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frank_d

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On 3/20/2021 at 10:57 PM, frank_d said:

-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

 

On 3/20/2021 at 10:57 PM, frank_d said:

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

Absolutely Agree, I am up since 2014 and having a deep eye on everything and how permeters taking place. All of my performance perameters are 100% you can see attached but still I am lost traffice, clicks, orders due to not delivered fast + hidden feedback from clients.

 

MY GIG RELEVANCE IS GOOD + SPEED NOT GOOD + CLIENT SATISFACTION IS OK = DROP IN SALES AND TRAFFICE

 

SO, according to my observation:  Fast Delivery + Better hidden feedbacks ( Satisfaction ) is key to sucsess.

 

Thank very much for this post Frank it's awesome.

 

 

Fiverr-Performance.jpg

Edited by pro_webdesiner
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On 3/20/2021 at 11:27 PM, frank_d said:

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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That's a great insight and makes sense for us. Huge transformation for maintaining a happy buyer-seller relation on fiverr platform.  I think that's a good shift to define a actual talent and skilled seller in this platform. No public reviews, successful order completion, keyword-rich content would be a measuring metrics for fiverr gig ranking algorithm, its totally will be depend on "most happy buyers & problem solving criteria, speed & relevancy"

If this continues then it 'll be a huge beneficiary brand recognition platform for buyers that will increase the Fiverr brand perception more to the buyers as well as sellers.


Thanks for sharing this valuable insights with us @frank_d

 

 

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So time extensions have become completely useless if you think about it. You would use time extension to avoid a late delivery and to avoid a penalty in ranking. You would of course communicate this to the buyer and come to an agreement about the new delivery time.

But now you are getting a penalty anyway using the time extension and the worst thing about it is that the stats on your dashboard will not show this penalty. A seller won't even know if he's doing something wrong.
You also don't know exactly how long you need to wait before the penalty is gone. (I assume 60 days like the other penalties)

The 12 hours to deliver message also gives a (hidden) penalty now. I'm not 100% sure but I do feel it gives a penalty. This means in essence that the deadline of your project is now 12 hours sooner. It's like a new deadline. Before you got a penalty when it got late and now it's 12 hours earlier. I would assume that the '12 hours to deliver' message is less severe of a punishment then the late delivery.

I won't be using time extension ever again that's for sure and focus on less orders to get them done before the 12 hour message pops up. 

I mean I think it's better for your buyers anyway and gives a better experience for your buyers. So I can understand that Fiverr did this. At the same time I feel it would be best to be transparent to all sellers and mention these penalties in the dashboard just like late deliveries and responsiveness for example. 

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  • 3 weeks later...
Quote

-Buyers accepting their delivery relatively quickly
-Not getting lots of revision requests

My performance should never be based on buyer behavior. I had a buyer who didn't respond for weeks and after I finally sent him the final order, he replied to me, but let the three days run out. 

Quote

-Delivering fast
-Delivering before the “you have 12 hours to deliver” notification

This is silly. This encourages regurgitated work rather than custom, tailor-made products. Why would I tell a buyer it will take 21 days when I really only have 20? I'm encouraged to add extra days just to make it seem like I delivered early.

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  • 4 months later...

I should be sorry I missed such an important article; thanks, @frank_d for letting us know. 

 

I wonder how could I know my buyers were satisfied if I don't see the 'private feedback'?

It is not an objection but just a query. 

 

Also, whenever I search for the term 'press release' a gig with a single 1* review that were posted years ago appears on the top of the page. It baffles me. 

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  • 2 months later...

This is great information.

I think one thing Fiverr can continue to do to give buyers and sellers a better experience is to make more seller levels on Fiverr.

This will allow for better placement of sellers, and if you are truly good you can stand out. This is just a thought though.🙂

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There's some information there that customer support has confirmed to not be true, and some that I hope is not true.

Mainly

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

As some people request a custom offer, but don't log in next time until 3 months and then accepts it. Even now I've sent an offer that was requested, and it has been a week or so without answer. Surely the solution according to Fiverr is to not abort offers and make the buyer ask for them again, further increasing the wait.

2. "-Delivering before the “you have 12 hours to deliver” notification."

As I provide marketing, I was interested if this is true before I even noticed this post. The buyer enjoys the service more and gets more out of it the longer it is NOT delivered, as promotion goes on until the order is delivered. That is why a professional marketer who cares for their buyers will only deliver at the very last hours to give the buyer the maximum results, while still avoiding to not go overdue.

Customer Support did confirm that there's no negative effect for allowing the 12 hours to deliver notification to happen.

Although I've seen many traffic sellers who deliver the order when the promotion starts instead. In fact everyone did that about 6 years ago still. Then sellers started to get warnings for it, but I've seen people still do it.

 

deliveries.jpg

Edited by adsensewizard
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On 3/15/2022 at 5:34 AM, adsensewizard said:

There's some information there that customer support has confirmed to not be true, and some that I hope is not true.

Mainly

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

As some people request a custom offer, but don't log in next time until 3 months and then accepts it. Even now I've sent an offer that was requested, and it has been a week or so without answer. Surely the solution according to Fiverr is to not abort offers and make the buyer ask for them again, further increasing the wait.

2. "-Delivering before the “you have 12 hours to deliver” notification."

As I provide marketing, I was interested if this is true before I even noticed this post. The buyer enjoys the service more and gets more out of it the longer it is NOT delivered, as promotion goes on until the order is delivered. That is why a professional marketer who cares for their buyers will only deliver at the very last hours to give the buyer the maximum results, while still avoiding to not go overdue.

Customer Support did confirm that there's no negative effect for allowing the 12 hours to deliver notification to happen.

Although I've seen many traffic sellers who deliver the order when the promotion starts instead. In fact everyone did that about 6 years ago still. Then sellers started to get warnings for it, but I've seen people still do it.

 

deliveries.jpg

There have been some things that I need to post an update on, and thank you for the contribution.

I personally wouldn’t trust what CS agents say. They are NOT lying but they have extremely limited knowledge and access to information.

how would a person answering calls know about the part of the algorithm that calculates (t) in the formula?

I also still think that, overall, speed matters. 

Fiverr will not tank your metrics if you always deliver after the 12 hour mark. But if there is a flag there exposed to the user, there is almost certainly something on the back end tracking it as well.

For example: we always got a message telling us our delivery was rejected and that urged us to review the client notes and redeliver.

That has been going on for years.

Some sellers ignored the message, or didn’t act on it fast enough.

So what did the system do? One fine morning we were introduced with something called “order response rate” which officially exposed to users what the system was already tracking.

My point being mainly:

a) efficiency + speed is always a good thing to strive for

b) be proactive and not reactive when it comes to Fiverr’s system 


As a side note, some professions obviously operate under different conditions. So yes, if your order is for a month of promotion it makes no sense to deliver in 3 days.

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On 7/26/2021 at 11:14 PM, frank_d said:

Thank you to everyone who is taking the time to read this post.

 

i am working on a new post, which will be complimentary to this one and add some much needed insights and an experiment I run recently.

@frank_d
As we talk about the involvement of rate of conversion, isn't it unfair for a seller in few circumstances like I got 3 buyer messages yesterday, one of them changed his mind and no longer needed a video, while the other 2 were so low budget that they wanted the work of $xxx in $50. Why in that case our conversion is counted low, it's not our fault that buyer don't have enough budget.

What should we do in this case?

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  • 2 months later...
1 hour ago, bigfact said:

Fiverr 3.0 = No skill sellers? and only care about performance?

I never said that. If that’s your takeaway from this article then you didn’t understand most of it.

I am focusing on what Fiverr is trying to quantify, in order to measure a seller’s performance.

Fiverr can’t evaluate if I am a good animator or whether or not I am better than other animators.

It can tell if I make more sales and offer a better price service though.

Skills are important. Hard skills are definitely needed but soft skills are actually extremely more valuable.

For example: I am not the greatest animator in the world. Heck, I’m not even on the top 1000 animators in terms of skills on this platform.

But I outperform almost everyone most likely due to my soft skills and business strategy.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 1 month later...

The post is very informative @frank_d, I have some questions that you might can answer. What if a seller who was not working actively on fiverr lately, lets say for the past 6 weeks and he/she now started again with their old gigs. Will this help or should they make new gigs to take a new start?

Plus does leveling system helps giverr 3.0 like new seller vs level 1 seller or level 2 sellers.

Thank you, would be very helpful if you could find some time to answer my these questions.

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4 minutes ago, noah_designer said:

The post is very informative @frank_d, I have some questions that you might can answer. What if a seller who was not working actively on fiverr lately, lets say for the past 6 weeks and he/she now started again with their old gigs. Will this help or should they make new gigs to take a new start?

Plus does leveling system helps giverr 3.0 like new seller vs level 1 seller or level 2 sellers.

Thank you, would be very helpful if you could find some time to answer my these questions.

I don't think you need to start over.

By being active again, you will signal Fiverr that you are able to handle orders.

Edits/adjust your gigs, the ones with the most traction so far, to make sure you are still relevant when compared to your vertical and even though it may take a while, you should start seeing some traction again.

Don't edit things over and over. Just once and then see how it goes, give it at least 14 days.

 

Don't deal with low performing gigs at all. Don't delete them, but no need to edit EVERYTHING, just your top two earners.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Thanks for all the helpful information.

I have two questions.

First, I have been doing fine untill March, 2022. Wouldn't the performance drop in an exponential way?

Second, if keywords are not of such relevance, why the new analytics of Seller Plus emphasize the keyword improvement of the gigs?

Edited by evp_productions
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  • 3 weeks later...

This is very insightful. I now know the importance of ensuring that only people you can help will find you. Receiving all sorts of requests(of services you don't offer or specialize in) from different buyers doesn't help at all.
Thanks a lot @frank_d.
 

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This article is really helpful and i cleared so many questions on my mind. Since last few months my dropped suddenly. till this time i could't understand what happened to my gig performance. now i realize what actually happen to me. I asked about this several times from customer support. But i couldn't find any possible answer. Thank you so much for sharing this.  

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  • 1 month later...

I think I was shadow banned for not replying to a message quickly. My response time dropped to 5 hours. I stayed for months without orders. Graciously, I have been able to get back to one hour. And somehow, my impression is coming up, and the orders have started coming. 

Thank you for sharing. 

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