Lesson 8

How Can I Increase the Traffic to My Listings?

You've mastered the many ways you can use HammerTap to quickly optimize your listings! How does it feel to know you're on your way to making more money on every listing?!

But, I know what you’re thinking, what good is an optimized listing if it isn't getting enough traffic, right? Well, today I'm going to show you how HammerTap can help you increase the traffic to your listings.

Buyers vs. Shoppers

If we're looking to increase traffic, we first need to understand how people are using eBay.

Most buyers come to eBay already knowing what they are looking for. This makes the search bar their primary target because it's the fastest way for them to find the product they want. They simply type in their keywords, and once they click that search button, only those listings that match their combination of keywords will be displayed. This means that if you're listings don't include those keywords buyers are searching for, they'll never even see your listings, let alone buy from you. The closer your listing title matches the keywords buyers type in, the more attention you'll receive. Your listing title is how buyers find you!

Now, you may have noticed that I've only used the word buyers and I haven't said shoppers. Do you think there's a difference between these two? On eBay there certainly is!

A shopper simply browses; they're window shopping to see if there's anything that might catch their eye. For example, when I go to the mall with my girlfriends, I often don't have a particular item I want to buy in mind. I'm a shopper. I might buy something if I really like it, but I'm almost just as likely to head home without purchasing anything. However, my husband never goes to the mall unless he knows exactly what he's looking for. He's a buyer. He goes when he wants or needs something specific, and he walks in, says, "I want that one," and he's done.

You want buyers coming to your listings. Buyers are much more likely to purchase your product because it's exactly what they're looking for. They're also often willing to pay a higher price, while shoppers are more likely to be a little more price-sensitive. But how do you pick the right combination of keywords to ensure you're pulling buyers to your listings, and not just attracting shoppers?

Well, HammerTap is here to save the day again! Let’s go back to those question reports in the Findings Window.

This time we're going to look at the very last question, What Title Keywords Should I Use? So, go ahead and open up your Filtered Earbuds report, click , and I’ll show you what just might be one of the coolest HammerTap reports.

The Title Keywords Report

We’ve already looked at this report in Lesson 4 when we were searching for products. Now, we’re going to use it to build our titles, as the title of the report implies. This report shows you every single keyword that is included in all of the listing titles in your results. In my filtered research, I have 262 listings, so that’s a lot of keywords.

The keyword report does not include words from subtitles or descriptions because HammerTap only searches the actual listing titles.

The report starts with a quick summary of your overall number of listings, ASP, and LSR so you have these numbers to use as benchmarks when you’re deciding which words to include in your title. There are also a variety of sorting and filtering options (which we’ll come back to), and then there’s the entire list of keywords.

Here’s the first portion of my keyword chart:

For each keyword, the report shows you how many listings it was included in, and then the average price and success rate of those listings (increases are in green, decreases in red). We’ll use these numbers to decide which keywords to include in our title.

You’ll notice that the first three keywords—INK, D (this is counted as a separate keyword because we separated it from ink with an ’), and SKULLCANDY—all have average prices and success rates equal to the overall averages. This is because they were the search terms we used in our search, so all of the listings include them.

Now, let’s use the keyword report to build the title that will bring us the traffic we’re looking for. Back in Lesson 2, when we were trying to figure out which keywords to include, we couldn’t decide if it was better to use headphones, earbuds, or earphones. Well, now, we’re not interested in what the sellers are putting in their titles. Instead, we want to know what most buyers are searching for and paying for!

In the screenshot of my results we can see several choices. We have HEADPHONES, BUDS, and EARBUDS. I also scrolled down through the rest of my list and found EARBUD (without the ‘s’), EARPHONE, and HEADSET. We now have the information we need to make an educated and strategic decision on which of these we should include in our title.

First, notice that BUDS and HEADPHONES have the highest prices. This means that if we had an ASP strategy we would want to include these keywords. We can either include both of them, or we can just pick one. If we were only picking one I’d go with BUDS, since it gets the higher price.

For the keywords included in my screenshot above, only HEADPHONES has a success rate that improves on the overall LSR, and that’s only by 0.56%. However, all three of the keywords I found when I scrolled down—EARBUD, EARPHONE, and HEADSET—all had 100% listing success rates. This makes it an absolute no-brainer when you’re building a title based on an LSR strategy.

So, we’ve looked at comparing words based on which would be better for our strategy, but what if you just want to see those keywords that get you the highest ASP? Well, let’s sort our list by Average Price. Simply scroll up to the Sort By: option and select Average Price.

This will rearrange your results and show you those keywords that get the highest prices in descending order.

Our highest paying keyword is MACRED (which is a color), and we can see that these listings got almost $6 more than the average price. However, notice the number of listings. Since there are only three, it isn’t guaranteed to get us that much higher of a price. But if you had red ink’d earbuds to sell on eBay, I would recommend including MACRED in the listing title.

If we look down the list, you can quickly pick out the keywords that were included in a lot of listings. Both NIP (an abbreviation for “new in package�) and SMOKIN (which is another way to describe these specific Skullcandy earbuds) have been proven to increase our ASP.

So, if I was building a title based on an ASP strategy, my title might look something like this: New Skullcandy MacRed Ink'd Headphones Smokin Buds NIP. This title would obviously only apply for red earbuds, but I could change the color and the rest of the title would stay the same. But now, instead of just hoping that my title will pull in high-paying buyers' searches, I know it will. I’ve used keywords I know high-paying buyers are using when they search for these earbuds.

These same techniques can be used to build a title for a listing with a LSR strategy. If I sort the keywords by % Sold I can quickly pick out those that will make my listings more likely to sell and build the perfect title for this strategy.

But what if I’m looking for good combination strategy options? If I’m trying to build a title that will get me both good sales prices and success rates, I can use some keywords that have good prices and also include keywords that have high success rates. Or, I can search through my list and find only keywords that increase both figures.

We can use HammerTap’s filter options to make these keywords even easier to find. Simply put the ASP in the Minimum Avg. Price field and the LSR in the Minimum % Sold field. Here’s what mine looks like (I rounded to down to $12.00 and up to 82%):

Then just click and your report will only display keywords that are above these minimums. Try it out within your report and you’ll see how easy it will make finding those keywords that will increase both your listing’s ASP and LSR.

Assignment #8: Build your own listing title!

I know you’re thrilled with how much easier this report will make building successful listing titles, so see what you can cook up for your own listings! Either run a new Product Search or check out a saved report for one of your products, and build your listing title based on your selling strategy.

CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve finished another lesson. You’re well on your way to being a HammerTap Master! Next time we’re going to talk about how you can use HammerTap to beat out your competitors—stay tuned! And don’t forget to send your questions to our support team!

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