eBay's AdCommerce service came along at just the right time. I was right at the end of an experiment testing both Facebook and Google AdWords ad campaigns. Facebook was a snoozer and Google was just "ok". There's a lot of competition out there for Google Ads, and unless you have a big budget (more on that in a minute) you won't see too many results. Ebay's AdCommerce works exactly the same way Facebook and Google Ads do, but here's the thing that gives it a huge edge over all of the others for eBay sellers: the people seeing your ads are already shopping on eBay!

Eager to give it a test, I set up an account and created two ad campaigns, one for My wife's ebay store, which sells new and used clothing in popular name brands, and my own store, still in its infancy, which will sell sporting goods, games and toys. The initial results were really good for my wife's store. Mine doesn't have a lot of products yet, and I don't have them priced quite right (I'm just working on loading inventory right now, anyway).
Let me take a step back here to mention my experience with Google Adwords. They first day I had the campaign set up, which I set up with a paltry $50 per month maximum budget, they "over-served" the ad considerably. In the first two hours, they gave us $600 worth of impressions and clicks! There was a HUGE spike in traffic on my wife's store pages. In fact, I went to Google and did a few searches for "women's jeans" and keywords I knew would relate to her site, and on the second search results page, there was our advertisement, in the same column of ads as placed like Target and Wal Mart! They didn't charge us for it, thankfully, but less thankfully, when they started serving us the proper amount, the extra traffic all but disappeared. I don't have graphs of that initial trial, but I do have some graphics to show from a more recent set of campaigns just started recently (Dec 2th 2008). 

Graph #1, my new store. You can see the jump in traffic on the 4th, the day after the eBay AdCommerce campaign started.

Graph #2, my wife's more established store.  For some reason, her traffic spike almost immediately, jumping a immediately higher.

 Graph #3 Screenshot showing what our budgets are set at, and the number of "impressions" (displays of the ad) and "clicks" (people actually clicking on the ad). You can see that my store got only one click (which means that most of the spike in traffic on my site was unreleated to the ad, anyway). But my wife's traffic spike is a real result of the AdCommerce ad, and the good news - and the thing to keep in mind as a seller or store owner - is that these clicks represent actual eBay shoppers, much more likely to end in a "conversion" (or bid). That's right...nearly 1/4 million impressions and only 138 clicks. WE are hoping to get better at it as WE  learn, too. :-)