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Keywords by eBay:
http://ebay.admarketplace.net
Google Adwords:
https://adwords.google.com
eBay sellers now have a new ad opportunity designed to reach customers who are already shopping on eBay. Keywords by eBay at first look appears to be a viable alternative to Google Adwords for eBay sellers. On the other hand, all sellers might not find Keywords by eBay a better value than using Adwords with their own pages. Some sellers may not even find them to be a profitable tactic.
What are these "keyword search" advertising programs?
The services are designed to allow advertisers to link their ads to the search function of Google or eBay. You choose the keywords that determine when your ads will appear. Your ad will appear when someone searching the site enters the keyword you selected. You only pay if someone clicks on your ad.
To test Keywords by eBay against Google Adwords, I set up the Keywords campaign with the same words and pointed it to a product in my eBay store. My Google Adwords clicks land on a separate one-page "micro-site" with PayPal payment buttons, off eBay.
The product I used for the test is one that I've promoted on Google over the last year. There are several search terms on Google that are relevant to the product, and have no ad competition, yet garner click-throughs of 30% or more.
Google Adwords drive traffic to these single-product "micro-sites" because I have also optimized my pages for search engines. Much of the time, customers simply look at the ad, but click on the search result. The Google search result for the product name also includes my eBay and ePier storefront listings for the product.
My Previous Strategy
I am not willing to pay Google Adwords to drive traffic to my eBay Store and risk my customers experiencing "cyber vertigo." (See http://www.myezsale.com/cab/abu/y203/m07/mes0004/s05.) Prior to the launch of Keywords by eBay, I was using Google Adwords and search optimization only for my micro-sites.
To generate traffic to my eBay Store, I listed continuous auctions on eBay so that one ended every day in two categories. To stretch the listings as long as possible, my auction pages include a clear buy now call-to-action directing auction shoppers to "Buy Now" in my eBay Store, where I set the quantity of the item to 50, making listing fees very small. (Sales of this product on ePier come mainly from Froogle clicks, but that's another story...) The cost of using serial auctions for promotion averaged about $10 per week in listing fees, plus the regular product costs and final value fees.
Keywords by eBay Test
So far, in six weeks with Keywords by eBay, I have spent $50 on the Keywords campaign to generate 500 clicks, which equates to approximately 0.14% of 364,726 impressions. Although the number of eBay transactions has been higher than it had been, and it's nice to escape the hassle of continually listing, Keywords cost about the same as the auction method. Since they did generate $10 in incremental profit per week, by that standard, Keywords by eBay was a successful tactic.
If you take into account the impact of potential branding value (that's quite a few impressions for $50), cross-merchandising, re-orders and "bounce-back offers" for complementary products, all very viable strategies to grow profit, the impact is greater, albeit less easily measured. You'll want to consider these factors in your analysis if they apply to your items.
Keywords by eBay were also especially attractive to an early adopter like myself because the competition was and still is minimal. But, is a positive return on investment enough? Might there be other ways to spend the $10 per week that could deliver a bigger return? I checked out my Google Adwords report to figure it out.
Google Adwords Test
Not only is Google's reporting better, a quick check of the numbers showed that my click-thru percentages and sales from the Google Adwords are about ten times those I had using the Keywords by eBay. Google Adwords averaged 1.4% across all AdWord campaigns for this product and cost me just $9.05 in the last six weeks, with ten times the number of product sales from AdWord clicks generated from 15,675 impressions.
Choosing Your Keywords: eBay versus Google
Watch what works for you when using any relevance-based tactic. There is a major difference between what works on Google and what works on eBay, and the only way you will know what terms work best on Google is to think like your customer. The product I sell solves the problem of torn ear lobes so women can wear pierced earrings again. Many women go to Google, which delivers about 70% of search traffic on the Web, to find out how to fix ear lobe tears. Or, they have used the product in the past, but have no source for it, so search for it by name. They may not know they want to buy this product, but they do want to solve the problem.
"Torn ear lobes" and variations of the phrase are my highest converting search terms in my Google AdWord buys (most clicks turn into sales), just ahead of the product name itself. Most people would not search for the product by name unless they were re-ordering, so setting your AdWord buys based on the symptoms that identify a prospect is one of the most effective ways to drive good traffic.
People don't search for symptoms like "torn ear lobes" on eBay (not sure I'd want to see their feedback if they did!). So your best choice for Keywords by eBay is to concentrate heavily on the items that work with the product you are promoting rather than simply using a store banner. In the above example, earrings was the highest performing term on the Keywords by eBay search. Use the "Competition and Suggestion" tools (don't be fooled, the suggestion tool is helpful, but nowhere even close to Google's in functionality) to find more words that might work well to complement your product. I don't recommend a banner pointing just to your store, unless you call out a product or a special offer.
Look at the competition's strategy for word choices to see if you can figure out what terms you can "own" in terms of search results and AdWords. This may also help you better understand the people who don't click to your offer, or click and don't buy. (Check competition through the sign-up interfaces of both Google Adwords and Keywords by eBay, or simply by performing the search to see what comes up. You can then use this information to make and test changes to your offer or creative to make sure that you are pruning out the words that don't work or cost more than they generate in profit).
Based on the results of this test, my experience was that using Google Adwords with micro-sites was a more cost-beneficial promotional tactic for my needs than Keywords by eBay. If your offer and creative banner or text ad is relevant because you think like your customer when picking the words to include, either option is more cost-effective than using staggered auctions or risking cyber-vertigo.
The sellers for whom Keywords by eBay will make the most sense are those who prefer not to deal with things like HTML code, PayPal buttons and ftp transfers (which are needed to sell from your own Web site), or those who have embraced eBay as their primary sales channel. For them, provided they are strategic about their selections and "do the math," Keywords by eBay at first look adds up to a good thing.
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