 Hey there everyone, welcome back and I apologize for my absence for a few days and for the current setup of my clothing wrapped up as if I'm in the Arctic, but I've been very very ill for a few days and this is the first chance I've had to get back on. And this particular episode of content is around some more clarity with the offsite ads of where your money is going and more not quite directly as far as where the call went, but what my purpose is, is to find out why traffic has fallen off a cliff for many sellers on the platform at the moment, especially around promoted impressions which has then had a knock on effect of sales. I wanted to find out in a roundabout way if the implementation of the offsite ads campaign where they have removed it would seem the traffic you were getting prior to this campaign implementation through promoted impressions where they were advertising offsite, if they have removed it and put it into the offsite campaign advertising obviously, and where it was going to find out how much power has actually been lost through promoted listings. Now the point of that you'll come to understand through the content, but it was more that the offsite advertising campaign specifies that it's now promotes on external channels like Google ads. Now a lot of people may not think this is important, but it's very important because one, is it Google ads? Because that is a massively powerful platform and if they're not advertising there, has it now reduced the visibility of your items on Google and Google shopping? And secondly, if they are or are not actually advertising on Google ads through these offsite campaigns, how powerful is our pay-per-click that we'd be putting in? And not only that, but where else is it advertising? You're paying for a service, but they're not telling you what that service is. Now we're not trying to undermine the system, but you need to understand where your money is going or where your money is gone or where has your traffic gone because of this. So this is going to move over to the next section, which is an actual call. Now I do apologize for the quality of sound. Obviously I'm having to record the call on speakerphone on my phone, trying to get the quality of the call as best I can next to the microphone. So I do apologize, but just bear with it and do apologize for my voice being loud and the advisor's voice being quite low. But if you can catch the conversation, it's an interesting conversation to be fair. I have a listening how the offsite ads work now that they've introduced it into the promoted section of your dashboard with regards to under the information that you can learn more about offsite ads. Under the first heading where it says how do offsite ads work? It says offsite ads lets you promote your entire eligible inventory on external channels like Google Ads. Now I just want to clarify because it's put a comma after channels and then like Google Ads. Now is it saying using this offsite ad promotion you are using Google Ads or it's platforms that are like Google Ads? Very, very different thing. Absolutely. Yep, no that's fine. Okay so when you go to my advertising dashboard, obviously you're now pushing pay per click on everything because you've got three adverts above my advertising screen now. Before I can even look at my fingers. So you've got save time with new smart promoted listings and advanced campaigns. You've got increased external traffic to your listings with offsite ads and then you've got try promoted displayed beta. So you're heavily pushing the promotions now and I get that that's fine. But on the middle one where it says increase external traffic to your listings with offsite ads. Do you see that one? Okay that's fine. Sure. It's just an information bar at the top of the screen, not anything specific. So when you go to on my seller hub along the top you've got overview, orders, listing and then the marketing. If you hover your cursor over marketing you then get a drop down selection of summary, promotion, buyer groups, advertising dashboard and social. If you click on the advertising dashboard, yep. So now that you're there you'll have increased external traffic. Now in that gray box at the end there's a little hyperlink tab that says to learn more. If you click on that you'll get a pop-up box of facts about offsite ads. Excellent. So the main important information I'm after with regards to this is some clarification because you're basically expecting us or I rephrase this. You're asking us to use this campaign which is then us making a legal financial commitment to this campaign usage which is fine. Excuse me but you're not clarifying what we're getting for what you're using for our money. Does that make sense? So it says external channels but it doesn't tell us what those external channels are. It just says like Google ads. So the first one is is it Google ads as one of them and secondly even if it is or isn't what are the other channels you're using? Because obviously if it's a low yield channel that you're using for example then it may not be of benefit for us to invest money in that campaign or it could be that we already advertise elsewhere on that channel and it would be pointless for us to double invest on the same platform. Yeah thank you. Yes of course. So we can see he doesn't actually have the answers at this stage but he has gone to look to see if he can find that information which should be readily available being a legal situation technically if you look at it for an investment which is what you're doing you're investing in pay per click therefore they should be open and transparent about where they're actually using to promote your your listings. Now I was put on hold for about five six minutes whilst he went away looking for this information and then he came back with this. Yeah that is just to know where he's going so if we have any other campaigns that we run independently we don't want to double up on our campaigns so it because obviously your if we go to like you say Bing or something like that if we have a different campaign that uses other platforms it could just be one we don't want to run a double campaign on the same platform or it could be that your promotion could well be more predominant than a different campaign and we can save the money from that one and use it with yours for example. It's just optimizing our investment if we're going to be using the off-site ad campaign and also clarity is to your wording as because it doesn't seem to be very clear it just says like external channels like google ads well that could be anything you know could be anything for sure okay lovely and when you say you're going to get in contact with us would that be via phone call or no problem thank you okay thank you very much take care bye bye. So there we have it the advisor specifically started the call off that have a detailed guide that they can work from to give us these answers and after then disappearing for five six minutes ten minutes whatever long it took him came back with no answers but he did understand my point of view as to where they're being advertised I mean he specifically pointed out google being etc and understood that I just needed to understand where the money is going but couldn't answer the question whether that was that there was something on their screen that said they don't share that information or whether they don't have that information on the screen in front of them or if it's outside their scope he still had to take it offline to investigate so the standard 48 hour clause that they always use will come back to you in 48 hours whether they do or don't we will see and I will report back the answers to that and the responses from that but as we can see not a clear path and it should be but we'll investigate this further and we'll get back to you with some results hopefully in within 48 hours keep you real see you on the other side