Listing enhancement results - seemingly disappointing

[saige Dismantled]

I have two active listing enhancements L$1699 every 15 days so they show as featered items on the home page of marketplace. I have looked at the featured items on the home page and scrolled through them many times over the first 3 days both logged in and not. I have never seen one of my listings appear. I see many of the same ones again and again and again.

 

What am I paying for?  What gives?

 

bigsistersarah

Big Sister RE

[Darrius Gothly]

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bigsistersarah wrote:

What am I paying for?  What gives?

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Umm .. a warm fuzzy feeling?

Some time ago I did a serious analysis of the ads being shown in the scroller. I set up a software robot that would probe the home page of Marketplace and take note of the ads displayed along with the owners of those ads. I found that the distribution was seriously skewed toward high paying advertisers and that lower paying merchants had little to no representation.

Placing your ads on Category and sub-Category pages increases your odds of having your ad shown, but when you factor in human nature and the tendency of people to "blind out" the ads .. your actual click-through rate is pitifully low.

You CAN improve the odds by creating a product image that is very eye-catching. But that takes artistic and marketing skill .. something I do not possess. You can also help yourself by choosing to sell only into product niches with little to no competition but a high demand. (If you can find one.)

What you CANNOT do is find any statistics or data that accurately reflects performance of your ads. Linden Lab refuses to provide anything more than "since the dawn of time" numbers. Unless you are able to pull those numbers every day with no variation in the time of day pulled then you will not be able to create your own stats either.

My personal summation: It's a Carny game where no one wins but the Carny.

[saige Dismantled]

Thanks for that. It would not bother me if i did not see my ad from random testing if I didn't continue to see many of the same ads over and over. This leads me to believe what you are saying that the ads are seriously skewed in someone's favor (perhaps these repetitive ads are Linden owned/run vendors).

I am a software developer myself. I know about the temptations of skewing things in your favor because you write the code. Second Life could improve the experience immensely in my opinion if they leveled the playing field and let the little guy have his place in the game but that is a risk Linden Labs doesn't seem to be willing to take.

 

 

[Darrius Gothly]

Paranoid though I may be, I have to clarify something. I have no proof of any rational sort that the top placements in the scrolling ads are owned by LL Alts (or past Alts). It's tempting to think but .. *sigh* .. pretty scary to contemplate even at the easiest slant. If the folks that run LL were to be that dishonest, I daresay not a one of the proven non-LL people would make any money at all. And we have ample proof that there are many known non-LL people making a sizeable income from SL.

However there is a very firmly set group of people that do have their ads shown on every refresh and in every "pull" of the ads for a scroller. I've seen the same ad shown on every pull, and have a sneaking suspicion I've seen the same ad twice on the same pull. (But I can't find the doggone data to prove it right now.)

While I cannot put any credence to the fear .. or feeling .. that there are some backroom shenanigans going on that benefit members of the LL team, I can absolutely support the claim that there are some people getting way too much exposure at the expense of the "sullied masses" that pay the same rates for far less benefit.

And the fact that LL steadfastly refuses to provide useable data to prove otherwise? Just proves the point. In a court of law you may be innocent until proven guilty, but in this world you are known to be guilty until you put forth the data showing otherwise. Especially when the data is so easy to provide as this.

[ChinRey]

If you click on the Listing enhancments link at your merchant home page you'll get stats how many impressions and click-throughs you got for your money.

I know nothing about Darrius' claim that the display ratio is skewed but one thing I can promise you is that once you see those figures you'll realize it's not worth the money.