The geo-targetting version of WordBay has been around for a few weeks now, so I just wondered how this is performing for you, if you are using it.
To be honest I have so far only had one sale where I could definitely put it down to the geo-targetting doing its work - a UK sale on a page I know defaults to US - but the vast majority of my search traffic is from the US anyway, so I think it’s more to do with that. Still, it would be cool to get a sale or two from Hong Kong or Spain just so I knew it was worth it!
Let me know how you are doing!
Posted on October 9th, 2008 by markowe
Filed under: Uncategorized
My sites are still not up properly… trouble with the author… but the splits on my clicks so far are:
UK 80 (ish, I have deducted what I think were my own test clicks)
US 37
AU 1
So… assuming I get my content finished and “juice” the sites I am expecting it to make a big difference…
Interesting - you are targetting UK, right, the US clicks are incidental? It could end up being the other way around once you really get going!
Yeah it is the other way round now… i have a .co.uk domain… but now 50% of traffic is US…. 20% UK and 30% ROW.
The domain in question was not bought for this purpose…. normally I would not use a .co.uk for ebay!!
Google will automatically geo that site for UK search because of the TLD… but most traffic still comes from US… bit of a muddle really…
however, I have another two wordbay sites under construction and domains for at least three more… all .coms
Either way, I think the geo-targetting functionality was well worth it and am looking forward to more results in the future, once I move my best performing site over from an old customised version of the plugin that I am reluctant to change.
There is kind of another flaw that springs to mind, similar to the one I mentioned whereby you get, say, Swedish results, but Sweden is not part of the EPN scheme, so you don’t earn anything. Namely the language issue - a visitor coming from a non-English speaking country will get results for keywords “velvet dog stairs”, but there may be next to nothing available through their local eBay site with those keywords because most listings are in their local language…
But still, I think it’s a good move overall, especially for capturing those lucrative UK and US markets, while all the rest are probably a negligible volume anyway…
I had a couple of clicks from Australia.
My only concern with this plug / WP is that it wont convert as well as BANS… I mean BANS is a sales machine… WP cannot really compete with that.
That said BANS sites have been dropping like flies lately… I am pretty confident my WP sites will not be following them!
Ok there is another problem with the GEO targetting.
If you set “Location for dispatch of items” to “Any Country / Region” it gets overridden by the GEO settings.
This can be a real pain, as a lot of the stuff I list ships worldwide… so, stuff that is actually UK based but ships World Wide will not show on a UK geo target… hope that makes sense.
So I now do “if ($first_location != ‘-15′){” to stop geo targeting changing the location from “Any Country / Region”… the full block:
for ($i = 0; $i < sizeof($locals); $i++){
if ($userCountry == $locals[$i][1]){
$first_siteID = $locals[$i][2];
$first_placementID = $locals[$i][3];
if ($first_location != ‘-15′){
$first_location = $locals[$i][4];
}
break;
}
}
It would be good if that were made an admin setting to… like have a “do not override any country / region” check box next to the “enable geo targeting” option.
Jez
Jez
That’s a good point - strange we never thought of that.
Yes, I will try to make that an admin option asap, though not before early next week as I’m not around this weekend.
By the way, this isn’t the same problem as someone just mentioned on this page, is it?: http://www.itsgottabered.com/wordbay/about/#comment-267
Thanks for this feedback guys. Phew, don’t know how that bug managed to hide away for a whole month, but it could have affected geotargetted results quite a lot.
Check out the new version, and the short write-up on the homepage, I have fixed the bugs and added the override functionality!
Jez, regarding the Bid Now and Buy Now links - yes, you would have to regex those out. The RSS feed is basically a “packaged” version of data from the API and all those tables and things are already in there, as well as the text that you see, and you have no real choice over what you get. As far as I can remember, these all link to the same page anyway!
It wouldn’t be difficult to do it, of course - we can discuss what the most useful implementation would be. Get rid of them altogether? Or maybe replace them with something that doesn’t leave such an obvious eBay footprint, like “Buy it!”, “Bid on it!” or something. Then maybe I would make it a back-end option - for the user to specify the replacement text. There is then the issue of other languages - I don’t feel like searching for “Fai un’offerta” and all the rest of it! But probably English still has the biggest footprint problem anyway…