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frank_d

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Hey everyone!

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A disclaimer: The following post/article is not an official Fiverr statement. It’s a summary of my personal observations over how Fiverr works and I am sharing because I noticed that more and more sellers come here, stating that they “lost their ranking”.

This is my effort to provide them with some answers and some food for thought.

Hold up. Fiverr 3.0?

If Fiverr’s early days (the wild wild west days) was Fiverr 1.0 and we count the facelift in 2014 (I think?) as v2.0, then we quietly got v3.0 late last year.

Without an official announcement, without much fanfare, the website slowly rolled out a back end update which seems to have concluded late last year.

How do I know this?

This is a good time to remind you to read my disclaimer.
I have no way of actually knowing anything, no one from Fiverr shared insights with me either. This is just a gut feeling and tons of personal observation, from a seller obsessed with performance. (and figuring out how things work)

Ranking is no more

I started hinting about this mid-2020, then started actively talking about it.

Talking about ranking is moot, as there are no more results pages. Well technically there are, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Fiverr transitioned from being a search engine like Google to being a match making service like Tinder.

It no longer serves users (buyers) with pages filled with search results, ranked according to how well they are “performing”.

Fiverr also no longer counts on buyers clicking on verticals to find what they need.

It’s all about the search function.

Fiverr’s new engine tries to match a buyer with a potential seller that will be as close to a 100% ideal match as possible, as soon as possible.

A great match is when:

A) a seller offers something relative to what the buyer is searching for
and
B) a seller has great “performance”

It’s all about reducing risk for Fiverr.

Risk that the buyer won’t find someone to hire and therefore won’t spent their money.

Or risk that the buyer will not get a great service and ask for a refund, never to return again on the platform.

What is this “performance” you keep going on about?

Here comes the good stuff.

There are two kinds of performance that Fiverr keeps track of:

A) performance as a seller (converting prospects into buyers)

B) performance as a vendor (satisfying buyers, successfully completing orders)

THAT’S IT.

Fiverr doesn’t care if you are the best designer, video editor, animator, writer, what have you.

All it cares is that you can make people spend and then making sure that said people don’t ask their money back. (And therefore stay on the platform to spend some more)

I am oversimplifying things, as the system actually keeps track of a bunch of interesting metrics when serving buyers with sellers.

Which is why searching for your gig, or your competition on Fiverr, even using incognito or clearing cookies and what not, will NEVER show you anything useful.

The new engine qualifies buyers and knows a lot about them, before serving your gig their way:

-their purchase intent
-buying history
-browsing habits (I mean on site)
-how they respond to custom offers
-when they spend
-how they spend

The list is long, and I am sure that even if I am right on some of the stuff I think I understand, there are hundreds more variables that only Fiverr’s coders know.

OK, let’s say you are right. What now?

Well just like every change in life, it is always met with resistance.

The new “engine” is here to stay apparently, since its sole purpose is making the platform more money.

What should we do?

Why are people losing their “rankings” out of the blue?

This is where I will try to sound less like a lunatic and actually try to form all the observations into some -hopefully- actionable advice.

When people start noticing that their gigs are losing impressions, or that messages stop coming in, etc, it’s usually because their performance has deteriorated.

They dropped the ball somehow.

I know it always seems like it’s out of the blue, but there are indicators.

Here are some things to keep in mind.

The new system values speed and relevance over anything else.

It’s all RELEVANT: (performance A)

So performance A (being a good closer) has everything to do with how your gig is set up.

If you still think about SEO, and keywords, and ranking, you already lost the game.

Focus on your gig’s title, don’t try to capture everyone, don’t use pretty adjectives, focus on who you want to find your gig.

You need to be focused on your niche.

Relevance is key. You need to make sure that only the people you can help will find you, and that will make Fiverr LOVE your gig.

Don’t use the same keywords as what you used as a gig title. Trust me.
Fiverr 3.0 hates that.

Your tags need to be complimentary to your title. Not repeating what you say you will do.

Again: relevance.

If your gig’s description is written with “SEO” in mind, and is “keyword-rich”, you will once again underperform. Fiverr 3.0 no longer crawls for keywords, it rewards descriptions that answer questions and help convert.

The need for SPEED: (performance B)

Fiverr 3.0 loves speed.

The quicker you can respond to inquiries the better.

The sooner you get that custom offer accepted, the better.

Other factors that may show Fiverr you are rocking it:

-Delivering fast
-Buyers accepting their delivery relatively quickly
-Not getting lots of revision requests
-Not leaving order updates unanswered for too long (the “buyer has posted an update for X amount of hours” notification)
-Delivering before the “you have 12 hours to deliver” notification
-Avoiding cancellations
-Avoiding time extensions

Oh, one more thing:

Relevance and speed are just two faces of a multi-faced die, that calculates one very important thing.

Fiverr 3.0 is all about having satisfied buyers.

The platform no longer just focuses on making revenue and having gigs purchased.

The updated engine focuses solely on having happy buyers.

Which leads me to my last point for this article, to whoever wants to hear it:

Your reviews no longer matter as much. You can keep getting all 5-star reviews, and you will still experience lulls and droughts.

Because the system no longer takes public reviews into consideration, using the same weight as Fiverr 2.0.

They still count, but not as much.

And can you blame them? The majority of sellers on the platform can be phoning it in and still get a higher than 4.7 average.

The system has too many 5-star sellers for that metric to indicate anything.

If everyone is 5-stars, then no one is 5-stars. (to paraphrase something I keep saying for TRS badges.)

So unfortunately, and maybe even people gaming the system with fake reviews had something to do with this, public reviews no longer mean as much to the platform, when it calculates how happy our buyers are.

It’s a long and complex formula, but I simplified it to this for now:

Performance A + Performance B + Buyer satisfaction = Actual seller rating

I still think that “gig rotation” is not a thing. It does exist, but it would never tank successful sellers and truly valuable gigs.

So to sum up:

-When you search for your gig and find it, that’s a skewed POV, that’s not telling you the whole story. You should stop doing that.

-When your gig is served to buyers, it’s because Fiverr actually believes you can score.

-The gigs that are also presented along your offering, are also very carefully selected based on their performance. There is no “ranking”.

-When you notice a drop in sales/enquiries/impressions, start thinking about your overall performance. More often than not, there is definitely some indicator that “told” Fiverr that you were dropping the proverbial ball.

The bad news is that this will take some getting used to and sellers are once again asked to either adapt or “perish”.

The good news is that this new system is actually a lot more forgiving than the old “SEO/rank” system. Even if you drop the ball performance wise, all it takes is just a tiny spark to get things going again.

As I write this, and gave it a quick read I understand that I may have oversimplified things, or that I haven’t spelled it out as much as I could.

Please forgive me, as I have a birthday cake to attend to. 🙂

As always I will be here to answer any questions and discuss things in detail with you all.

Thank you!

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Hi Frank

These are some nice and thoughtful observation. Thank you for your sharing. Although I’m quite skeptical with the validity, but some of your points are beneficial to other sellers.

Hi there!

I am not claiming I am 100% accurate or that everything I say is correct.

You are of course free to make your own observations and contribute to this discussion.

I made this post to help people with what I think I know but to also hear from people who think they have a part of the puzzle themselves.

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Your post makes perfect sense. It’s a shift from perceived relevance/importance (SEO, reviews, etc.) to actual, real, live relevance/importance (happy buyers = more sales = more money for Fiverr). If this is happening – and I think it should – then it could have very positive longer-term effects on Fiverr’s public reputation, too. Bonus for high-quality sellers.

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Your post makes perfect sense. It’s a shift from perceived relevance/importance (SEO, reviews, etc.) to actual, real, live relevance/importance (happy buyers = more sales = more money for Fiverr). If this is happening – and I think it should – then it could have very positive longer-term effects on Fiverr’s public reputation, too. Bonus for high-quality sellers.

Thank you @melanielm for taking the time to reply.

I agree 100% that one byproduct of this shift is seeing a better marketplace where people can’t game the system anymore.

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On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

Don’t use the same keywords as what you used as a gig title. Trust me.

Fiverr 3.0 hates that.

On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

Fiverr 3.0 no longer crawls for keywords, it rewards descriptions that answer questions and help convert.

You mean don’t use words from the title in the gig description? Surely that helps keep it relevant. eg. if you say “video” or “explainer” in the gig title it’s going to be relevant (and should help) to put that word in the gig description too.

On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

Fiverr 3.0 loves speed.

The quicker you can respond to inquiries the better.

I agree they probably do, but maybe if the buyer likes a particular gig they won’t mind waiting a bit for a response (eg. the good buyers won’t expect people to wake up at 3 AM to respond immediately). eg. there are sellers with around 2-4 hours avg response times that seem to have more reviews on average than people who have 1 hour avg response times (though just from that it wouldn’t tell you whether they initially had a shorter response time to be able to start getting those reviews).

On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

The new engine qualifies buyers and knows a lot about them, before serving your gig their way:

-their purchase intent
-buying history…

Though for new buyers who haven’t purchased anything yet, checking your gig position using an icognito browser/one with no Fiverr cookies should help give an idea where your gig is currently for those sellers, or maybe those from your country or similar location based on ip address maybe.

On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

Without an official announcement, without much fanfare, the website slowly rolled out a back end update which seems to have concluded late last year.

They said in their Q2 2020 shareholder letter:

Quote

Over the last few months, we developed and rolled out an improved infrastructure for search experience. The new infrastructure is able to support multiple machine learning models across different contexts such as search and category pages, and takes into account advanced user behavioral data in communication, availability and engagement metrics in addition to textual relevance. The result is an improved search experience for our buyers which leads to better search experience and higher conversion.

So maybe the change is that or a continuation of that. ie. giving their machine learning models more and more Fiverr stats to analyse to find which are the best predictors of the best sales (maybe for those keywords?) and then using those and removing the stats that aren’t good predictors from the model/search engine ranking algorithm.

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On 3/20/2021 at 3:16 PM, uk1000 said:

You mean don’t use words from the title in the gig description? Surely that helps keep it relevant. eg. if you say “video” or “explainer” in the gig title it’s going to be relevant (and should help) to put that word in the gig description too.

I agree they probably do, but maybe if the buyer likes a particular gig they won’t mind waiting a bit for a response (eg. the good buyers won’t expect people to wake up at 3 AM to respond immediately). eg. there are sellers with around 2-4 hours avg response times that seem to have more reviews on average than people who have 1 hour avg response times (though just from that it wouldn’t tell you whether they initially had a shorter response time to be able to start getting those reviews).

Though for new buyers who haven’t purchased anything yet, checking your gig position using an icognito browser/one with no Fiverr cookies should help give an idea where your gig is currently for those sellers, or maybe those from your country or similar location based on ip address maybe.

They said in their Q2 2020 shareholder letter:

Quote

Over the last few months, we developed and rolled out an improved

infrastructure for search experience. The new infrastructure is able to support

multiple machine learning models across different contexts

such as search and category pages, and takes into account

advanced user behavioral data in communication, availability and

engagement metrics in addition to textual relevance. The result

is an improved search experience for our buyers which leads

to better search experience and higher conversion.

So maybe the change is that or a continuation of that. ie. giving their machine learning models more and more Fiverr stats to analyse to find which are the best predictors of the best sales (maybe for those keywords?) and then using those and removing the stats that aren’t good predictors from the model/search engine ranking algorithm.

What I meant re: keywords is you shouldn’t use the same words in your title AND your tags.

So if your title is “I will make an animated explainer video” none of your tags should be “animated explainer video”.

Your description actually matters very little for your gig’s serving to prospects but the general guideline is to not try to add keywords just for ranking. It will hurt your gig.

I also said “without an official announcement” as in they didn’t notify sellers of any changes.

Shareholders meetings announcements aren’t considered actual announcements to sellers as far as I am concerned. And I am both a shareholder and a seller. 🙂

And finally: Yes, Fiverr heavily uses AI and the way Fiverr works now is definitely more like a live, real-time thing that changes on the fly.

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Interesting, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Makes sense that they’d do something like that (for example, there have been many, many complaints that reviews mean nothing because everyone is a 5 star seller).

Oh, and happy birthday! Enjoy the cake! 😺

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Interesting, thank you for sharing your thoughts. Makes sense that they’d do something like that (for example, there have been many, many complaints that reviews mean nothing because everyone is a 5 star seller).

Oh, and happy birthday! Enjoy the cake! 😺

Thank you @catwriter !

Sending some virtual cake your way! 🍰

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On 3/20/2021 at 3:39 PM, catwriter said:

many complaints that reviews mean nothing because everyone is a 5 star seller

Though in the celebrtiy impersonators subcategory there doesn’t seem to be there - for gigs. eg. on page 1 of the top selling sort there’s 2 gigs with avg of 1.0 stars, one with 3.3, one with 4.2 etc. edit: when I checked - it might be different for others/when viewing at different times but there’s only 4 pages.

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There are quite a few thoughts that I think very probable from my own observations and experience and would agree with. Sellers might profit a lot from taking those into consideration.

Some points seem overly simplistic, the thing that immediately stood out for me would be speed - while true in some aspects, it could clash too much with things like happy buyers, who won’t come back for refunds, or aspects like the introduction of the up to 90-days gig delivery time, but you said yourself you simplified, and the post is already very long, of course.

Regarding

On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

It’s all about the search function.

I’d add that Fiverr also actively recommends specific sellers to specific buyers/businesses, directly, or by featuring them, which is certainly based on the combination of relevance and performance, though, so it’s not really important to even be aware of that probably, since you’d want to focus on relevance and performance anyhow.

I’m absolutely with you on the point of relevance/matching, while I don’t agree that speed is such a big factor in an absolute way and suggest it is in a relative way (if you can be fast and good, sure, go ahead, but if not, ponder whether speed or happy buyers will ultimately benefit you more).

But it’s a combination of several things, anyway, and for some aspects, categories, etc., different weighting might apply.

On 3/20/2021 at 2:53 PM, frank_d said:

Which is why searching for your gig, or your competition on Fiverr, even using incognito or clearing cookies and what not, will NEVER show you anything useful.

Well, that’s definitely good news, I haven’t looked at anything the like for many months, good to know I didn’t miss anything useful 😉 that should save a lot of people a lot of time and make forum posts less repetitive.

Happy Birthday, and thanks for taking the time for this, I’ll certainly take the time to read it again.

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On 3/20/2021 at 3:59 PM, frank_d said:

So if your title is “I will make an animated explainer video” none of your tags should be “animated explainer video”.

So what should the tags be? Something random? or grammatically twisted? Animation explaining motion picture?

Oh, I have to get video link to that last webinar ASAP.

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On 3/20/2021 at 4:07 PM, miiila said:

There are quite a few thoughts that I think very probable from my own observations and experience and would agree with. Sellers might profit a lot from taking those into consideration.

Some points seem overly simplistic, the thing that immediately stood out for me would be speed - while true in some aspects, it could clash too much with things like happy buyers, who won’t come back for refunds, or aspects like the introduction of the up to 90-days gig delivery time, but you said yourself you simplified, and the post is already very long, of course.

Regarding

Quote

It’s all about the search function.

I’d add that Fiverr also actively recommends specific sellers to specific buyers/businesses, directly, or by featuring them, which is certainly based on the combination of relevance and performance, though, so it’s not really important to even be aware of that probably, since you’d want to focus on relevance and performance anyhow.

I’m absolutely with you on the point of relevance/matching, while I don’t agree that speed is such a big factor in an absolute way and suggest it is in a relative way (if you can be fast and good, sure, go ahead, but if not, ponder whether speed or happy buyers will ultimately benefit you more).

But it’s a combination of several things, anyway, and for some aspects, categories, etc., different weighting might apply.

Quote

Which is why searching for your gig, or your competition on Fiverr, even using incognito or clearing cookies and what not, will NEVER show you anything useful.

Well, that’s definitely good news, I haven’t looked at anything the like for many months, good to know I didn’t miss anything useful 😉 that should save a lot of people a lot of time and make forum posts less repetitive.

Happy Birthday, and thanks for taking the time for this, I’ll certainly take the time to read it again.

Thank you for taking the time to contribute @miiila

It’s true I brushed over some very important and complex things in order to try to keep this short and increase the chances of people actually reading it.

I’m not saying that speed is important in the sense that you need to deliver everything ASAP.

Replying to first messages quickly is important.

Replying to a buyer update on the order page quickly is important.

Delivering a 7-day order in 5, may be somewhat important. It’s definitely an easy way for a robot to assume you are good at what you do.

However, if you deliver in 5 days and then the buyer requests 11 revisions or cancels, that changes things completely.

So yes, things are slightly more complicated as we dive into this.

@marinapomorac your tags should be complimentary. I don’t know how you immediately jumped on something extreme.

Let me give you an example: if you used animated explainer video in your title, then use your tags to describe the service or target audience.

So you can use terms like medical, corporate, startup, or whatever else you think you can do well and that is in demand.

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On 3/20/2021 at 4:19 PM, frank_d said:

your tags should be complimentary.

On 3/20/2021 at 4:19 PM, frank_d said:

medical, corporate, startup

This falls under “random words” to me. If you put just “medical” as tag does that mean F3 is going to combine buyer that typed whiteboard medical in search to that listing?

Wonder who is going to be the first to update their tags like this so we can see what that looks like.

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your tags should be complimentary.

medical, corporate, startup

This falls under “random words” to me. If you put just “medical” as tag does that mean F3 is going to combine buyer that typed whiteboard medical in search to that listing?

Wonder who is going to be the first to update their tags like this so we can see what that looks like.

I’m sorry you don’t see it.

Fiverr reads title+tags+description to serve your gig to the right buyers.

So Fiverr in this case would see “animated medical explainer video”.

How does this seem random to you?

If this feels gibberish to you, feel free to not use it.

I will be updating 3 of my gigs on Monday if that helps you any.

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On 3/20/2021 at 4:29 PM, frank_d said:

I will be updating 3 of my gigs on Monday if that helps you any.

Yes, I went to check your GIGs to see what is it under animated whiteboard to try to understand the mental perspective of this.

On 3/20/2021 at 4:29 PM, frank_d said:

If this feels gibberish to you, feel free to not use it.

No, I did not say that, I just can’t grasp what to put under tags for one of my main services. Everything is covered in the title so there is nothing more to say about the service. For example

“I will remove background from your photo in Photoshop”

Tags: image modification, image tampering, pozadina removal, … back removal,

This will take some time to figure out.

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This make sense, but this match have failures… because in the end the buyers are humans not machine.

Is really commum that we receive messages from buyers that don’t read the GIG TITLE… and contact you thinking that you do X when you do Y. (Is crazy but this happen in all internet)

For example:

  • Sellers that write script for videos… receiving buyers that ask to edit video.

  • Or a Voice Over Seller that work the idiom A and the buyer ask for the idiom B.

In this examples the Seller never will convert. So this match need improvements, analyse more deep the variations to filter better what kind of sellers fills more closest to 100% with the buyer needs.

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On 3/20/2021 at 4:37 PM, frank_d said:

Fiverr reads title+tags+description to serve your gig to the right buyers. So Fiverr in this case would see “animated medical explainer video”.

I remember something similar was mentioned a few years ago. To make your service more specialist. For example, logo design in the title, and coffeehouse as one of the tags.

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This make sense, but this match have failures… because in the end the buyers are humans not machine.

Is really commum that we receive messages from buyers that don’t read the GIG TITLE… and contact you thinking that you do X when you do Y. (Is crazy but this happen in all internet)

For example:

  • Sellers that write script for videos… receiving buyers that ask to edit video.

  • Or a Voice Over Seller that work the idiom A and the buyer ask for the idiom B.

In this examples the Seller never will convert. So this match need improvements, analyse more deep the variations to filter better what kind of sellers fills more closest to 100% with the buyer needs.

If something like this keeps happening to you, I’d suggest you editing and refining your gig until it stops.

Then if it happens one out of 25 times or so, it’s just someone who wasn’t meant for using the Internet. 🙂

On the flip side, Fiverr’s algorithm learns all the time, so it will be getting more efficient.

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Sellers that write script for videos… receiving buyers that ask to edit video.

Or to write a PHP script.

I still get the occasional request in a message to make an app, when I only offer promo videos for apps.

But never orders.

Tweaking my tags made less and less people message me about what I don’t offer.

Eventually I hope to completely eliminate them.

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Thanks @frank_d for sharing your observations.

I can totally agree on the part some big changes are done in Algos. Many sellers reported gig impression falling and something similar happened to one of my gigs.

Diversifying through tags is something that can surely help to target a bigger audience(I guess), also something also these lines came up while discussing recently with the Success manager.

One of my assumptions is that Sellers offering higher ticket gigs in the category and with a good track record are going to get boosted. What’s your opinion on this? @frank_d

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