eBay Ads Still Off Google: How Much eBay Traffic & Google Cash Lost?

The “experiment” continues. It appears that eBay ads on Google are still nowhere to be found, consistent with what eBay spokespeople said last week — that the company would continue its AdWords fast for an indefinite period. As one example, the quintessential eBay search for “collectibles” reveals a top organic link but no paid eBay ad.

Without citing a source, Did-it’s Mark Simon says in this MediaPost piece that eBay spends — or used to spend — $26 million monthly on Google AdWords in the U.S. market. If true that’s $312 million annually.

As postscripted by Barry on the original post, Hitwise’s Bill Tancer said:

Google is the #1 source of traffic for ebay.com, accounting for 10.6% of its traffic for Tuesday 6/7/07. From daily clickstream, that percentage dropped to 9.86% for Tuesday 6/12/07, representing a near 7% drop from the previous Tuesday.

From Google’s perspective, eBay is the third most popular non-Google site visited from the Google.com domain behind MySpace and Wikipedia, accounting for 1.12% of Google’s downstream traffic for Tuesday 6/7/07. For Tuesday 6/12/07, that percentage has droped to 1.03%, a 7.5% from the previous Tuesday.

Steve Dennen, of comScore, adds the following:

The following comes from qSearch Marketer, our web-based search marketing competitive intelligence tool, and is from March 2007 for the US market. This table shows that Google accounts for 45.7% of total search click-thrus to eBay, and 39.2% of paid search click-thrus. This measures search click-thrus from the main web search channels at the leading search engines in the US. Other Web Search is predominantly AOL Search and Ask.

Source: comScore (June, 2007)

eBay should already know what percentage of its traffic comes from Google and whether and how it will suffer from the withdrawal of paid search ads from the site. The data above suggest that eBay would suffer but could certainly survive without Google’s paid search business. A more interesting question is how much money, in turn, does eBay make off that $26 million it spends on Google each month?

It’s also interesting to consider how much Yahoo might also indirectly make off of that Google traffic vis-à-vis eBay’s AdWords buy, given Yahoo’s ad partnership with eBay.