One of the many changes to Best Match that eBay rolled out in the Fall of 2009 includes something termed the “Listing Performance Score.” This is a ratio of sales to impressions that will impact your Fixed-Price listing’s visibility in the Best Match search results. The higher your Listing Performance Score, the closer to the top of the search results you will appear.
How Listing Performance Score is Calculated
First, remember that this only applies to fixed-price listings offering multiple quantities of items for sale.
Newly posted fixed price listings get an initial boost in visibility under eBay’s revised Best Match search and sort algorithm. Every time a listing is presented to an eBay visitor in the search results counts as an impression.
For the Listing Performance Score, eBay calculates a ratio of sales to impressions. So, if the circled Guitar Hero listing makes one sale for every 50 impressions, its Listing Performance Score is 2%.
All other factors being equal, fixed-price listings with a score above 2% will rank higher in the search results than the listing in my example while those with a lower score will appear after.
Listing Performance Score Tactics
Specific and Relevant Titles
Specific and relevant titles are more important than ever. If your title is too broad, it will show up (initially at least) in a lot of search results for a variety of queries. Many of those potential bidders might not be looking for what you are selling – generating numerous impressions without many corresponding sales. For example, while the title below may show up frequently in the results for “new iPod Nano” searches, it probably won’t be generating many sales — at least not for those buyers who actually wanted a new iPod Nano.
Like NEW MP3 PLAYER better than IPOD NANO
However, if the listing title were more accurate and included something like “used Sansa Clip MP3 Player,” I would generate fewer impressions (due to a lower number of searches for that item), but I would probably have an excellent ratio of sales per impression and a higher Listing Performance Score.
While casting a wide net used to be a good strategy to garner bids, sellers who want to perform well in the Listing Performance Score now need to be more focused.
Increase Sales While Keeping Impressions Low
As explained above, the Listing Performance Score is a ratio calculated by your sales divided by impressions. There are two ways of increasing this ratio:
- Increase the numerator (sales)
- Decrease the denominator (impressions)
Of course, you can combine the two (OK, that makes three ways of increasing the Listing Performance Score!).
But how do you garner sales without increasing impressions?
- By bypassing the eBay search results completely!
Send potential bidders straight to your auction listings. How? Get your free AuctionLink at http://www.auctionlink.to. It’s a short web address that links to a page of your current eBay.com listings.
- There’s no registration required
- It’s not on eBay’s server, so the listings don’t count as impressions served under the Listing Performance Score.
- It’s just your listings – no worries about competing sellers.
- It’s free!
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