eBay: Our paid Google advertising was a total waste of money eBay has claimed that Google's paid search ads aren't worth the money for big-name brands, after it conducted a study showing that found it was only getting 25 cents back for every dollar it spent. eBay Research Labs looked at the online bazaar's sales after it gave up on search ads in some regions but left them on in others. …
What's the joke? The google really is EVIL these days, and more so all the time.
These days it seems like google's main concern is how to prevent complaints about the gmail-based spammers. If that isn't EVIL, I'd be curious what qualifies.
I'd think that google would resent the competition from the spammers, or maybe they would be concerned about the value of the brands that are being abused to death by the spammers. Where does the self-interest go south?
As someone who used to think the google was going to help make the world better, I now feel like a bigger sucker than an ebay shopper.
Oh yeah... Google is Evil !!! :P get a life. They are an org out to make a buck like every other org. Except they go out of there way to help you every now and then. If you dont believe me go ask the tens of thousands of small businesses who have started up PURELY because of Google Organic search.
I've been scammed as a seller. Sold an item for $200 (it was worth a lot more), buyer sends me a message that it's not as described (not true). I give him my phone number, never calls me, keeps sending nasty messages. I tell him to send it back. He doesn't want to. He contacts ebay, who investigate. They put a lock on my money on paypal. They tell the buyer to send the item back. He refuses. No way to contact anyone live at ebay. Took two months to release my money.
Have been in exactly the same situation as you. I'd already withdrawn the funds from Paypal, which gave me a negative balance.
Not able to use Paypal to purchase anything when you have a negative balance, all because somebody is trying to scam me.
Nobody at Paypal or Ebay was able to respond to my queries in less than 7 days. Will not be doing business on Ebay or with Paypal again.
It's not just sellers getting scammed - buyers too.
Anecdotal evidence I know, but I paid for something that never arrived and tried emailing and calling the seller. Eventually got Paypal involved and the seller sent Paypal a scan of a postage receipt... for a completely different name+address.
Paypal accepted that as evidence and closed the dispute. That was where my relationship with Paypal and eBay ended. Will never use them again.
"In any Google search for a well-known brand like eBay, Amazon or John Lewis, that firm's site is going to pop up at the top of search results anyway, so an extra paid ad isn't really necessary."
Oh yeah? Well it might well *become* necessary when Google changes its algorithms to penalize eBay, Amazon, John Lewis (and many others), if they start to think that they don't have to help fund Google's bottom line.
"A spokesperson for eBay told The Reg in an emailed statement that the study wanted to find out why large firms were spending so much money on paid search."
It's not rocket science, for fuck's sake;: the answer is simple: they're stupid and gullible.
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..EBay aren't the only people who can buy the search term eBay and place ads on it. Look for Firefox on Google, the free download links on the top aren't from Mozilla.
You may own "mybrand.com" but if someone else is paying for "mybrand.com" ads they can put whatever they like above you in the search results and that can have an effect on your public image. It's almost like Google have you over a barrel....
The problem here isn't that eBay bought ads for the term eBay. The problem is no matter what I search for I get ads for eBay. I could search for Global Thermonuclear Meltdown and get ads saying "Buy Global Thermonuclear Meltdown at eBay!" Now I'm assuming they don't have that for sale...
As a result I ignore any ad for eBay on Google. Even if I'm searching for a product that they might actually have on eBay I won't click one of their ads because I'm expecting it to be useless.
Quote; Sure you didn't mean "Whales?"
It has offered to sell me the capitals of two european countries, an island in the Canaries group and a few others like this.
The reason for this is eBay are idiots - they have exported their search term lists which included "location" additions to the search done by people to lazy or clueless to use the eBay distance to seller search facility. That term got dumped into adwords. Of course this will have negative ROI. It would have been surprising if it had given a positive one. Any search for Rome resulted in an eBay ad being displayed (and charged for) "Do you want to buy Rome" (Rome being an example - I had that one with another Eu capital).
I agree. It seems eBay just went way overboard on their search terms. If you actually click on some super specialized item ad the result is almost always "not found here's some unrelated bullshit you might like".
It seems to me eBay shot themselves in the revenue foot on this too. I would have offered it as a listing upgrade for the seller to get their listing on Google.
It strikes me as a bit daft for eBay to broadcast their internal findings on this matter.
It doesn't surprise me at all if eBay has found paid ads don't bring much to the table. However that finding is going to be specific to their circumstances I would suspect. With a brand that is so strong, most people willing to deal in a non-retail environment will automatically think of them.
If they can cut the adspend and still make money - they do it. By by brining this up, all they do is state the obvious and potentially piss off Google*.
*And that is just bad for (any) business.
So you're telling me if I google "ebay" then ebay will be at the top??? if I google some other smaller company name like say "Forbidden planet" that too is the top, not even a paid add too!! How is this news?
What about if I googled online auctions? ebay aren't top then so in this case a paid ad may actually be beneficial!
The thing is that if you are looking for a blue widgety thing, you will search for that. If e-bay then dominate the search for what you are looking for 9i.e. a blue widgety thing) then it is likley they will broker your sale and make fees
The issue here is that as seller of blue widgety things, you are paying eBay a small insertion fee and a comparative small percentage of your turnover. So while you may be making a fat profit of £50 eBay may be making a profit of £2.00.. where it actually cost them £8.00 to advertise the fact that they could assist selling your widgets (not every one who clicked went on to buy
E=bays mistake here is to market too may diverse products (at too high a price) instead of the profitable (for them) products
I'm a loyal customer of some brands so when I see they appear as a paid result, I click on the Ad so that they get value for money with their advertising... I really must go, I took a knock to the head earlier and it's made me feel a bit odd.
Mine's the Gingham dress with Mr. Fibble in the pocket.
Sure the returns on advertising decrease as a brand reaches 'defacto' level mind share for any given online activity, but there is also a cost to maintaining that level.
They appear not to have considered this. If ebay is not paying for those placements, it opens them up to competitors that the searcher may not have considered or known before. Leading this searcher to another place to buy a given product.
When buying more expensive kit such as camera lenses, often Google Shopping search results for eBay show me used or refurbished equipment which I do not want. New kit is simply not sold on eBay because eBay charges such high fees to third-party sellers that new products are not competitively priced. The exception is one-off liquidations of end-of-life new-old-stock kit, or the occasional front-page loss-leader promotion.
Buying cheap kit such as an RF camera trigger, an eSATA multiplexer, or a camera bag, is often cheaper to buy directly from similar websites in Hong Kong or China such as AliExpress.
... is that advertisers can actually MEASURE it's efficacy.
With good, old-fashioned advertising there was little, if any, way of telling how well a particular advertisement was working. Sure, occasionally one advertisement would go stratospheric and everyone would win an award (even if sales didn't twitch) - but the main reason for mainstream advertising was that YOU had to do it because everybody else was, too.
With the 'net that's all changed. The old saying that: "half of all advertising money is wasted - but nobody knows which half" is no longer true - either in degree or analysis. We now know that most advertising money is wasted, either by targeting the wrong (or none) audience, preaching to the converted or being too expensive for the returns it produces.
So, given that anyone with their finger on the pulse of their advertising budget can see where it's gurgling down the plug 'ole (to mix a few metaphors), it's a wonder that anyone still bothers with it. Until you look back at the alternatives.
Afraid that's not true at all, at least not for all non-online advertising.
Marketing departments have many tricks up their sleeves to monitor the efficacy of their ad spend. Things like the phone number you call or "mention this word" spiffs are markers for analysis. I once worked for a company that went so hogwild with the phone number thing that we ran out of space on our PBX for the new numbers.
I'm with one of the previous posters: Why is ebay making a story out of this? There is likely some underlying reason.
Perhaps they will be introducing a competing advertising service.
My take is that eBay has been paying for blanket coverage on search results, regardless if they could offer anything of benefit. Until a few months ago you could search for "broken leg" and be offered "get a broken leg on eBay".
You seem to spam up goggle with ads for every possibly conceivable combination of search terms. I'm sure if you googled "Victorian lead pipe plumbing replacement gender reassignment surgery cupcake mistress Soho sausage meat suppliers in Stevenage grief counselling for dummies" that ebay would have brought an ad for that exact phrase!
That goes for both google and eBay. They both make gazillions.'
"it conducted a study showing that found it was only getting 25 cents back for every dollar it spent.."
This means that for every tax deductable dollar eBay spends, 25 cents will NOT be spent at the competition. A few years of that and the competition struggles and goes out of business.
If eBay had the wherewithal to hire a good advertising agency and put some clever ads on cable, maybe the get more users.
It's far from a given that a site's own search function will be better than Google's (notwithstanding the "natural" vs paid issue). For example, some widely-used web applications *cough*phpBB*cough* have diabolical native search functions, so googling $QUERY site:www.crapsearch.co.ck will get you far more useful results.
No kidding sherlock. We researched this 2 years ago on many large companies and found that 70% of Google PPC clicks were brand terms but companies are largely blackmailed that if they do not buy their brand terms someone else will. The value is not extra traffic, as they would get that anyway from natural search, but was to stop competitors taking traffic away!
The conversion from non brand terms for large companies was pitiful.
Also what tracking are you using? Low and behold its probably Google Analytics? Hold on might there be a conflict of interest for someone to sell you clicks and then tell you if it works? Doh?
Do you know that Google has made at least 30 changes to Google Analytics to make it look better for Google ROI.
The biggest change they made was unbelieveable. They changed the way sales were recorded. They said the sale would be recorded based on the last referred website? That means if someone types in a keyword, probably the brand term in Google, and then the next day sees a TV advert offline or maybe a newspaper ad and then decides to come back to the site directly (ie not going via Google) the purchase would be recorded in Google Analytics as a sale from "Google"? Google ignores direct visits. Its unbelievable on so many levels. The world is seriously duped and probably in the eyes of many this could be seen as large scale fraud as basically Google Analytics is ignoring the influence of any offline marketing working at all as it does not register sales against the last visit actually being direct. Take into account that most people use Google as the worlds biggest bookmark and was a brand term search you start to see a very different story. If Google had to not count any traffic from Brand term search Google traffic for many big sites would fall to less than 5% and would be insignificant. Changes need to be made on so many fronts at Google but i simply cannot understand why no one is taking with to the SFO or European union for serious investigation.
"companies are largely blackmailed that if they do not buy their brand terms someone else will"
Is this a problem? (*) If I search for an actual brand name, I'm looking for that brand (duh!) and will certainly not be spending money on some time-wasting lying swine who wastes my time with a deliberate red herring. If they were on my short-list (and I'm searching for each one in turn), they will be crossed off it.
(*) Who knows? Almost certainly no-one. What passes for "analysis" in the advertising world wouldn't pass for bog-roll in the hard sciences. It's cargo cult stuff, just a story told by marketing execs to whoever sets their budget.
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