“We actually buy the word ‘eBay,’ which is very, very unintuitive. We’ve done numerous, numerous tests on this, because every time I go and say, ‘We buy the keyword, eBay’, people come back and say, ‘You’re an idiot. Why are you buying the keyword eBay? Everybody knows eBay. You don’t need to buy the keyword eBay.’ says Matt Ackley, eBay’s VP of Net Marketing.
“We have proven this through analytics … over and over again that it is actually incremental to buy the keyword eBay.
“The reason we believe it is such that there are different types of users … [who] use search in different ways. … There’s probably users who essentially, we say, ‘Put their faith in Google. In Google we trust, and I’m just going to click on the organic search results because I trust the Google algorithm 
.’ Then, there’s the group of users who say, ‘You know what? If somebody’s willing to pay for something, they’ve probably got something of quality to sell.”
“So, we’ve seen that by buying keyword eBay, we actually get incremental traffic. Now, of course, we cannibalize the natural search or the organic search results. We’re paying for traffic that supposedly we would have gotten for free, and that’s always the question internally, ‘Why are you doing this?’ But, we’ve run the data over and over again.”
o Google’s One-Box presents new challenges
“Our site name is the same as our [stock] ticker symbol — so when you do a search on eBay, actually, the ticker symbol and quote comes up at the top of the natural search listings, which effectively drops our first organic result down to what would be like the third position. … I went to the CEO at one point and said, ‘You know we could probably save a ton of money if you changed the ticker symbol.’ That didn’t go over too well.”
Read the full interview of Matt Ackley at MarketingSherpa.com
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