eBay Analyst Day - topic 2/7 - All Searches are not created equal...
On pg17 of the analyst presentation, eBay introduced a new metric – daily searches and stated that this is currently 345m/day. This data point is also echoed on pg31.
My guess is eBay is introducing this metric is an attempt to show they are as much a search engine (for products) as Google/Yahoo are for the broader web and to provide some scale.
Now here are several important caveats to that 345m number:
- eBay buys a lot of traffic via paid-search and their affiliate program. Most of this spend comes through in the form of searches. eBay doesn’t report exactly (pgs 64/65/304 have some data points, but avoid the specifics). Now, here’s an example of one of the 15m terms that eBay bids on: “killer bees”. When you click this, you go to this page which is… you guessed it a search.
- eBay also relies on natural search and shows it as driving 60% of registered users (p304). And lots of the natural search comes through as ….. searches
- Every front page promo, click on a category, second click in a browse sequence, etc on eBay is a search.
The point of these three caveats is that if you can NOT compare the eBay 345m/day searches apples to apples to say Google’s search volume. First, a very large number of these searches are paid for or come from natural search engines. Secondly the majority of searches on eBay are not what the rest of the internet thinks of as searches (a person entering a text string and clicking the search button). Instead, they are searches in the forms of promotions and browsing.
For apples to apples comparisons, you would need to know the number of “primary direct searches” on eBay – in other words, how many times a day do people directly enter a search term and hit “search”. eBay doesn’t report this number. My guess is:
- 345m searches – 60% purchased leaves
- 138m searches – 50% natural search driven leaves
- 69m searches – 20% browse, 25% promotion driven leaves
- 44m direct searches
Note that even this maybe high because when a user looks (clicks) at page 2+ of any search result, that is another ‘search’ and I’m guessing is included in the 345m, so you could give this another 10-30% chop if you wanted to get closer to the equivalent direct searches.
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