Swoopers dot org » swoopo stats

Placeholder Bids 201: Skewed Win Statistics

Matthew — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 05:03:18 +0000

In my previous two posts, I discussed what a closed auction is on Swoopo and how Placeholder Bids can help you get access to these exclusive auctions.

Today, I’m going to explain how the strategy of Placeholder Bids has an interesting effect on our Swoopo Analytics statistics…

Let’s Talk Win Percentages

With Swoopo Analytics, we track every single bidder and every single auction. We also know a bidder’s won/lost history and can therefore calculate a winning percentage over the history of their account.

A typical bidder (let’s call her Susan) may have 15 wins and 100 auctions participated in, meaning she has a win percentage of 15%.

This statistic alone isn’t helpful, however, because there are many other factors to consider. I won’t get into detail here, but I do want to explain what this has to do with Placeholder Bids.

The best bidders often use Placeholder Bids with regularity. So Susan has participated in 100 auctions, but let’s say in 40 of those auctions she simply placed a Placeholder Bid and then never returned to participate in the auction. (Maybe the auction remained too competitive, or she were bidding on another auction and didn’t want to be distracted or perhaps she simply had other things to do).

If Susan has 40 auctions in her history that were single bid auctions, then her win percentage would be more accurately described as 15 wins in 60 auctions. Or a win percentage of 25%.

So when considering win percentages, both for yourself and others, don’t forget to factor in Placeholder Bids. In the final post of my Placeholder Bids series, I’ll explain why you shouldn’t run from all those “pinkies” you see in Swoopo auctions.

New Data on Swoopo Changes

Matthew — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 15:15:11 +0000

There have been a few changes at Swoopo over the past few weeks. These were controversial changes for our members in the forum, who were torn about whether or not the changes were good for users.

I waited to make up my mind until I had data firmly in hand about what effect it would have. And thankfully, my data mastermind Jason was able to get me stats quickly.

Here is the average savings on Swoopo over the first 10 weeks of 2010.

So it would appear that the changes are good for users on Swoopo. Now, the techniques of the Swoopo pro will definitely change because they can no longer heavily rely on Swoop It Now to save them from a big loss. It’s also made it easier for new bidders to jump in and start winning auctions.

With the shift from Swoopo Pros to every bidder on the site, hopefully Swoopo can continue to improve their customer satisfaction and keep bidders coming back again and again.

There have also been concerned voiced that Swoopo’s traffic is down. Here’s a glimpse at the number of closed auctions by week:

It should be noted, however, that their current traffic levels are similar to those about 5-6 months ago. They’re not growing at this point, but it’s not unprecedented for them to have this many finished auctions per week.

It’ll be interesting to see what they tweak in the model going forward and how it affects everyone in the forums and at home who’re bidding and winning on Swoopo.

Updated Swoopo Manual

Matthew — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 23:40:09 +0000

Today I released an updated version of the Swoopo Manual. This is now version 1.7.

Included in this update is an all-new data set of over 30,000 analyzed auctions. And more importantly, we slice and dice that data to reveal interesting trends about how the best Swoopo bidders bid…and how they win.

Also included in this update is an item by item savings breakdown. In the previous versions I grouped items together into categories (such as TVs or Cameras). But readers of Swoopers dot org requested item breakdowns instead…and I listened!

Finally, the biggest change:

We took our huge data set and created an hour-by-hour matrix for the entire week. This shows the best hours to bid for every single day of the week. We included this in an all-new Excel download which you can grab on the “Stats” page.

Thanks as always for reading…and keep kickin’ tail on Swoopo!

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts