eBay sellers are often tempted to include irrelevant keywords in their auction titles and descriptions in the hopes of attracting unsuspecting surfers to their items. A recent study by Sellathon.com says this kind of "keyword spamming," in addition to being a violation of eBay's policies, is a waste of time.
For the past few months, Sellathon has been beta-testing the latest generation of its ViewTracker software, a data-analysis tool for eBay sellers. One of the features of the new version is the ability to see how much time visitors spend looking at an auction item.
According to Sellathon's findings, the average time spent looking at an eBay item is about 26 seconds. However, when the search term used to find the item doesn't accurately match the item itself, visitors spend an average of 2.9 seconds on the auction.
Sellathon CEO Wayne Yeager says, "We noticed that some of our beta-testers were getting visits from irrelevant - although completely innocent - searches. For example, if the seller was offering a "coin silver spoon with a gold-colored monogram," she would get visits from people searching for "gold coin.""
Yeager said they began watching these visits that originated from irrelevant and inaccurate searches more closely and made an interesting discovery.
"Anybody who expects to make more money or get more bids by adding "Britney Spears" or "Paris Hilton" to their auction description is just deluding themselves," Yeager said. "It doesn't work. It might make their hit counter go up, but that's all."
Another interesting finding, Yeager said, is that nearly half of all visitors to an auction spend 10 seconds or less looking at that listing. (http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abn/y05/m01/i17/images/timegraph.gif)
But Yeager says there's good news too.
"When a serious buyer arrives, they usually spend several minutes looking at your auction," Yeager said. "In fact, you can almost tell who's going to bid and who's not, just by looking at how much time the visitor spends on an auction. It's a pretty good indicator."
Sellathon's ViewTracker provides sellers with information on how each visitor found their auctions, including the search terms the visitor used, the method used to sort the search results, whether the visitor is watching the item in "My eBay," and other data points.
http://www.sellathon.com
