 Hello everyone. I think I have cracked the first layer of taking back control of our on-site traffic. We know eBay controls and limits and throttles our accounts to what it feels we should be getting. I think I have found a way to regain control in an organically naturally growing way to increase our impressions and our traffic. So what I mean by this is eBay obviously controls and we know they've admitted it that they will control the amount of traffic you get on what they feel comfortable with and how popular your account is and how well maintained and the quality of your account and the standing of the account on the platform etc. Now with this said since the implementation sorry of the off-site ads campaign and an even further throttling control that they wish to have on what you can achieve and it's not meant that way as such but it's more a case of they want to control how much you're paying how much they're getting from you in order for you in return to be getting that traffic and to be getting those sales. We could see that they have done some major changes over the last six to twelve months. I mean we're talking a lot of changes happening on the platform and 99% of them are technical. Now yes many of you will go I just want to sell products I want to list my product I want to sell my product and that's fine that is the ultimate goal but there are ways for you to be more in control or to be able to direct and stroke the ego of the algorithm. We know they're on there. We've covered many of these tactics and ideas and tips along the way from item specific optimization to image optimization, metadata we've covered and I gave out some information and advice back in September before it became more widely known about the item description box and how they were using that for gaining valuable information for placement within the indexing on its platform or quick indexing on the platform for placing your products in front of people. Some have taken this on board some haven't quite got it yet but that's fine go back and check the the video if you wish it'll be under the September update check that out certainly worth a look into that can give you a good step forward in boosting a bit more visibility. Now we know they made some major indexing coding under the Cassini for that precise reason for placing your products in front of people for quick pulling of products but they've also made a lot of other changes obviously the promoted listings is another contention we won't go into that today to those degrees on those subjects but they have introduced this new as many would see a money grab with the offsite ad promoting. Now it's been proven whether you like it or not that they are blocking site crawling and indexing from externally onto your listings so that the only way you can promote your listings offsite is to go through this I don't want to use the word police state control but you get the gist where I'm going to make sure that if you want to promote your listings offsite you have to go through ebay and then obviously they will then get a cut of that traffic on the cost per impression click whatever you want to call it so I've been working very hard to try out a few different things and finding ways to try and circumvent this whole control because it's a it's a monopolization of your visibility now we pay them a service to use their platform we don't then expect them to be hiding our listings from the rest of the 7 billion people in the world potentially just for the sake of using their platform it's a very sneaky way and I'm not sure legality how they get around it but hey I'm not into that side of it but there are ways as mentioned in previous videos to look at circumventing this a little so it's about the I mean we know that ebay as a platform the algorithm the AI whatever you want to call it will look at many factors on your account on how well it's looked after how well you're selling your click-through rate your sell-through rate your etc etc so so what we're covering here is a way or to show you the the basics of what I've been testing out now for a little over a well about a month and here the findings with a bit more solidification to the the research so I have covered that you need or it would be beneficial to if you're going to be advertising or trying to advertise your products from off-site to get people into your listings you want to be doing it through your categories or your store the reason for that is one most predominantly it does not affect your strike rate your sell-through rate your click rate into your listings so where you may drive tens of thousands of people looking at a particular listing if none of them are buying it that greatly reduces your sell-through rate so the algorithm will end looking it's getting loads of traffic but it's really not getting a sale so why should we waste our time giving you the traffic on site if you're not going to get that closure sending it to your store doesn't affect that statistic within the algorithm sending it to your categories does not affect your statistics on that part of the algorithm I've proved it I've shown it and this is where we're moving forwards so what we need to do or technically what you could do is pull traffic into your store into your categories the algorithm looks at your account and sees that you are getting more traffic to your store people are interested to visit your store your categories now they don't have a preference of we don't like this particular seller he's too small or he's not selling motor power so that's not how they look at it what they look at it the coding is looking at people buying people being interested they see people coming to your store they know then that they can see this is gaining momentum this this store this account is getting a lot of interest so we can see it's getting interest let's give them some traffic from our pot of internal and see how it goes now just have a look before going to any further let's just have a look at some figures of where things have been up to so far okay so we can see here that this is from around the end of July and I've done this specifically in a quarter just to show you so this is a three month period now we can see here that all through and it is the same before all through July, August, September most of the way through or in fact to the end of October it is almost a consistent flat line and this is the promoted listings and they both play the same preference to the interest on your account you can see that I'm averaging around 150,000 promoted listings impressions per day we can also see from this screen I'll just turn off the previous to that although you can see that there was a massively low throughout the previous quarter which is obviously around the April time when everybody got hit summertime picked up a bit and I managed to level out let's just get rid of that when it wants to it doesn't want to okay that's fine level out these impressions so you can see all the way through all the way to the end of October it didn't matter what I did it was keeping a pretty much calm sea level of impressions no matter how many listings I added no matter how well I optimized it was just sitting around the same sort of levels and we were really struggling to get small incremental increases beyond this level now as we can see round about the November time we had a massive hit now this from my understanding will be around the time they did an upgrade on the search indexing algorithm or one of the updates and that massively hit us you can see I managed to get it back up I was testing out a couple of things just teasing things around this time and then it came back down again now this is December if you notice this is when the offsite ads came into play we lost a lot of traffic a lot of traffic now we can see here towards the end of December in January on this particular screen where the traffic started growing considerably so we started getting way above the benchmark of what we were receiving back in the previous quarter and we've now been pretty consistently that's today obviously but pretty consistently around the 200 to 300,000 somewhere in there varying promoted listed impressions so just from the promoted listing side of things we've almost doubled our average so going back to this screen here that this is the traffic okay so this traffic was pretty consistent all the way through to October we then move on to the next month which is where we are into October this is the pre current quarter or the current three month quarter of stats came down in November came down in December and then as I've implemented this work around the knock-on effects which is great because it wasn't necessarily what I was aiming for but it is a win-win excuse me is we have had a massive increase excuse me a massive increase in promoted listed impressions are more importantly organic impressions now these organic impressions are huge you can see around the December time when they did the off-site ads they just wasted us they completely wasted us we've had to get in any organic traffic and everything was promoted which is what they want they want you to be getting promoted listing impressions they want you to be getting sales off those because they're making sales off of it they want you to promote off-site because then they'll get another double dip and they'll get the off-site ad promotion as well now if you are happy with that and you don't want to be going down the other road that we're going to be discussing then that's great that's absolutely fine and more credit to you but if you like me are willing to explore other avenues there are a little bit more technical or a little bit more time consuming to potentially gain on the other side of the fence once this embeds itself into your account it's well worth it work well worth the work so we're going to go into a couple screenshots and we're going to go through how it's worked basically what i've been doing i'm not going to give you the exact thing i'm doing at this point i have to be honest and that's only because it's not for everyone but the principal points behind it will work regardless of what system you use to gain this okay i'll go into more detail so we can see from our accounts here and the screenshot i'm popping up now that's the first incremental basis and these run on nine-day cycles the system is judging and looking back and deciding how much traffic to give you on a nine-day cycle all right so from 26th of December to the third of January which we can see here on this screen there has been an incremental growth up to and above of what we were receiving on a steady basis before overall on traffic on impressions but most important we're gaining organic traffic we we we're getting four five and sometimes six times more organic traffic than we were getting prior to the off-site ad implementation then on the next cycle of nine days between the fourth of January and the 12th of January we can see it spiked again moved up a section it was trusting more and it was giving more and it was giving us an average of around i would say the 275 mark 250 to 275 and then again once we hit the 13th we then hit another increase there's a couple of days of dipped but that's fine but overall it's now hit an average of about 290 between them per day and now as of the 20 20th onwards i think we can see yeah 20th onwards we've bumped up again we're into the next one now the next one is now giving us 350,000 378,000 so we're now more than double overall in impressions than what we were getting on a consistent level back during peak you know quarter four peak you know so again as you can see from the screen the blue bars represent our organic impressions and not only has evidently gone up those organic impressions have more than doubled again so we're now getting probably eight to ten times more organic traffic than we were getting back when it was before the off-site ads and then when you go off-site ads i mean i mean just blows it out of the water totally so we're going to be monitoring that further on as it goes so as you can see first quarter increase or first quarter first nine days the first increment nine days cycle is improved then it's improved again then it's improved again there is a consistent stepping stone cycle and we're now into the fourth stepping stone which has now gone up again now i will report in a week or two time to see how that one's going i am hoping to see it break the 400k impressions per day overall for promoted impressions and organic impressions predominantly i want the organic the promoted i'm not too concerned about but on the back of this what it's basically saying is the system is giving you more traffic it's trying you out with more traffic now as long as you are getting sales it is seeing a a sell-through rate increase okay so as long as you're getting those sales even if they were consistent from what you were getting before let's just say everyone varies it could be anything from two to 20 to 50 a day work at whatever scale you're on if you're or if you were getting say two or three sales per day for sake of conversation they've given you more traffic and you're still getting two or three sales a day you haven't dropped in your sell-through rate because the traffic you've been sending to your store and your categories does not affect your strike rate okay so this is going to be a multi-level level growth and crack of this system and i'm going to be working on the next stage a little over the next month or two hopefully quick results but we shall see so what i'm trying to get out here is you've got extra traffic pushing to your store you've got ever extra traffic coming to your categories now how you get that traffic there are multiple ways you can share social media links you can promote off-site platforms for interest within your niches there could be ready threads or there could be instagram pin trust facebook communities pages threads anything that is interested in the categories that you're selling you can promote if you take out a little bit of time per day creating a list a promoted a post or a comment or something on one of these groups communities or pages probably takes say 15 minutes now start with one a day get used to doing it maybe two of a day maybe three a day whatever fits your time scale but it can't do any harm you can sit there frustrated listing try into the list figuring out why your traffic is not coming in what can more can i optimize on the listing or you can try the promotion now the benefits of that is one you're driving traffic to your store and your categories two you're driving traffic to your account you're getting favoritism to some degree within the ebay platform for ebay traffic now it's interesting important to understand that the additional traffic you get will be from within because it's not going to give you anything from without because there isn't anything without you paying for off-site ads but that's fine there are plenty of customers on site that they don't let us get to so you're gaining that percentage extra there now even if you're promoting and people just click on your category in your store and you're not getting a sale fine the quality of where you're placing it may be good traffic and bad traffic and the same technically goes in principle for what ebay gives you but as long as you're not getting less sales and lowering your strike rate sell-through rate click rate whatever you want to call it then the algorithm is not going to pull it back as long as you're getting those sales now you can see here i had a couple of dead days here around the 18th and 19th and as a result obviously i got less traffic but the next day i got a couple of sales and the algorithm was happy about it and it threw out a lot more traffic for me and i was that's how i peaked into the next phase the fourth cycle of this nine-day cycle now i'm going to continue doing what i'm doing in order to improve this so what we're basically saying is we think we found a way to crack the shell of the control which is stage one we want ebay to give us the traffic we deserve the visibility we deserve and this can grow through this means now from this i've also noticed that my top 20 search slot impression placement has dropped currently since everything that's been introduced to the platform now my next goal is to get more top search placement i'm not worried that my non-search impressions predominantly monopolize the overall impression placement that's fine i'm not concerned of myself about that there is always what i would call trickle traffic and trickle sales where you just got that spur of the moment buyer or the looky loo that comes along and decides yeah i like this but what we're aiming for here is the top 20 search slot impressions that that's important we want to get up there that's the next part of the the coding we want to get visibility from and that's what i'm going to be working on next now don't forget all the other tips that everybody's been giving you myself and polish pete and hayfrog cells jeff over hayfrog cells now all these points that people are giving out they are very important you know i mean the optimizing of your listing these are the they're the blood within the veins now this is the muscle in the arms and legs okay this is the the power to push you forwards get the visibility because without visibility and i know there are people out there that will say impressions mean nothing it sails and there are those depending on the products you're selling and depending on the saturation of the market of the items you're selling you don't need millions and millions of page views and millions and millions of impressions you just have an item priced in the area that somebody wants and they're in there at the right time i wouldn't call them a unicorn buyer but they are your your optimal audience and there is going to be an optimal audience to some percentage for everyone if you're working well with that again i don't want to rock the boat and say this is what you have to do because everybody can do what they want everybody can make a decision for themselves what parts they want to take what parts they don't want to take what ideas may give food for thought which may spark other ideas that you may think of that go well cal i can see you're doing that but that's really not for me but i have thought of if i do this then that will actually let's try that out and that is brilliant i mean and if you do come up with something like that get it in the comments below please you know share it with the community let us all gain from it i mean we don't have to start saying oh look this is what we sell you have you know if you've got this sell this and then i'm putting myself out of pocket the platform is big enough for everyone you don't need to tell us what you're selling just how you're selling how you're selling can be just as important to a new seller an experienced seller than having the gates opened by ebay themselves and then not having to pay for that traffic this way if we can look after each other as long as we're not breaking any policies somebody's got to find a way through this quagmire of ebay's manipulation and control they're getting too too boisterous with it now far too boisterous so the principles behind it is what you're doing is every time you're putting a post every time you're putting a comment somewhere that's bringing somebody to your store make sure that you have some of your keywords for the category and not just necessarily something simple like baseball cap you want to be expanding it you want the longer key tell words those are the ones that people will will still search for and you could gain control and momentum behind within the metadata throughout the platforms now i know you may not want to get technical and that's fine but you have to understand they're like road signs okay every time you're creating this post it creates what's called a back link which links back to your store the more of those you gain that have trust behind them so trusted platforms trusted websites the more of those you gain the more it influences off-site search engines such as google etc to make that link more prominent from there that gains you more traffic into your store yeah into your store and into your categories from there ebay sees you're getting interest in your store it gives you more traffic natural progression you're not robbing one person to pay another but you're you're keeping two friends happy yeah and in return that friendship and that bond grows and that's what ebay have taken away they are like the gas lighting friend that's not a real friend unless there's a benefit for them that's who ebay are what this type of process does is it keeps three friends together and that's what we need to get back to we need to get away from this gas lighting self perpetuating control of a platform ebay's becoming unfortunately whether they realize it or not and get back to working as a team on the technical side we need that technical coding to work as a team if they all are happy with each other they all look after each other they all look after each other you're in a better place you're happier people are happier sales can improve all right so that's where we're up to with this so definitely in my eyes and i can't see it stopping growing the way it's growing i can't see an issue with this the only benefit is more traffic at worst even if nobody else bought you are getting more traffic more interest on the site gives you more visibility that's all we can ask for at this stage isn't it more visibility get your visibility get your traffic and then we can move on to the next part and the next part is getting people to be interested in your product enough to either click on one of your products and then after that obviously is to buy one of your products so here we are this system works i know it works i've shown it works how you want to approach if you even want to approach by all means take what you will from it but there's definitely got to be something there for everybody i feel yeah okay so again don't forget share like subscribe and all that jazz helps community helps us helps you let's work together not hack the system but actually make the system work for us it's a new beast we need to tame it tame it now before it's too late okay guys keep it real