|
eBay sellers work in the dark when it comes to knowing how customers (and potential customers) are finding their listings. Sellathon's ViewTracker provide statistics about visitor traffic to listings so sellers can improve performance and increase sales.
ViewTracker works by having sellers add a unique tracking code in their eBay auctions. Anytime an eBay user visits one of their listings, ViewTracker starts compiling data, such as how they got there, and the time of day and day of week they clicked through. ViewTracker is much more sophisticated than a regular auction counter, which only indicates the number of visitors that viewed the listing.
ViewTracker subscribers can view data by individual listings, and by combined listings (for instance, by product line, or auctions versus Store items). This is especially helpful if you have thousands of listings and want to look by all items of a certain type.
When you sign in to Sellathon, you'll see a table on the top left giving an overview of your active listings with seven metrics, including the number of auctions you have running, how many have bids, the average number of visitors per auction. (Conveniently, Sellathon always gives raw numbers and percentages.)
Underneath those statistics, you'll see Folders, which can be customized. Click on the letter H (which stands for Highlight) next to each folder name, and you will see statistics about all the auctions in that folder. While this version of Viewtracker is somewhat manual in how you create folders, Sellathon President Wayne Yeager said Version 3 will be much more powerful. (Version 3 is due out in the next month or so, Yeager said.)
In addition to getting data by folders (groups of listings), you can get data by individual listing. Here's the information you'll see about your listings, both by individual listing and by folder (groupings of listings):
- Most active time of day;
- Most active time of week;
- Searches with Titles and Descriptions;
- Most common sorts;
- Way visitors found your auction;
- Top 50 search terms used.
I viewed some posts in the Sellathon discussion board to see what people were talking about. Some users said by knowing what search terms buyers were using to find their items, they were able to improve their auction titles; they believed this increases the chances potential buyers will find their items. They also found information about the day and time auctions received traffic to be extremely useful.
It's interesting to see whether visitors to your auctions searched or browsed, what page they came from (it specifies which eBay page or other site they came from), and what percentage used the default method of searching Title only versus "Title and Description." If you love statistics and are experienced with spreadsheets, you can export the data in a CSV file, so you can play around with the data in Excel.
Sellathon is not an eBay-certified developer and does not use the eBay API. Since eBay doesn't make visitor data available through its API, this doesn't seem to be a major roadblock for users at this point. Customers range from small sellers up to enterprise sellers, including Dell Financial Services.
Sellathon charges a monthly fee for accessing the data with three plans: a basic plan for $4.95 (which allows you to track up to 25 listings); an advanced plan for $8.95 (up to 250 listings); and an enterprise plan for $19.95 (for unlimited listings). Sellathon tracks all type of eBay listings, including auctions, fixed-price listings and Store items.
Carol Ellis of ChunkyPunkys.com (site no longer active -Editor, March 22, 2007) was one of Sellathon's first customers and is a big fan of the service. She says people who have used Sellathon fall into two camps: people who don't understand the data and don't see the value, and people who find the data useful and are always looking to improve their sell-through rates and traffic. "But," she said, "one of the things that everyone seems to agree on is how fabulous it is to tell you what keywords people are using to find your listing." And, she adds, "Sellathon's support is second to none."
Sometimes people will search for items using the singular, sometimes plural; in some cases, you may want to put both in your title, Ellis said. She sells scrapbooking items, and she sometimes sells a brand called Jolee's. But she discovered through testing with Sellathon that many people were searching for the word without the apostrophe ("Jolees"). So she often puts both words in her listing titles.
When she starts selling a new product line, she will set up two nearly identical auctions at the same time to test a particular keyword or a feature like Gallery. "It can be eye-opening," Ellis said. Sellathon tracks all fields found in eBay's search box and tracks whether people are using those fields, so you know if people are searching for PayPal, or Gallery, for example.
She has been a "number-cruncher" for 20 years, she said, and feels comfortable with statistics. If you aren't sure if you will derive useful information from Sellathon, the company offers a 30-day free trial.
http://www.sellathon.com
|
