eBay to expand into Jobs, Property and Travel

eBay.co.uk is looking to diversify its auction model into new business areas. It was revealed that the site was in talks with several big brands to support its move into Jobs, Property and Travel.

The site's "Motors" channel is its most successful niche development. Although eBay has tried to make a travel channel work in the past, they have decided to get help from one of the bigger travel companies in the UK (not XL holidays...) While eBay.com uses the excellent Expedia as a branded travel partner, the UK site is still out for tender. A joint revenue share will be available for the right company with a big enough brand and a capable development team.

Recruitment websites
As the recruitment and property markets have taken big financial hits recently, travel will be probably be the channel developed first. It will be interesting to see how a Jobs section will function with eBay's community.
I have worked on numerous recruitment websites and count myself as an expert at recruitment SEO and while each recruitment site works within its own niche, all sites function in more or less the same way so any new or original functionality would attract candidates.

The auction model won't need to be applied to each of the new channels and Buy It Now could be a good option for some of the products and services on offer. eBay will be quite flexible and will welcome creative ideas to provide a compelling service in these areas.

Travel websites
While several travel sites struggle with the volatile fuel prices, the biggest companies, Thomson and First Choice continue to achieve good levels of profit, this stems from the general lack of confidence in smaller travel companies after XL went bust and left 80,000 people stranded. eBay would want to work with a larger brand for this project too, so First Choice/Thomson would be most likely to begin the partnership with eBay.

Last Click Wins? The Online Marketing Lottery

The "Last Click" model is a system that attributes a sale to the online marketing channel that got the sale. So if a user clicks on your PPC ad on Google and proceeds to buy from your website, PPC is attributed the sale. If we know that PPC generates 40% of your weekly sales, you can calculate spend for PPC. You can do the same with all the channels using various website tracking and analytics software. Some of the other channels include: natural search (SEO), paid search (PPC), display advertising (banners and placements) and email (marketing newsletters).

Your online marketing channels should perform better as a whole than in isolation. While this seems like an obvious statement, I mean it is because of the other supporting channels you "Warm up" the customer.

So a channel that is not attributed a sale (using the "Last Click" model), may have helped a sale happen in another channel. This is the "Warm up" process.

Here is an example:

1. A user reads a positive review of your garden furniture on an affiliate site.

2. The user sees the garden furniture brand name on the affiliate site.

3. The user searches Google for the official site.

4. The user finds the official site in the natural search results and purchases.

So all credit goes to the SEO (Natural Search) marketing channel, when the affiliate channel helped the process, and might have swayed the user in the purchase.

The Last Click model doesn’t reflect the combined effect of all the channels. Ideally we would want the Affiliate and SEO channels to be credited with this sale. Otherwise, a quick look through our sales chart will show Affiliates contributed no sales. An online marketing manager might then decide to scrap their Affiliate channel, because they didn't see where it contributed value to the user journey.

Solving this problem will take more advanced Clickstream Analysis software, but as all E-Business depends on accurately plotting the user journey, this software is either in use now or in development.

Ecommerce will be a great place once this software is available commonly. The level of detail in which you can measure the performance of your online marketing spend will only encourage businesses to go online. While initially there could be some data protection issues and users against in depth tracking, in time this will be less of a problem.

Good clickstream analysis will enable E-Commerce to become even more cost effective and predictable; where else can you get that right now?