eBay are ready to introduce you to Promoted Listings Advanced BETA on both the US and UK marketplace. This new campaign type gives you preferred access to the top spot in eBay search results through keyword and budget control.
What you need to know about Promoted Listings Advanced BETA
- Promoted Listings Advanced BETA is based on a cost-per-click model so you pay when someone clicks your ad.
- It works by allowing you to target the keywords that matter to you, and you then bid for the number one slot in eBay search results.
- You always determine exactly how much each click is worth to you.
- The daily budget feature ensures that you’re in full control of your ad spend.
- You can combine it with Promoted Listings Standard for maximum visibility.
What we like
We love the flexibility that this type of campaign will bring to eBay. For retailers used to search engine PPC campaigns, it’s a familiar model where you bid on a key word and pay for a click rather than paying for a sale. It also give the ability to choose which keywords you want to bid on so you’re not restricted to eBay’s algorithms. If there’s a keyword you know works for you, even if it’s not in your title, you can still bid on it.
Perhaps the biggest feature is the access to the number one slot in eBay search results – that’s a huge advantage for sellers if they hold the top search position.
What we don’t like
Some will hate this type of advertising as costs don’t directly relate to sales. However, if that’s you then it’s simple – stick to Promoted Listings Standard where you pay for successful sales only. This is a campaign type that will appeal to brands and retailers who already advertise on the likes of Google and are experienced in managing PPC advertising.
Our biggest current concern is the lack of tools to easily manage this new type of campaign. Tools will be needed to manage two things – budget control and keyword selection. eBay do of course offer some control but this might be viewed as pretty basic compared the the sophisticated offerings we’re familiar with from third parties for PPC campaigns. There’s good news if you are a ChannelAdvisor user there’s good news as they’ve already rolled out a solution within their product suite.
Get started with Promoted Listings Advanced BETA
- Go to the campaign management page.
- Start by naming your campaign, and then choose dates and a daily budget.
- Name your Ad Group, and add your listings and keywords.
- Select the cost-per-click for the keywords, and then you’re ready to review your campaign.
16 Responses
**** this, I already pay eBay enough in fees already.
I’m not into this paid race to the top and it’s why we’re slowly coming off this ‘site altogether.
They have had their small business PR stunt now back to business as usual.
Will be for their corporate pals and China…
Place is so overpriced now is it any wonder hardly anyone really uses it now.
PPC and sales fees you would need some margins for that.
I think that this simply designed to meet market expectations in terms of future revenue.
Ebay has stated they do not anticipate substantial sales growth on the site in the near future. They got “lucky” if that’s the right word with Covid as it concealed a host of problems with the site and its direction.
Ebay has stated they will still pay increased dividends and revenue will still grow. Now that Covid may or may not be receding, the reality is biting again that the board has to keep feeding the shareholders without any substantial growth in sales to drive that. In fact, sales may fall for a time as the covid boost fades away and financial realities hit buyers.
Conclusion. They intend to take more off sellers to achieve this growth in revenue.
Even more crazy is what they are doing to collectables in October by doing away with most of the categories.
It’s the one area Amazon has not parked its tanks, so Ebay are nuts to threaten that area with a totally incoherent switch to garbled item specifics which mean nothing to buyers of collectables.
Dumb and dumber
Makes you wonder what they have up their sleeve to charge sellers with next. I cannot think of anything apart from increasing all the fees across the board. Glad we pulled out of Ebay at begining of this year.
You have all said what I’m already thinking….
“Pay to play” has killed eBay for us. We just don’t have the margins to support it and sales have dived because other sellers will happily pay double fee’s and make no profit because they focus on sales, not profit. Margins were bad enough before Sponsored Listings.
But eBay don’t worry, there are another 50 sellers who will happily take my place and work for nothing – that is the problem. It is a race to the bottom for sellers, unless you sell something niche or unique such as your own product or design.
I sell a lot of wallpaper, I searched one of the brand names l sell, 9 out of the fist 10 listings were from private sellers. 3 of which clearly run a business with one account over 770 listings and two other clearly running a business with over 100 listings.
I accept that there is an argument to try to take advantage of any given situation.
Theoretically, it should be possible to price in these extra costs and try to boost sales to compensate.
However, the reality is that buyers are feeling the pinch everywhere and the cost of selling is rising.
Managed payments have seen a rise in our fees, not a drop, with Ebay now taking over a quarter, compared to less than 20% before.
The problem is that this can become an escalating game in which Ebay is the only winner. Even buyers lose, because they will soon get up with not being able to find what they want, being fed a host of promoted items not relevant to them instead.
The item specifics fiasco is now costing sales.
If Ebay reads these pages then read this.
YOUR ITEM SPECIFICS ARE NOT FIT FOR PURPOSE
They are meaningless, irrelevant, misleading and have been put together by people with no knowledge of that selling area. Doing away with most categories to rely on these is a disaster.
Experienced sellers could help Ebay set them up so they actually work.
I reached out to Ebay to ask them why the item specifics are so dire and whether they would consider using the vast knowledge sellers have of their areas to improve them.
Ebay apparently has no plans to do that……
@Andy, spot on. They are absolutely clueless when it comes to item specific and most things at the minute. Bathroom mirrors require the size in item specifics. I get that it is an important specific. I include it in the description, when asking why I have to go back and change listings that are older. I am told buyers want to search for size, yet that option is not available on the left bar.
When listings items like drinking glasses I usually end up selecting 3 different item specifics to say the item is a wine glass.
Item specifics are not fit for purpose
Returns process is not fir for purpose
All the metrics how they measure us by is not fit for purpose
At the end of the day, if you’re selling something for £10 and using up £1 in pay per click , you may as well sell it for £9, then you might have a chance again the 50,000 Chinese listings than trying to flog a dead horse.
Next it will be, if sell over a certain amount we will pack for you from out vast network of warehouses. If you don’t let us we will penalise your listing position.
Sounds like another amazon in the making to me. I spose we will see an ebay rocket going into subspace next.
Yes, orange connex is just around the corner, if Amazon is anything to go by, it will be game over for UK businesses with UK warehouses on amazon. If you dont use FBA your listings barely get ranked on Amazon.
This takeover is something the government should have addressed years ago.
A well run PPC on Amazon yields a major organic ranking boost, which helps to keep advertising costs at a sustainable % of total revenue.
Do we know if the new eBay PPC features offer something similar?
If we are bidding on keywords and there’s no organic boost for high converting listings, then CPCs would need to be very low for it to work.
Without a kick back elsewhere, it’s basically just a FVF % booster.
not only the actual fee the time and cost of admin and monitoring needs to be factored in,
juggling ,drinking a pint , while eating crisps, at the same time, might be easier
eBay are banking on a likelihood that most sellers do not pass on this kind of fee to buyers, which all businesses logically should. this would mean a constant flow of new sellers all paying eBay more than they should be receiving while prices remain the same so buyers won’t leave.
they want amateur sellers who set prices manually without using any calculation
same as bookies wanting punters who bet with emotion not with any kind of logic.
“At the end of the day, if you’re selling something for £10 and using up £1 in pay per click , you may as well sell it for £9, then you might have a chance again the 50,000 Chinese listings than trying to flog a dead horse.”
This is an excellent point. The theory that buyers will pay substantially more for something just because it is on top of the search results is insane. Any buyer knows to re sort by price. The only exception I see is when someone sees something at the right price, on the front page. They may well not want to spend time sorting just to save 50 cents or $1.
Get out of the Rat Race that is eBay. If you haven’t got your own website, create one, and use the Fee’s your wasting on eBay on a decent ad site like google. Only use eBay to drive sales to your website.
Why is everyone wasting their time on this eBay sink to the bottom platform. For half the fee’s, you can drive traffic from google to your website and cut out the eBay fees all together. We started doing this 2 months ago, and we are seeing a really nice return from our website.
eBay is a dead in the water platform, and its going to be ruled soon by a small handful of sellers, all competing to be at the top with low margins. Eventually they will all drive themselves into the ground. Whilst you are on eBay, use it, put flyers in your packaging, do everything in your power to drive sales away from the platform.
If you don’t take destiny in your own hands soon, you won’t have much of a destiny to go forward with.
Writing is on the wall with the way eBay are going. They are like the Government, they will keep taxing you until you have nothing.