eBay's New View Counting Policy & Reports
Changes to how eBay counts and displays listing views recently went into effect and it's causing quite a bit of confusion and concern as sellers are seeing view counts drastically change.
Liz Morton ~ Founder
There are two important parts to this update - eBay will be filtering out "non-human" bot traffic and will be changing the default display to show only views from a rolling 30 day period.
To give you clearer insight into your listings’ performance, we’re changing to a more accurate way of counting page views, and updating how we display traffic data on your listings
- To give you cleaner performance data, we’ll now show a 30-day rolling count of listing views instead of a lifetime count.
- You’ll still be able to access data for the past 2 years in a new listing traffic history report.
The current page view numbers on your listings count various types of traffic, including a significant amount of non-human traffic—one example is programs called “bots” that scan websites and now account for approximately 40% of internet traffic...
...while most sellers will see a significant drop in page view numbers, the impact of filtering out more non-human traffic may vary. Importantly, the actual traffic from potential buyers to listings isn’t changing. We’re just updating what types of traffic we count as page views to more accurately show views by potential buyers.
30-day rolling data makes it easier to spot trends and optimize listings. However, we know some sellers prefer to have data that spans a longer period, so a new listing traffic history report will show the past 2 years of view counts for each listing.
Showing 30-day rolling data rather than lifetime views is very important- if you are seeing a drastic change from previous views, it may not all be bot traffic being filtered, some of it could be the result of the display showing a shorter timeframe than it did previously.
Here's what the new data looks like in Seller Hub:
If you want to see data for a different timeframe, you'll need to click on the number under "views" to access the report page for that listing.
Once you're on the Listing Traffic History page, you can select 7 days, 30 days, 90 days, 6 months, past year, or past 2 years. This listing started in January, so that's as far back as the report goes for this example.
One major UX problem I want to point out here is the designers of the Listing Traffic History report obviously didn't talk to the designers of the Ad Dashboard.
The Listing Traffic History report uses the turquoise/green color to represent Organic traffic and the purple/pink color to represent Promoted Listings traffic - but the Ad Dashboard report is exactly the opposite.
If you're experiencing a sudden decline in views, the changes outlined above are one very likely culprit.
That being said, there are some users reporting seeing view counts that don't make sense even with the changes and eBay community staff have acknowledged there's a current known technical issue causing inaccurate view statistics to be displayed.
If that's you, here's the ticket number to provide when contacting support.
There is a known issue some are experiencing where view counts are off. It's correct on the back end, but not being reflected accurately for your view. The tech team is aware and working on a fix but it never hurts to provide them with more examples. If you'd like to be added to the ticket, go here to find what info you'll need to provide Customer Support.
Incorrect number of views showing (May 14, 2022)
Reference ID: ALERT13785
Provide Seller ID:
Provide Item Number:
Provide Customer Site:
