Jun
14
2007

Google eBay – Data on the Tiff

Posted by under Consumer Behavior

Danny Sullivan’s post here first alerted me to eBay’s move this week to cease sponsored listing ads on Google alledgedly over a Google party that conflicted with eBay’s shareholder meeting. A couple of data points to consider to shed light on what eBay is deeming an “experiment:”
Google is the #1 source of traffic for ebay.com, accounting for 10.6% of its traffic for Tuesday 6/7/07.
From daily clickstream, that percentage dropped to 9.86% for Tuesday 6/12/07, representing a near 7% drop from the previous Tuesday.
From Google’s perspective, eBay is the third most popular non-Google site visited from the Google.com domain behind MySpace and Wikipedia, accounting for 1.12% of Google’s downstream traffic for Tuesday 6/7/07. For Tuesday 6/12/07, that percentage has droped to 1.03%, a 7.5% from the previous Tuesday.
Before I pulled the data I was expecting a bigger drop given the drastic removal of sponsored listing ads by eBay. Pulling the top search terms from Google to eBay reveals why the drop wasn’t more noticeable. 25% of eBays search traffic from Google (and thats just the top 5 words) comes from brand, domain or navigational searches for eBay (e.g. “ebay,” “ebay.com” “www.ebay.com”).
More to follow as this story develops.

TAGS:
CATS: Consumer Behavior

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  7. Although eBay experienced only a 7% drop in traffic during the “experiment”, a significant part of their low quality ad click traffic with Google (through the content network) could be eliminated by regularly analyzing and adding Made For Ads (MFA) sites to their site exclusion lists.

    These MFA sites cumulatively create a significant number of ad clicks for eBay and other large advertisers each day.

    Kevin Embree
    SVP, Product Strategy
    Click Forensics

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