Most brands still look at online marketplace enforcement the same old way: count the takedowns, put the number on a slide, and move on. It’s a simple metric, but it leaves out most of what actually matters.

If you work in-house, you already know the real question isn’t “How many listings did we remove?” It’s “Is any of this working?” A better way to answer that is to look beyond raw takedown totals and focus on three things: volume, velocity, and whether the listings actually stay down.

Volume: How Much Stuff You’re Dealing With

Volume is what everyone already tracks: how many counterfeit, infringing, or unauthorized listings your team found and removed. Nothing earth-shattering there. Where it becomes useful is when you stop treating it as one big number and start breaking it apart.

A few simple cuts make volume more interesting:

  • Which marketplaces keep showing up as problem spots?
  • Are certain products or SKUs consistently being targeted?
  • Do the same sellers reappear across multiple listings or platforms?
  • Are you seeing hotspots in certain countries or regions?

That kind of breakdown gives you a better feel for the shape of the problem instead of just the size. It also makes conversations with business and sales leads more concrete: you’re not just saying “we took down 2,000 listings,” you’re saying “most of the harm is concentrated here, here, and here.”

Velocity: How Fast Things Come Down

Velocity is about speed—how quickly a platform takes action once you send a notice. For some product categories, especially anything touching safety or compliance, this matters a lot.

In practice, the numbers can be all over the place. One marketplace might remove a straightforward trademark misuse in under an hour but drag its feet for days on a counterfeit selling the exact same product. Another may be fast in one region and noticeably slower in another.

When you track velocity, a few patterns usually pop out:

  • One or two platforms are consistently slower than the rest.
  • Certain categories (like electronics or auto parts) take longer to address.
  • Automated notice flows perform better than purely manual workflows.
  • High-risk listings aren’t always being treated as urgent.

Once you see those patterns, you can have a different kind of conversation with the platforms. Instead of “we’re frustrated,” you can say, “here’s how your response times compare, and here’s where we need help.”

“Down and Stays Down”: The Real Test

Here’s the big one. The listing comes down… and then it’s back a day later. Or an hour later. Or with the same photos and a slightly tweaked title. If you’re not tracking how often that happens, you’re missing the best indicator of whether enforcement is doing more than clearing surface clutter.

A “down and stays down” view forces you to look at recurrence:

  • How often do the same sellers come back after a takedown?
  • How quickly do they reappear?
  • Is the platform actually blocking bad actors, or just forcing them to re-list?
  • Are there clusters of sellers that behave like an organized network?

If most of your listings reappear within a week, the data is telling you something pretty clear: the platform isn’t dealing with the underlying actors. That’s where escalation, coordinated outreach to the marketplace, or even litigation sometimes comes into play.

Putting It All Together

None of these metrics is especially complicated on its own. But when you put them together—volume, velocity, and “down and stays down”—you get a much more honest picture of what’s going on.

High volume with fast removals and low recurrence usually means things are working. High volume with slow removals suggests you’re constantly playing catch-up. Fast takedowns with high recurrence means you’re on a hamster wheel. Low volume and low recurrence, especially in your most sensitive categories, is what you’d like to see over time.

Counting takedowns is fine as a starting point, but online marketplaces and counterfeiters have both evolved. In-house teams that track not just how much they’re taking down, but how fast it happens and whether the harm stays offline, will have a much easier time explaining to leadership what’s actually working—and where it’s time to push harder.