eBay's Jordan Koene Discusses Search Tools & Data

Key Takeaways

[Music] hello I'm Mar Newland with search engine General I'm here at the search metrics conference in San Francisco with Jordan from eBay what are you do at eBay I am um one of our leads in uh the SEO team and I manage our content development and uh SEO track now um you were saying you have a huge amount of internal data you've got a lot of 40 people on the team you've got a lot of business units who also want information um how are you uh working with such a large team how do you develop it and why do you have both internal data as well as using external tools yeah that's a great question um working with a big team is always challenging especially in a big company it's uh it's like a matrix organization so so you're always jockeying to to get different data get different information and you're ultimately trying to find some balance of Truth something that everyone can agree on right um so whether it's whether it's using your internal data or using external data uh what we ultimately try to find is something that we can have that that will cover all of our business cases so um something that can help us manage on a global scale but then also um reach some sort of scale right because eBay is a very big site so those are the two very big prerequisites when we're looking at external data to help us validate what what we're seeing internally and what kind of differences do you see well that's that's a very good question um you know sometimes sometimes we see um we see some some some very big differences and and the differences are typically uh when we're looking at how we Benchmark ourselves to competitors and so external tools will sometimes sway one way or another for eBay against eBay or for eBay and um and we'll we'll notice that you know um our internal data is is telling us the contrary uh so it's kind of a funny thing right because it's a it's a it's a it's a self-positive you know when you're when your internal data is saying oh you're doing great but the external data is telling you something different so that's when we start to kind of get the thinking caps on and kind of Deep dive into what does that mean which is why we use third party data right because that's the only way you're going to get that Insight often times your internal data is giving you um a positive answer that that isn't necessarily true can you give a specific example for example where you've used such metrics in your own data and said okay here's a difference and and why has that difference occurred and what have you done about it and yeah um you know because the site is so large you know and we get a lot of direct traffic um often times uh we have situations where we're working with a particular vertical right say take example fashion or Electronics um and they get their data can be very hard to parse it can be very hard to divide um what is electronics actually getting in the ecosystem of eBay versus all the other verticals or just what's happening naturally on the site so when you're looking at internal data sometimes you can see that that a particular vertical is performing in a very strong way but from an SEO perspective they may be very weak and that could be from product changes that could be from Google changes um historically we've had some very interesting ones around Fashion um fashion is a very graphic heavy you know they trying to build a very unique experience and that can that can sometimes create challenges for a search engine and when when product teams make big changes um in in vertical such as fashion we can see major drops that they're not seeing internally just because organically they're doing very well and sales are still good people are still visiting it because the ecosystem of eBay is so large yeah but externally from from from an SEO perspective they're really suffering very interesting if people want to find out more and uh connect with you how do they do that sure uh they can find me on Twitter um my Twitter handle is JT Cooney and that's my my my name Jordan Thomas and then Cooney last name k o e n e Jordan thank you very much have a great show I'm Mar newans with search engine Journal I'll see you next time [Music]