eBay, Google Agree to Mutual Negative-Feedback Withdrawal

The eBay marketing “experiment” that began earlier this month with the cancellation of the auction giant’s Google AdWords campaign has finally ended. EBay resumed its Google AdWords advertising on Friday, ending a 10-day pullout that began when Google announced plans to throw a Google Checkoout Freedom Party for eBay merchants attending the eBay Live annual seller conference in Boston.

“We found that we were not as dependent on Google AdWords as some may have thought,” eBay spokesman Hani Durzy told AuctionBytes. “By re-allocating our marketing dollars to our other partners, such as Yahoo, AOL and MSN, we were able to increase traffic and find efficiencies that will enable us to drive more value to our sellers and partners going forward. We are now slowly turning AdWords back on, in a much more limited way than before.”

And for good reason. According to analysis from Hitwise, eBay–which has long been among Google’s largest advertisers–didn’t exactly suffer from the pullout. Total traffic to eBay actually rose during the AdWords boycott. More important, overall activity, including the total value of goods sold, also remained relatively steady. “From our point of view, it was a very successful test. We learned a lot,” Durzy said. “Turning it back on was always our intention.”