eBay Promoted Listings Direct vs Halo Sales - How Can You Tell?
UPDATE 7-13-24
eBay has introduced a new Ads Dashboard experience that promised to be more intuitive and advanced, but sellers say it provides less transparency and visibility into business critical advertising metrics - including no longer showing if sales were made with Direct or Halo ad attribution.

eBay made some major changes to Promoted Listings ad attribution on March 30th that have left some sellers scratching their heads about how to determine which ad fees come from direct sales vs what eBay is now calling "halo" sales.

We will be expanding what we qualify and report as an Attributed Sale for Promoted Listings Standard to include when a buyer clicks on one of your Standard ads and then purchases any of your Promoted Listings Standard items within 30 days.
What is a Halo Item sale for Promoted Listings Standard?
A Halo Item sale is the type of sale when a buyer clicks on one of your Standard ads and purchases a different Promoted Listings Standard item from you within 30 days.
A Halo Item refers to a purchased item from a Promoted Listings Standard campaign that resulted from an initial click (from the same buyer) on a different Promoted Listings Standard item of yours.
The ad fee for a Halo Item sale will be calculated based on the ad rate in effect for the purchased item at the time of the sale. To view which sales are Halo Item sales, see your Sales report, accessible from your advertising dashboard.
What is a Direct sale for Promoted Listings Standard?
A Direct sale is when a buyer purchases the same item that was featured in the Standard ad they originally clicked on within 30 days.
Previously, all sales from Promoted Listings Standard were Direct sales, but with the addition of Halo Item sales, we now have both Direct and Halo Item sales that, in aggregate, make up the Sales metric in your dashboards and reporting.
To view which sales are Direct vs Halo Item sales, see your Sales report, accessible from your advertising dashboard.
So where can you find the reports showing Direct vs Halo sales? It's in a new Sales report page that can be found on the Advertising Dashboard or at:
https://pls.ebay.com/plsweb/sales

This new report page has a column that shows whether sales are attributed to Direct or Halo ads.

And you can also download the information in CSV file format.

Now that you know where to find the data - I'd love to know if sellers are seeing significant changes to their Promoted Listings with this new attribution model.
Are you getting more sales due to the "halo" effect or are you still mostly seeing direct sales? Let us know in the comments below!
I had a customer open THREE separate INAD cases back to back in Feb. She told a bunch of falsehoods in her comments on the case and refused to provide pictures to back up what she was saying, so I called her out on in it with proof that her statements were untrue.
Even though I knew she was trying to scam me, of course, I approved the returns [all 3] and provided a pre-paid shipping label.
She never sent anything back. I got 3 messages from eBay's system saying "We've closed your buyer's return because we have no record that they shipped the item back to you."
However, eBay's system counted all of them against me in my Service Metrics, causing my "Item not as described returns" rate to be: 0.98% even though the buyer was an obvious scammer and didn't return the items.
I didn't have to refund her since she never shipped anything back so there's not a problem there and eBay did remove her feedback, but eBay still counted the cases against me in my 'service metrics' percentage making me look bad in comparison to my peers.