Ebay to offer brands consumer insights

Ebay is planning to share consumer insights with the marketing community about the way users shop and search on its site for the first time as it bids to boost its appeal to would-be advertisers and for ads on the platform and elsewhere to be more “inspirational” to shoppers.

Ebay

The online marketplace, which recently unveiled a radical new Pinterest-style site redesign and logo, is to release a regular shopping trends “barometer” as part of its moves to become “the new Ebay”.

The Advertising Barometer will offer the marketing industry insights into seasonal shopping trends based the wealth of behavioural data the site garners from its users. As with other similar pieces of research, from sites such as Google, sensitive user data will not be divulged to brands.

Reports be shared with marketers via email and on Ebay Advertising’s website.

Brands and media planners will be encouraged to get in touch with Ebay about topics they may find of use for future Barometers or more pressing real-time insights they need about shopping behaviour to inform their seasonal marketing strategies, both on and offline.

Phuong Nguyen, Ebay UK’s head of advertising, told Marketing Week the Barometer and the company’s wider approach to share more insights with partners will help challenge brands’ tried and tested ways of marketing to shoppers.

He added: “We have the ability to tell brands something they didn’t know and challenge marketing mentalities. We have a big repository of data and while lots of data is inferred, ours is observed…we can segment by [gender], [location] and we even know if someone’s in the market to buy a car.”

Ebay’s latest redesign centres around inspiring people to buy products, rather than just acting as a tool for users who are already in the market to purchase. Users can create scrolling “feeds” of products based on their interests – such as smartphones or fashion – which will be supplemented with additional items they may be interested in based on their purchase and search history.

Nguyen said this new design could soon open up more possibilities for the company to offer new ad formats that “enhance” the browsing experience and the emergence of more brand campaigns rather than just call to action ads.

“You may see many more propositions and formats that the industry has never seen before on Ebay. This interest-based notion of being inspired throws a massive hand grenade into the world of brand marketing and completely turns the way marketers have been trying to execute for decades on its head because inspiration will be in the hands of the consumers,” he said.

Ebay is due to release financial results for its third quarter on Wednesday 17 October. It increased revenue by 23 per cent year on year to $3.4bn (£2.1bn) in the three months to 30 June. Of that figure, $513m (£320m) came from “total marketing services and other revenues”, an increase of 27 per cent year on year.

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