eBay Marketplaces North America President Bill Cobb told AuctionBytes he didn't understand the media frenzy over the eBay - Google situation that cropped up prior to this month's eBay Live conference. Google had cancelled a party meant to attract attendees of eBay's annual conference and designed in part to protest eBay's ban of Google Checkout - after eBay pulled its US advertising on Google, though eBay called the move part of its routine marketing tests. Bill Cobb spoke to AuctionBytes on June 16th in an interview now available on AuctionBytes.TV.

Asked about eBay sellers who said page views were down since eBay stopped advertising on Google US, Cobb said that's not what eBay's total data shows, though he said some sellers may be impacted more than others. "That's why we're running the tests." He said, "We don't see anything in the first few days that would indicate we're seeing any issues."

"We understand that our obligation is to drive demand to our sellers. I wouldn't worry about, you know, the corporate,...you know, what the press is talking about. Our number one job is for the sellers to get them demand, and that's what takes priority over anything else."

When asked when people might expect to see eBay ads back on Google, Cobb said, "We want to see how the test goes, so I wouldn't give it a time frame, I would just say at this point, as long as we're seeing demand that's satisfying our sellers, we'll continue to,..."

"I don't think we're going to have a dramatic announcement that,... You know, we'll probably put money back into Google and take it away from something else to see what the best mix is. But we are not captive to Google. That's what is so odd about why the press is in such a frenzy about this. We have a lot of marketing levers and we experiment across those levers all the time."

Cobb answered additional questions including seller concerns over Yahoo ads that are appearing on the site, including on search results pages. "Our first goal is still the transaction business on eBay. And even on a null search environment, we try to ask them if they've misspelled the word, and "did you mean?" and we figure out every way to get them back to our items." Cobb said he feels that over time eBay will get better quality inventory in that space and better quality advertisers that will make the site look better. Cobb said the Amazon Marketplace sponsored links that were competing with eBay listings have been eliminated. Other topics covered during the interview included Feedback 2.0, Trust & Safety initiatives, and "core versus store" issues.

http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/ebaylive2007

View the video interview here:
http://auctionbytes.tv/cgi-bin/video-manager/frame.pl?features&06162007c

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