do in "best match" are well-aware that the criteria changes frequently. How are we as sellers expected to make this a best practice?
Why would the "organic" listing ever rank higher in eBay's eyes? eBay makes more money on the promoted listing and has the stated goal (right from the CEO's mouth) to drive more sellers to use promoted listings. I can't see that the "organic" would EVER rank over the "promoted" just based on eBay's stated goals.
@zamo-zuan thought you might find this discussion interesting.
It's a bit confusing without more transparency.
In theory, this could be very "fair" if, for example, your organic listing scores highly, and the first page of search results is NOT cluttered with duplicates (which was one of the top problems of the system, as duplicates made less spots on the first page, which hurts everyone).
At the same time, it's hard to say exactly what they mean by this. Is the organic listing getting compared to typical sponsorship placement that all sellers share based on how much invested? Or does the organic listing have it's own SEO statistics that are being monitored separate from the organic listing? If it's the latter, it becomes a bit less "fair" as the sponsored listings by design have some elevated statistics.
It also leaves a mystery to one of the other key variables: Peer rates. They did say this was involved in the determination. Does that mean if you pay *more* for a sponsored listings, you're making your organic results LESS likely to appear? This would make the new changes "shady" rather than fair, as in this case your spending money on eBay would be contributing to your own stores decline in organic statistics.
It also has side-cases that may be inadvertent changes and/or problems. For example, if the sponsored listing is showing instead of your organic results, this is likely going to have a negative effect on your organic statistics.
This all may or may not be the case. I can only assess the proposed ideas, and think of it from the perspective of a designer. If I was designing the system, these would be the problems I would be looking at. Did eBay take these things in to consideration? I have no idea. And without any transparency/clarity in to how these things work, it's hard to give any guess as to how things will turn out.
In response to the "best match" issues, this is legitimately true. "Best practices" often don't help, or only help in specific cases nowadays. If you do some major changes such as dropping the price far below market value, it's a coin flip if it will actually improve things or not. And as mentioned, eBay does say "we can't tell you anything". So it's hard to know what to do exactly.
At the end of the day, we can still hope for the best. Because Sponsored Listings was debatably the #1 issue that was making the design of eBay's search unsustainable. If they did develop a solution to this problem, it might have became possible to score highly in organic search based on your own changes to your store again. Some community members have documented their experiences with this and didn't find success. I can hope that these changes resolved the problem (at least a little bit) and make it possible to actually compete again.
If this brings "healthy competition" back to eBay, it's good for all of us. I can't say if these changes succeeded or not, and I haven't tested anything post these changes yet. Wishing for the best!
(Random note, I hope it did improve things, as CSR's have recently been saying they received notice from the IT department to "stop reporting search problems as they have been reduced to a skeleton crew until next year while the personnel was moved over to work on Managed Payments". If this is true... it's one of the scarier things I've encountered on eBay.)
