Tracking Your eBay Traffic

Tracking Your Traffic

One of the nicest things about doing business on the internet is the degree to which you can test and get accurate results. One very important part of being able to run a truly useful test is the ability to track what's going on, particularly with your visitors.

When you advertise on TV, there's really no accurate way to gauge how well your television commercial worked. But on the internet, nearly everything is trackable, leaving very little doubt as to the accuracy of the results.

If you know where your visitors are coming from, what they are looking at when they arrive, how long they stay, how they found you, and so forth, then you can start to paint a picture of what is and isn't working for you.

If you were to run a regular eCommerce website, tools to accomplish this task are very expensive, running in the thousands of dollars. They are also very complex, requiring hours just to learn the basics behind them, and days of training to learn how to use them effectively.

But if you want to be truly successful, the time and money you put into tracking your traffic pays off several fold.

For instance, if you run a marketing campaign with a pay-per-click search engine, wherein you bid on specific keywords for position in search engine results, you want to know which keywords are getting you the most traffic and which of those keywords is getting you the highest conversion rates (ie: traffic that results in a sale). In other words, you want to know where your money is best spent; on this keyword or that keyword.

Once you know where your most profitable traffic is coming from, you can increase funding to those keywords and decrease or stop bidding on keywords that are less profitable. That way, you get the best bang for your marketing dollar.

The good news is that doing business on eBay is typically far less complex (and requires a lot less money) than a traditional eCommerce business. Furthermore, the software available to track your traffic is much more affordable, starting at just a few dollars per month.

Not too long ago I stumbled on some amazing software that really has the potential to take your eBay business to the next level! The software is called ViewTracker, and it's made by Sellathon.

ViewTracker is a hit counter (much like the free Ándale counters that eBay allows you to use), but does so much more. ViewTracker can actually do all of the things I mentioned earlier.

Among the information ViewTracker is able to gather:

• The sequential number of a visitor
• The date and time a visitor looks at your auction
• The visitor's IP address
• A visitor's geographic location
• How long a visitor spends looking at your auction
• If a visitor places a bid, whether they become the high bidder, or whether they got outbid
• If a visitor adds you to their "watch list"
• What search terms they used to find your auction, along with what category they were searching in
• How a visitor sorted their search results (ie: items ending first, lowest price, etc.)

…and much more!

To see all the information ViewTracker can report on, visit the Viewtracker FAQ page.

Why is this information important? Because it gives you a general idea of how your visitors behave. Knowing how your visitors behave will help you test more accurately, and therefore get better results for future auctions.

For example, different types of items attract different types of buyers at different times of the day.

When I sold cosmetics, my best customers were typically stay-at-home moms who did most of their internet surfing and shopping during weekday afternoons.

By knowing what day and time most people look at your auction, you might want to test having your auction end on that day at that time. Unless, of course, you find that most of the bids are being placed in the middle of the auction (as often happens with Dutch auctions) as opposed to the end of the auction.

If you know what search terms buyers are using to find your auction, you can test different keywords in your auction title to see if you get better results. Even better, you might find a correlation between certain keywords and the likelihood of a bid being placed!

You'll know what keywords get you the most bids, as opposed to the most page views which are far less important, and know what keywords are simply wasting space in your auction title.

By understanding how most bidders sort their search results, you'll know whether or not it's a good strategy to list a low opening bid on certain items.

In short, the more you know about the behavior of those who are most likely to place a bid on your auction, the more you'll be able to design your auction specifically for those type of people.

Knowing this information and being able to adapt your listings accordingly is what will separate you from every other seller on eBay.

I can't even begin to tell you how important it is to have this information, and what I would have been willing to pay for it when I first started on eBay. The truth is by having Sellathon's ViewTracker software, it's almost cheating because it gives you such a huge advantage over other eBay sellers!

Here's some information that Sellathon discovered which you might find useful or interesting. Have you ever wondered if all those sellers committing keyword spamming violations are actually doing their auctions any good?

According to data Sellathon gathered from multiple eBay sellers that were using their software, they were able to determine that keyword spamming is an essentially pointless exercise.

Remember when I said earlier in the book how annoying it was when I searched for "poker chips", and I kept getting results for "poker tables"? It was because some sellers of poker tables were keyword spamming with titles such as:

Custom built poker table, goes great with poker chips!

When I saw those auction titles, I would simply ignore them. If I did happen to accidentally click in to one, I would immediately hit the back button on my browser the second I discovered that the seller tricked me.

Sellathon discovered through their research that most buyers behave essentially the same way. Buyers have a tendency to search for what they want (go figure, huh?) As such, when they click into an auction that is not what they are looking for, they would simply leave, and leave quickly.

Sellathon's data indicated that buyers who clicked in to auctions that were unrelated to their search terms viewed the auction for an average of just a couple of seconds, which was probably the average amount of time it took the page to load.

There may be one case in which keyword spamming could be helpful however, and that's in the case of what I like to call the "upsell keyword spam".

An example might be an auction title like this one:

Garmin StreetPilot 2620, better than the 2610

My logic here is that somebody who doesn't know about the 2620, or thinks it's out of their price range, might go searching for the 2610 model. When they see that you have the upgraded version that they didn't know about, or thought was too expensive, they might decide to take a look at your auction.

Naturally, having a detailed item description, as we've discussed earlier, will be very important so the buyer will be able to make a good comparison between the two models.

So does the "upsell keyword spam" really work? The only way to find out for sure is to use Sellathon's ViewTracker software!

Sellathon offers a free trial so you can try it out before committing to a purchase. Visit their website for details.

Next: Chapter 3 Summary & Takeaways

Subchapters:

Testing for Success
Tracking Your Traffic
Chapter 3 Summary & Takeaways

Jump to another chapter:

Chapter 1: Driving Traffic to Your Auction Listing
Chapter 2: Listing for Higher Profits
Chapter 3: Does Any of this Stuff Work?
Chapter 4: eBay Stores
Chapter 5: Auction Management
Chapter 6: What to Sell on eBay
Chapter 7: Finding Products to Sell on eBay
Chapter 8: Mining eBay's Traffic
Chapter 9: HTML Tutorial
Chapter 10: Acting Like a PowerSeller
Chapter 11: Final Words