How's Your Auction Doing? A Guide to BiddingForGood Reports
BiddingForGood has a wealth of tools to help you run a high-performing auction. I’m here to tell you all about a very useful part of our suite that you might not know much about: reports!
For example, the Sponsor/Donor by Item Report gives you a list of all of the items you have entered and their donors. The Registered Users Report provides a list of everyone who has registered to bid on your auction and anyone who has placed a bid or submitted a donation. However, there are also a couple of reports that are extremely valuable that require a little more digging to understand. The Auction Activity Report and End of Auction Report are the two I’d like to take a closer look at.
The Auction Activity Report is one of the most important reports available to you. It gives you a summary of:
- Total dollar amount of high bids
- Number of bids placed so far
- Number of items with bids
- Which items have bids
- Number of bids on each item
- Which items have watches
- Number of watches on each item
You should check this report daily during your auction, because it gives you valuable insight into how you can increase the bid activity on your auction. If you find there are some amazing items that have no bids but a lot of watches, you should feature those items on your homepage and in your emails. Post about them on Facebook or Tweet about them. Take those interested watchers and turn them into bidders!
If the end of your auction is approaching, and you see that there’s a category where none of the items have bids or watches, you may want lower the opening bids a bit. You can then promote the markdowns and it may be just the nudge bidders need to start bidding.
Your Auction Activity Report can offer you a concrete look at how your auction is doing. If it’s day three of your auction and you feel nervous about how you’re doing, you can take a look at the report to get some numbers. You may find you’re doing much better than you thought you were!
Be sure to keep an eye on your Auction Activity Report in the final days of your auction. (Don’t’ forget to send out those final reminder emails). You’ll most likely see a major uptick in bidding in those last few days!
The End of Auction Report will offer you a wealth of information about your online auction’s performance once it has ended. It will even offer you some comparison data about how you’re auction performed compared with others in your cause group. Some of the key information on this report includes:
- Bid Activity Per Day: A graph illustrating where the peaks and valleys were in your auction’s bid activity.
- Key Auction Metrics: Gross revenue, net revenue, percentage of items sold, etc.
- Audience Engagement: Bids per bidder, items sold per bidder, watches on items, etc.
- Top 10 Performing Categories: Number of items sold per category, revenue raised per category, bids per category, etc.
- Email Activity: If you sent emails through our tool, this will show you the delivery rate, open rate, and click rate of your email sends.
To give you an idea of what you can learn from the report, the Bid Activity graph will allow to find out if the bids went up on the days you sent out your emails or when you Tweeted. Did starting promotions six weeks ahead of time pay off? If you see a major surge of bidding on the first day, you can be certain it did.
Your Top 10 Performing Categories will also show you which items were the money makers. Work on getting more of those items for your next auction, and you’ll likely see even more success.
There’s a lot of information here, so if you’d like some help interpreting it, you can schedule an "end of auction consultation" with your auction expert to go through the report. If you aren’t sure who your auction expert is you can email support@biddingforgood.com.