How Using eBay Analytics Can Improve Your Sales

For sellers, there are many keys to garnering bids, but among the most important of these are getting great placement in eBay search rankings and beating out competitors for eyeballs and clicks.

You don't have to leave these things to chance or to the black magic of guesswork. You can adjust your listings and watch your selling manager stats to try to see how you're doing. Use the eBay-sponsored Listing Analytics app developed in conjunction with Terapeak and offered through eBay's Apps Center platform.

What Listing Analytics Can Do for You

Listing Analytics, the most popular eBay Apps Center application of all time, can tell you any number of things about any group of your auctions that you choose to ask it about, including:

• Where it appears in search results
• How many people have seen it in search results
• How many of those have actually clicked through
• How your top competitors are doing along similar metrics
• Charts that plot much of this performance data for you over time
• Which of your listings performs best, and which worst

The tool itself is quite simple to use, offering a search box that you can use to search through your auctions. Each search shows a list of matching auctions with all of this detail and a link at the far-left that displays charts when you click on it. It's also free.

Activating Listing Analytics

To activate Listing Analytics for your eBay selling account, visit the Listing Analytics homepage or follow these steps:

1. Visit your My eBay page
2. Click on the Applications tab
3. Scroll to the "Featured Apps" box and click "See All" at the upper-right hand corner of the box
4. In the search box that appears, type "Listing Analytics" and click the "Search" button
5. When the Listing Analytics app appears in your app search results, click the "Get it Free" link
6. On the following page, check both check boxes to indicate that you accept terms and conditions, then click the "Confirm Subscription" button

You'll now find Listing Analytics available on the Applications tab in your My eBay area and can launch and use it to monitor, and ultimately improve, your listing performance.

Analytics to the Max

If you want to take your research and analytics a step further, marry your use of Listing Analytics to two additional apps available in the app store that provide complementary information:

• Smart Counter Analytics - Smart Counter Analytics provides a complementary set of details that Listing Analytics does not, including best dates times for your listings, regional and national success rates, and most cross-visited listings.
• Terapeak - Terapeak provides detailed marketplace research including things like hot categories, hot items with the categories in which you sell, current success rates for items like yours, category trends, and top searches.

For each of these apps, follow the same instructions to install them that you used above for the Listing Analytics app, replacing the search for "Listing Analytics" with a search for "Smart Counter Analytics" or "TeraPeak" in each case.

Neither of these additional apps is free, but both are valuable in their own right and well worth the subscription rates involved if you're a determined seller that wants to have the clearest and most accurate picture of the eBay marketplace and your listings' place within it.