Impressions are easy to understand and easy to increase. Conversions require more work to interpret. This gap in difficulty has led sellers across every major marketplace era to optimise for the wrong thing, repeatedly, and the historical record on this is pretty clear.
The eBay Promoted Listings Phase
When eBay expanded its promoted listings programme significantly around 2017, seller forums filled with posts celebrating impression counts. Sellers would report reaching tens of thousands of impressions per week as evidence their campaigns were succeeding. Fewer posts asked what percentage of those impressions resulted in a click, and fewer still asked what percentage of clicks resulted in a purchase.
Impressions Are Not Neutral Data
Here is what the impression-chasing mindset misses: a high impression count on a poorly matched keyword tells you that your ad appeared in front of people who were not looking for your product. That is not reach, it is mismatch. The analytical error is treating any metric that goes up as a positive signal without checking what it actually represents.
Students learning about marketplace advertising should build the habit of reading metrics in sequence. Impressions lead to clicks, clicks lead to conversions. A problem at any stage in that sequence requires a different response, and conflating them leads to wrong diagnoses and wasted spend.
- High impressions with low clicks suggest keyword mismatch
- High clicks with low conversions suggest listing problems
- Optimising impressions alone addresses neither issue