eBay Vs Google – The Stats

These has been much excitement and speculation in the blogosphere regarding the spat between eBay and google

Background

Google scheduled a Checkout Freedom Party in Boston during eBay Live conference to pressure eBay into accepting Google’s checkout payment solution. eBay temporarily stopped buying Google keywords. Rumbled, Google canceled the party.

Dropping the ads revealed some interesting information about the relationship between Google and eBay which I thought I would cover

Google and eBay’s Statistics

Here are some stats about eBay’s relationship with Google

1. Bill Tancer from Hitwise says that 10.6% of eBay’s traffic comes from Google (they don’t differentiate paid/natural).  He does note that a big chunk (25%) of it comes from the branded terms (ebay/ebay.com/www.ebay.com).
2. Jordan Rohan cited that eBay spends about $25m/Q on Google Adwords

Using these figures Scott Wingo of ChannelAdvisor that paid google search account for around 20% of eBay’s traffic, depending on your estimates of eBay’s average CPC.

How did dropping the ads affect sellers?

Opinions about this vary.  ChannelAdvisor received mixed message from their sellers and Hitwise data (thanks to Tamebay for the data)was fairly inconclusive:

• For the week 5th to 12th June, eBay traffic rose from 1.59% to 1.67% of US internet visits. This can probably be attributed to the publicity associated with Live!, as well as perhaps with the Google story itself.
• On 7th June, Google drove 10.6% of eBay’s traffic. On 12th June, that fell to 9.86% – a 7% reduction.
• On 7th June, eBay accounted for 1.12% of traffic *from* Google; by 12th June, that had fallen to 1.03% – an 8% reduction.

What channeladvisor did find was that their client who were in long tail businesses (the ones most likely to benefit from a long tail targeted adwords campaign) were the most hit.

eBay is now back advertising on Google.  The lesson from this episode as ever is to diversify onto other channels.