The trend of declining unique visitors and page views shown for eBay in the first quarter of 2008 continued during the month of April. According to Nielsen Online, the number of unique visitors to the eBay site declined 10.73% year-over-year (YoY) in April, while page views declined almost 13% in April compared to April 2007. The time spent per person on the site, however, increased 12% in April, YoY.

Source: Nielsen Online

AuctionBytes reported last week on first quarter data from 2008 versus 2007, which also showed declines in unique visitors and page views and an increase in time spent on the site (http://www.auctionbytes.com/cab/cab/abn/y08/m05/i09/s00).

In Q1-2008, page views on eBay showed an 11.3% drop YoY, from 42 billion page views to 37.2 billion page views. Unique audience declined nearly 7%, dropping from 182.6 million in Q1-2007 to 170 million in Q1-2008.

The drops in traffic and page views come at a time when eBay has undertaken initiatives directed at improving the buying experience on the site in hopes of increasing customer activity. In early 2007, it began rolling out Trust & Safety initiatives to reduce fraud on the site, and it has continued testing and rolling out new search technology to improve the "finding" experience.

Comment on the AuctionBytes Blog:
http://blog.auctionbytes.com/cgi-bin/blog/blog.pl?/pl/2008/5/1210908126.html