 Hello and welcome everyone and today we're just going to be looking into a little about about the social media posting and the importance of bringing traffic to your store as opposed to your listings and also how it's been working for me and what sort of results I'm getting within the platform and the consequential knock-on positive effects that it's been having on the account. So further ado let's get straight into it. So as you can see from this screen here this is the last 30 days with the promoted impressions. Now with this in place we have been working on the reduction of the promoted listing percentages and as you can also see from the graph this has not overly affected if at all the amount of promoted impressions I'm receiving. Now this I think is in conjunction with what other things I've been doing on the account but in the scheme of things it's working for me it may not work for everyone but I definitely think there is a how can I put it there's a level of promoted listed percentage that you just don't need depending on the category you're in you may not need any but certainly there are levels where it's just no point promoting higher than that. I intend to try and bring this down as low as possible before this level of promotion drops too low but that also all depends on my sales if my sales continue to grow with the secondary approach that is currently running occurring with me reducing the promoted listings then I'm not bothered if I'm not using promoted listings in the long term more money for me. So let's have a look at the other screens so as I've reported before I've been using other areas to bring in traffic this is crucial absolutely crucial and I will go into how this works and the benefits and how it benefits you but let's just look at the current figures. So this is January so far so you can see it started from the first of January up until today which is still in motion. Now the black line you can see rolling through the screen is the prior 30 days or the prior time period and looking at what sort of impression rates was getting to what I'm getting now so you can see on average I'm probably getting about two-thirds more per day in total impressions to the previous period and that's peak this is not peak we're outside peak now yes you have the early January boost to some I definitely didn't get it last year but there are some that are getting it this year and I may well be getting some this year I don't know but I personally feel looking at the figures this is down to what I'm doing so as we can see just in the last 17 days I'm up excuse me 78% in impressions I'm up nearly 6% in page views I'm up 75% in sales top 20 search I'm up 94.4% rest of search 77.2% up and non-search impressions up by 78.2 everything's on the up and up the only thing that's not is the external traffic now I'm still working on that one but at the moment I'm working with what we've got we know that eBay from our observations would seem to be blocking the search engine from crawling their listings and only allowing access to the ones that are promoted through the offsite ads that's how it's coming across with the amount of eBay items that have disappeared off Google which would which makes sense with the levels that we're now dropping to for the external traffic but let's get back to the point so to give you a better understanding of the difference in the impact things have made this is the last three months now again you can see the black line is the prior three months to that and you can see that was pretty consistently not really moving anywhere so July August and September I was averaging around 150,000 impressions a day mark coming into October still sitting around the same until we hit November and then it tanks tanks right down and then come December it starts picking up a little a bit more a bit more and then we have had two areas of massive growth from there so we have this longer stretch here from around about here through to there and then at that point it's boosted up and about a week later it's boosted up again and I'm expecting another boost in two or three more days and I expect to be popping over into the 300,000 to 350,000 impressions per day now yes we know that there are some content creators out there that will say impressions mean nothing it's all about sales technically that's true but if you don't have any impressions you won't get any sales it's that simple you don't open the doors you don't entice the customers in no one's going to come in and buy so the more impressions you can get the more opportunities for somebody to click you will get and the more opportunities from those clicks you'll get for someone to buy that's key point one now the quality of those impressions this as Polish Pete's mentioned in the past and I'm in complete agreement is you can have crappy impressions and you can have good impressions now depending on how you approach things you can take in some crappy impressions that's fine especially in the the way that I'm bringing traffic in you can't guarantee that it's all going to be good but that's fine it's the knock-on effect that's important and we'll come to that so firstly though let's just have a look at things so let's just get rid of the previous so we can see where we're at so this is the last three months now as we know let's get rid of promoted organic fell through the floor come December because of the offsite ad promoting and we just don't really get any anymore nobody really gets any anymore you know I mean it's just appalling but as you can see I tested out initially a little bit of area here and started to have a bit of umph and I left it for a week so I can work on things tweak things and make things set up correctly and as you can see we have exploded with organic impressions now if we just take out the organic impressions and put the promoted back in they are also growing as you can see but together we can see some massive growth so I have retained and pulled back from the system the organic impressions and I'm getting more organic impressions now the question is how am I doing that so what you need to understand is having an eBay store is like having a taco stall in the middle of the desert great idea but if nobody knows how to get to you no one's going to ever come and find you now with eBay it's like having an oasis in the desert with a taco store in the middle you've got this wonderful area of wealthy opportunities and thirsting for buying things within the stores that are in this oasis but you're limited and they have full control of you they've got you by the bits so what you need to do is get some roads there okay now I'll go into this in in a moment but you need to drive traffic to you you need to look beyond the borders of eBay unless you're hitting your figures and you're happy with those figures if you don't want to grow any bigger if you don't want to sell faster and that's not a sarcastic comment it is literally the case if you're happy with it happy days but if you're looking to grow this is an opportunity to do so now it's not for everyone but for those that are willing to do it it could well be a very good opportunity to do so okay so let's just give a little understanding for those that don't understand how this works so what we're saying is simply this is your store on the eBay platform now there's lots of users already on the platform 185 million but that is your entire area of customer base now the problem you've got is all this area here is the rest of the world the rest of the internet the other seven and a half billion people out there granted they're not all customers they're not all got access to internet but the principal being that is where they are now eBay are controlling what you can get it's their sandbox they can do what they want we get this that's fine but what they're doing is when you're going and creating a listing within your store google look at your store index it and put it onto google which then goes out to the world being google reddit etc etc etc all the other platforms all the other places all the other websites that could possibly have your listing and within there you've got google ads google shopping etc etc now at the moment you're not getting any of that all you're getting is that now obviously with what they've done with google ads is within your listing there's lots of information and there's lots of coding so when google comes to have a look it cannot gain access to seeing your listing unless it has the right key to get in and look at your listing so every one of your listings because it belongs to eBay has or will have that block so you can't get nobody else can get to it so they have full control it's like getting day release from prison they have the the power nobody gets out nothing gets out without their say so now there's ways around this if you know what you're doing and if you have the right idea so let's just look at this so you have your account okay oh it's a bit too high sorry let's put it over here you have your account and in your account you may or may not have a store which then has categories and then within those categories you have all your listings now that's line there is where they're blocking it all of these listings cannot be seen because they have coding that only allows going off the off site ads okay so let's just imagine for a minute it you want to promote it elsewhere you can Facebook Instagram Pinterest and you can do that you can do it through the social media option on the tab and I'll guarantee you that also has coding and they're tracking it they're not blocking it at the moment so that is an option for you to promote this is not on the whole there may be some that are doing well with it and I'm really happy for you but on the whole for the average seller on eBay that off site ads is just not profitable not worth it now with this said there is another way around it and I'm sorry for my artwork here it may be a bit confusing but let's take it back to the categories now the categories do not have block block coding on I can guarantee it because I'm using it I'm using the strategy of the categories and it's working you've seen the figures now at this stage I would suggest if you want to circumvent eBay's blocking of code listings advertise the categories advertise the categories twofold one they're not blocked two they don't and more importantly don't affect sell-through rate they don't I know this I have been driving hundreds of thousands of impressions across the last few weeks to the platform and my strike rate has not gone down because obviously if you have 100 people look at your listing and only one buy that's a 1% sell-through rate okay now if that traffic was being driven to your store doesn't click on it that's obviously your click-through rate goes down this has also not been affected I've not been affected on my sell-through rate my strike-through rate my click-through rate whatever wordings whatever titles you want to use none of them have been affected now with this set let's just take this off here for a moment it's starting to get a bit messy that's okay now with this set you're going to get to start with let's just say this is your daily amount of impressions that you're now receiving with the driving of traffic to your store to your categories etc now a section of these are just redundant because they're just clicking and it's just pinging and it's just checking on the account that's fine but this is the remainder now out of this remainder and we're not talking on the promoted listed impressions but the principle stands the same because it has a knock on effect eBay is looking at what's happening on your account and it can see hey this account's getting a lot more interest I like this getting a lot more interest so I'll tell you what let's just monitor this and if he's getting more interest more popular we're going to give it some more impressions so you've got your normal and now it's giving you a little extra yes you've got this excessive amount that's not getting you anything that's fine no worry about that it's this section and this section so you're retaining what you had and you're now gaining additional momentum from eBay because they can see that your account is gaining interest on the platform now as we know eBay control and temper shall we say the amount of sales you can get the amount of traffic you can get as it's rotating through its other coding and geographic placement and how much traffic it's sharing out amongst everyone what this is doing is saying okay we're still entitled to that amount of traffic but for all those hours of dead space we could be getting more sales if you only gave us the traffic and we've been saying this for a long time and now it can happen you're basically falling the system in a way to say look we're getting a lot of traffic give us some more impressions as a result we'll give you more sales because we know our stock will sell and it does and it has been and we have gone from in December alone we had 15 zero sales days due to no offsite traffic due to throttling due to search issues etc etc since implementing since implementing this new tactic we had two zero days which was the first of jan and the third of jan that's it every other day out of the last 17 days so that's 15 days outside of these we have had sales not only have we had sales we've had more sales than usual now i'm not saying that a portion of this may not be due to january sales but we're now part almost two thirds of the way through january and i can say without a shadow of a doubt that driving this traffic to your store will gain you momentum but the key is not to push the traffic to your listings push it to your categories it's an extra level of protection from losing your sell-through rate and your click-through rate percentage which then obviously pushes you backwards in the ebay's algorithm of power and placement because we are gaining more interest in our store more interest in our categories ebay is giving us more impressions they're giving us a higher placement which i think in turn is allowing us to reduce the promoted listed impression percentages which means not only are we getting more sales but we're getting more sales more profitably so as we can see if we drive traffic to our store or our categories it's not affecting the sell-through strike-through rates click-through rates none of those metrics are being affected because they're going to a focused area of your account not a specific listing which is where the coding is in the algorithm to just judge and calculate your sell-through rate your strike-through rate and your click-through rate if that goes down you get less power you get less placement you get less extra impressions now obviously the knock-on effect of ebay's coding seeing and viewing the account is getting more interest is it gives you more traffic more organic traffic more promoted traffic more placement these are all more opportunities to get sales and we know the sales are there because we had them before until all the changes started we were getting those sales the sales were there they were coming in and then suddenly they were getting more and more difficult to get we know the ebay's platform only has a fraction of the populace of the planet on it and in order to gain that extra momentum you need to put your name your products in front of the eyes of people beyond the borders this may not be for everyone i'm well aware of the next level into this rabbit hole which is down the seo'd backlinking white hat black hat cat uh style or backlinking the pr ratings etc well we're not going to it's too confusing and for the everyday man who just needs to say i need more traffic i need more sales so i'm trying to keep it as simplified as i can for you no offence meant because we all have different levels of understanding we all have different levels of what we really want to get into you know at the end of the day we're a guy and a gal or whatever and we just want to sell a product make some money pay the bills have some extra cash that's the nuts and bolts of it but it's becoming more and more political more and more technical now i could be more technical not everyone wants to not everyone can that's fine everyone's at different levels if you're making enough happy days if you want to make more here's an option where you promote it how you promote it these are all avenues you'll need to look into for yourself but i strongly strongly tell you don't go down the promote a specific listing option unless you know what you're doing with how you're promoting it it's not worth driving the additional traffic because it'll drive down your strike and sell through rate and click through rate but that coding currently is not involved from the proof of the figures it is not involved at your store level or at your category level if you can guide a customer to a section of your wares that's a salesman's job is you've seen it many many times before you'll go into a store and you're you're specifically looking for something you can't find it so you go up to one of the the shop attendance and they will guide you to it and they don't walk away straight away they will leave the chat with you about what's there or they will step back and let you look and this is basically what you're doing you're basically guiding the customer into your store you're guiding the customer to the section within your store and you're showing them what's available in the range of things that they're looking for now unless they're specifically looking for let's just say this this cap and in my cap okay so i want an in my cap okay well let's have a look at what caps these are the caps we have available we've got some great ones here some more up-to-date ones here etc etc etc have a look see what you like the look of if there's anything you like let us know so you've now got them looking at the rack they're looking down your listings now in long as long as they don't click on it it won't affect your click-through rate it won't affect yourself really but the likelihood is that they're looking down it and then they click on it there's an interest so you've got just as much chance of getting them to buy from that than any other traffic that you used to give you but now ebay can see that more people are visiting your store if they're visiting your store they're going to give you some more because you're getting sales and we knew the sales were there the sales were always there it's just now we're getting them the coding is looking like always getting more yes ebay we're getting more we're getting what we should have had to start with but you're now getting more okay well you're getting more that's great well i'll tell you what then here's some more traffic and so on and so on and so the snowball grows we've got to work within the parameters of ebay now that's what i'm doing yes there is some junk traffic there because it's then they're not clicking on the listing that's fine because ebay's giving me more real traffic that was always there and we're getting sales and we're getting more sales than we were getting and the go again is growing and growing and then you have the other side where obviously we're reducing the promoted listings percentage we're not saying we don't want promoted listings but because it's giving us more traffic we're getting more promoted impressions but we're getting it at a lower percentage because we're dropping the percentage down because we're pulling our traffic in other ways does that make sense if anything's a bit of interest or made you wonder or ponder anything like subscribe and all that jazz if you have anything you want to discuss or any aspects of it that you weren't too sure of or anything you don't agree with pop them in the comments let us know but in the meantime keep it real