This is the fourth blog in our weekly series on retail media advertising and focuses on best practices for advertising on eBay. Missed the first three blogs in this series? Read The Rise of Retail Media, Effective Advertising Strategies to Unlock for Retail Media Success and Best Practices for Advertising on Amazon.
Advertising on eBay
Amazon may be the biggest marketplace game in town, but it’s certainly not the only one. For many brands and retailers, eBay plays an equally important role in e-commerce strategies.
Within this year, eBay has achieved:
- Global GMV: $19.4 billion
- Global net revenue: $2.5 billion
- Revenue from Promoted Listings: $222 million
In other words, eBay continues to offer immense e-commerce potential for retailers.
To ensure your products stand out on this fast-growing marketplace, the right advertising strategies are key.
Leveraging the right tools: Promoted Listings Standard and Promoted Listings Advanced
To ensure all your products stand out among billions of listings, eBay offers an advertising program that includes campaign types in line with your goals: Promoted Listings Standard and Promoted Listings Advanced. Let’s look into their characteristics:
Promoted Listings Standard
- Boost visibility: showcase your listings across the eBay network
- Preserve profitability: you pay the advertising charge (CPS) when a buyer clicks and purchases the advertised product
- Receive guidance on performance: improve results through guided optimization
Promoted Listings Advanced
- Premium position targeting: adjust the bids for top priority listings to appear in the top slots of the search results
- Advanced management features: utilize keywords, allocate budget by campaign and build a tailored bidding strategy to target your ads
- Pay per click (PPC) pricing model: pay only when your ad is clicked
Both campaign types are powerful tools that allow you to drive success on your eBay activity, however, they have very different objectives.
We recommend using Promoted Listings Standard when your main goal is visibility and your media budget and resources are limited. This campaign type does not allow for much control over performance but it’s great to maximize visibility without sacrificing your return on investment.
On the other hand, if your goal is around sales growth and return on ad spend we highly recommend Promoted Listings Advanced. Enhanced budget control and strategic keyword selection give you better control on your ad account and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns. Bear in mind that this campaign format requires a higher investment and greater resource allocation.
Best Practices for Promoted Listings
Reflect on your goals. First, decide what you want to achieve. Then set up your campaigns to reflect those goals. Not sure how to begin? Try focusing on specific categories, price ranges or seasons to identify milestones in key areas for your brand.
Optimise your content. Accurate content will help ensure your ads lead to actual sales and revenue. Competitive content, relevant keywords and crisp, clear photos with white or transparent backgrounds can go a long way in making your promoted listings stand out.
Use recommendations. If you see listings flagged as “recommended” when launching a campaign, these can be a great place to start. Recommended listings tend to have a high potential of performing well based on the latest trends and buying behaviours.
Best Practices for Promoted Listings Advanced
Build your ad-groups strategically. Organize your ad groups based on the same criteria, whether it is category or common goal. This will allow you to target listings with the same set of keywords.
Leverage keyword suggestions. Add suggested search terms to your ad groups to target buyers who are actively searching for products like yours. eBay identifies and evaluates these terms based on relevancy and historical data.
Review your bidding strategy regularly. Ensure your bids are competitive and in line with market trends to maintain the right balance between visibility and profitability. eBay provides bid suggestions and bid ranges to achieve optimal results.
Conduct regular campaign optimization. To ensure campaign effectiveness and overall ad account success, monitor your campaigns on a granular level and regular basis according to performance.
Looking for more advertising advice? Rely on the eBay experts.
The Rithum Managed Services team acts as an extension of your internal team and combines the strengths of our technology with our unmatched industry expertise. Our experts will strategize with you to customize an action plan for growth — whether that means maximizing your presence on eBay or choosing the right mix of additional marketplaces for expansion. And thanks to our long-standing relationships with Amazon, eBay, Walmart and others, you’ll be first to know about new opportunities as they emerge. Contact us if you’re interested in learning more.
We’re nearly at the last stop of this journey in our in-depth review of retail media advertising. Stay tuned to learn more about Walmart advertising best practices next week.
