Looks like Yahoo! ads on eBay are working in the USA – so eBay will now start testing Google ads on international eBay sites. For these ads to work it must mean that the sell through rate did not change, and that the click through rates are high enough for advertisers.
This is good use of the internet – traditionally ‘destination’ sites like eBay do not want people clicking away from the site. By putting Yahoo!/Google ads on the site eBay is allowing people to click away, so they have (finally) realised that clickers are going to come back (or opened the new page in a tab), and perhaps were never serious buyers in the first place.
The impact on eBay’s revenue and profit could be startling – these advertisements are big business.
The downside is that this is yet another facet of an already overly complicated website. The incremental changes may make sense, but eBay lacks the elegant simplicity of Trade Me or the Apple store.
Lance Wiggs 