Panda 4.0: Why eBay lost many of its organic rankings(wordstream.com) |
Panda 4.0: Why eBay lost many of its organic rankings(wordstream.com) |
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I shuddered at the though of buying used toilet paper.
What that means is that they will form an ad around your query targeted to a particular page on eBay, often times insensitive to the existing inventory or improperly matched.
Compare this to Amazon's dynamic keyword campaigns, which usually only trigger when they have relevant inventory, and match to a dynamically generated page that does its best to match the inventory results to the query. This is not easy to do, but not impossible, either. eBay looks to just set up their dynamic campaigns and scream #yolo.
This is the best article written about their terribleness: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/03/13/dear-ebay-its-n...
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.T...
One exclamation point seems to be the limit.
But, in any case, it was definitely noticeable that they were "spamming" AdWords with worthless ads that frequently led to nowhere useful on eBay's site.
So that's what that awful misfeature is called. I hate those ads, they're always frustratingly unhelpful.
Here's the (best) use case: let's say I sell garden equipment: hoses, sprinklers, garden gnomes, etc., so I advertise on those terms as keywords. I could have one ad that says "Best Garden Equipment", but tests show that ads work better if they specifically name the product that the user is looking for. So I can use keyword expansion to have the ad say "Best Garden Hoses", "Best Garden Sprinklers", "Best Garden Gnomes", etc., and not have to manage a lot of different ads.
This can be used in much broader cases, too, such as if I have hotels in 500 US cities: load up the keyword expansion with the names of all 500 cities and run an ad with title "{CITY_NAME} Hotel Rooms".
The problem is when people load it up with a jillion keywords in the hope that, if they get a click, they'll look for matches in their product database afterwards, and sometimes they fail.
So, yes: frequently lame. But when it's not misused, pretty useful.
If you don't take shortcuts, you get better results.
'No results for "what you just searched for" found here'
They now have a reason to rework their website, improve sales listings with the user in mind, clean up their pages and make them nice and lean, etc. I hope Amazon gets the same treatment, their product pages are a mess too IMO.
It's especially strange considering that Bezos has such an almost pathological (not necessarily in the bad sense) focus on the customer.
One would think Amazon would have some of the best, most laser-focused search of any site on the Internet, but I can't even reliably use 4-stars-and-up as a search filter, or even "Prime only." No matter what I do, I get shown things outside of the filter I set up. It's downright bizarre.
Again, my apologies for the little thread hijacking. I guess one could at least argue it's "search-related" lol....
Content I want? Current price, shipping price, and the description from the seller. Everything else is garbage. The default pictures and descriptions are especially worthless. I want pictures of the actual product I'm buying, not whatever marketing shot of a pristine product from the company.
And then shortly there after eBay dropped significantly in Google's rankings. To be honest, the above statement from HBR is a major threat to Google's business.
Coincidence?
yes.
Nothing will rev up regulator interest like a $65 billion company willing to cry to D.C. as they lose a billion in sales due to algorithm changes.
That being said, as a Google search user I am delighted to see them lose search ranking. Is sucks seeing eBay listed in first page search results for just about everything. If I wanted to look for an item on eBay I would go to eBay. What I want is INFORMATION about the item/topic, not a link to eBay. Now, if they could just get ehow and about.com.....
They have a patent on moving the mouse cursor towards the address bar?!.
Stack Overflow is usually at the top, but when I want relevant blog entries that actually cover what I'm working with, those get shoved to the back.
Can you imagine going to Target or Best Buy and having some guy with a megaphone screeching at everyone about his used wares in the back of his van in the parking lot?
It's against the TOS of almost any ad serving company but that doesn't mean it does not happen. (which is interesting, because you'd think it would be very easy to detect, and yet, people do it):
https://support.google.com/adwordspolicy/answer/190442?hl=en
What's interesting here is that you could argue that if you bought the traffic from party 'A' and sold it to party 'B' you should be free to do so. The only reason Google can (and does) put a stop to this is because they see both sides of the trades and your take is technically their loss.
But people buying traffic on adsense or another source of traffic that is cheaper than the one where they are selling it could likely pull this sort of thing for years.
However, sites like info.com advertising or shopping comparison sites are the most classic examples.
While arbitrage is forbidden, placing AdWords ads on the pages that have value and purpose other than serving ads and simultaneously buying AdWords traffic is legitimate.
I think it will just hurt incremental sales, rather than them being able to make up the shortfall on Google via paid means.
And more interesting kind of sites will be get the rise out deployment of Panda 4.0.
my 2c
So how did that work out for them?"
Hmmm.....just hmmm....
I do not buy that Google Search is not doing Google Adword's bidding, directly or indirectly. They know why advertises and who doesn't, by name and by category ("large brands" for example. ) So unless Google is separated in two separately owned parts (Search and Ads) I think people have every reason to question this. Especially since a drop in traffic essentially forces a site to buy ads.
the same goes for Android and Chrome, many of their features are to drive people to Google search.
Best result | popularity | cost: ascending | user rating | date
Btw. the technology: A9.com is a subsidiary of Amazon.com based in Palo Alto, California that develops search and advertising technology: is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A9.com
eBay and Amazon are huge spenders on Adwords according to this infochart (which may or may not be reliable): http://i.i.cbsi.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2012/01/24/google-earnings...
I don't believe they directly have bounce data, but they infer it from click-back. They have publicly stated that they do NOT use google analytics data to inform organic search rankings.
It is however "ok" to buy an adword to a page about, say a '65 mustang restoration article you did. Have it be mostly an article about restoring a mustang and a "few" (for some opaque definition of a few) AdSense ads on the page which may or may not be related to the AdWords buy.
But what is really the bottom line is that the variations are endless :-)
It's a risk some are willing to take but I would be very careful with that strategy, especially if the pages are used in this combination right from day 1.
It's because Amazon is just better, and they're up in my face about PayPal.
How am I meant to know how they have categorised something? Should I look in Cameras & Electronics for an SD card or Memory? Or one of the other 24 Departments they suggest?
How can they NOT have fixed this after 20 years?
Maybe because they are dominating internet retailing so much that they don't feel any need to, largely through low prices achieved through (1) narrow margins, and (2) not doing anything that isn't aimed at reducing long term costs per sale.
You think it sucks, I think it sucks -- but if empirically its working good enough and fixing it is a cost without a clear payoff for them, why do it?
Improving their search would mean that more people find what they want to buy. That means more sales, PERIOD.
(Yes, I am aware that searching ebay for the cheapest sd cards is foolish!)
Not that their short term bottom line is a worthy excuse for deceptive and confusing search practices.
Without DKI: You search "Lawn Chair" and see a list of ads with headlines like "Target", "The Patio Store" and "Summer Furniture".
With DKI: You search "Lawn Chair" and the first thing on the page is "Cheap Lawn Chairs".
This is better for you as it's immediately clear where to click to find the thing you were looking for. DKI allows small advertisers, who have neither the time nor capability to manage hundreds of ads, the ability to still present an ad that is tailored to your search when they offer what you're looking for.
The ad still has to actually link to the lawn chairs you wanted. If it doesn't, that keyword would be rejected by the AdWords editorial team in the advertiser's campaign for that landing page. Even if it made it through review, it'd suffer algorithmically compared to ads that do link to lawn chairs; the bounce rate and poor landing page relevance scores would drop the ad's Quality Score, which means ads that do link to lawn chairs will rank above it, or the ad won't be displayed at all no matter what the store is willing to pay per click.
The domain name section of the ad shows who the company is.
... and then you go to their site and they have no lawn chairs available. Yeah, great /s.
Sure, improving their search would mean that more people find what they were initially planning to buy without seeing as much other stuff. Of course, offline retail experience has been that that's generally a good thing for premium venues, its usually exactly the exact opposite of what is good for sales in discount venues.
And, even to the extent that it might be a net gain -- I suspect it would, overall -- its quite easy to believe it might not (despite 20 years) have ever reached the level of being the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of benefit/cost ratio.
