See the introduction to this article at:
http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y206/m04/abu0165/s02

and the main article at:
http://auctionbytes.com/cab/abu/y206/m04/abu0165/s03

Bobby Minnich (Bobby131313) is a Silver PowerSeller and sells coins on eBay. To test and measure his cross-promotional efforts in his eBay Store listings, Bobby has come up with some creative ways to use Sellathon ViewTracker (discussed in Chapter 7).

Within his eBay Store listings, Bobby includes clickable buttons for the types of coins he sells (Quarters, Halves, Dollars, and so on). When someone is perusing his store items, he hopes the shopper will continue to browse his store by clicking these cross-promotional buttons. Bobby links the buttons to his other items using a special code, or keyword, so that when a shopper clicks one, a page showing only Bobby's items in that category appears.

For example, if a shopper clicks the Gold and Silver button in one of Bobby's listings, a search is launched in his eBay Store for the term uscoinsbullion. Bobby has all his Gold and Silver coin listings coded with the term uscoinsbullion so the shopper finds items relevant to what he or she is looking for.

Bobby deliberately uses terms on these buttons that no searcher would ordinarily type into the eBay Search box. When he looks at Sellathon ViewTracker to see which search terms visitors used, he can differentiate the cross-promo visits. He knows that if 100 visitors found him with the search term uscoinsbullion, they must have clicked the Gold and Silver button in one of his other listings. (And using ViewTracker, he can see from which listings they linked.)

This gives him valuable information about the popularity of each of his categories, and it lets him measure results over time, as well as test new templates to see if one is more effective than another.

Bobby has invested a lot of time in learning the way his traffic-tracking program works and how he can use features to give him information to increase his sales and go for the gold.

Note from the author: When designing cross promotional strategies, make sure you understand eBay's policies regarding links (http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/listing-links.html) and keyword spamming (http://pages.ebay.com/help/policies/keyword-spam.html).

This is an excerpt from the book, "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars: Tools and Techniques to Make More Money on Every Transaction" (McGraw-Hill 2006) by Ina Steiner, you can find the book on Amazon (http://digbig.com/4fwpf)