How to Set up and Run an Effective eBay Ads Campaign

eBay Ads allows online merchants to use eBay's advanced ads system to reach more customers. Through promoted listings on eBay's website, search results, and external promotion, eBay seller ads are a must-use tool for any eBay business to sell more products. 

This article will review all the ads eBay offers but focuses on eBay's Promoted Standard and Advanced ad types to maximize Fixed Price product sales.

What Types of Ads Does eBay Provide Sellers?

eBay provides online merchants with three advertising services.

1. Classified Ads:

In select categories, sellers can create Classified Ads (listings) to promote items sold outside eBay's website. 

Ebay charges a $9,95 fee for a 30-day listing of your Classified Ads. Plus, there are no final value fees.

2. Website Display Ads:  

Similar to other display ads platforms, eBay’s display ads allow you to target audiences based on their interests in certain categories of goods.

If you are a large brand or are growing to an enterprise-level business, contact eBay directly to promote your store and listings with banner ads on (and off) eBay's website. 

3. Promoted Listings 

Promoted listings on eBay put your listings on top of your competitors, showing your product to more buyers.

eBay offers three types of Promoted Listings to eBay sellers. 

Standard: Set a custom percentage fee you're willing to pay if eBay sells one of your products through promotions within eBay's network. 

Advanced: Bid on top eBay ad slots and deploy Cost-Per-Click promotions targeting and excluding keywords. 

Express: If eligible, you can pay a flat fee to display your Auctions on similar listings using the eBay app.

Where does eBay Promote My Ads?

eBay promotes listings on its website when a buyer searches for items, visits a listing or views their homepage.

Standard and Advanced promotions are also eligible for eBay Ads on search engines and partner sites. 

Can I manage which eBay Listings appear on Google Shopping?

eBay's system determines where to promote each listing, so for Standard ads, it may help to consider the total fee you're willing to pay for promotion. A quick reflection of your promotion costs will help you speculate if it is worth it for eBay to spend money on the external ad. 

How to Set Up an eBay Ad Campaign

First, visit eBay Seller Hub. Then, navigate the Marketing tab to the Advertising Dashboard and click "Create New Campaign."

Why Use Campaigns for eBay Ads?

Professional marketing analytics and business organizational standards require you to create campaigns for eBay ads. Campaigns track promotion performance across groups of listings and can assign particular settings (like ad fees) to the ads. 

After setting up a campaign, you can track the performance of your ad on a visual dashboard. Dashboards show you all the crucial metrics, like ad impressions, clicks, conversions, revenue generated with your ads, and more. Here's an eBay campaign dashboard example:

Dashboards allow you to dive into multiple campaigns at once to assess your global ad efforts and analyze each particular campaign to make more targeted adjustments.

At some point, you might need to compare your eBay Ads campaign performance with ads across other channels to create a holistic picture of your marketing performance. We’ve prepared an eCommerce marketing dashboard template to accelerate your analytics and help you compare metrics across touchpoints. Click on the image below to download the template.

How to Create an eBay Ad Campaign

Seller Hub Ad Campaigns use the Promotions Standard or Advanced settings we explored earlier. 

Create and Edit Promotions Standard

Create Promotions Standard campaigns (and set fees) with the Advertising Dashboard, listing editor, or in bulk with the Listings tool.

Advertising Dashboard: If you create a Standard campaign with Advertising Dashboard, you'll use filters to include listings that match eBay categories, specific pricing, brand, and condition. Then, set the fees you're willing to pay for each sale. 

Listings added to campaigns created with the Advertising Dashboard will display as Automated on the Listing tool table:

Edit Individual Listings: If a campaign filter does not include a listing, edit the listing to create or add it to an existing campaign.

You can also edit fees and campaigns from the Listings tool table.

eBay Listing tool: Edit ad fees and assign campaigns to listings individually or in bulk. Sellers may also use advanced listing tools with more filters and features for editing eBay promotions with bulk actions.

Pro Tip: Name and organize every campaign. eBay will automatically name your campaigns if you don't include a name, which can cause many hours of organization later.

Create and Edit Promotions Advanced

Create and edit Advanced campaigns from the eBay Advertising Dashboard. Promotions Advanced includes two types of settings. 

Campaign Settings (CPC ad cost): Manage the campaign's daily budget, name, and schedule.

Ad Group(s): Filter and select listings to advertise with the campaign. 

Add keywords to use for advertising the listings. (e.g., a Google Shopping ad uses your keyword) Include negative keywords that you don't want to use for advertising.

Then, manage added keywords and set your bid (how much you will pay per click, per keyword)

Discover analytics best practices for large eCommerce stores

Read

How to Optimize Listings for your Ads Campaign

A listing's content increases eBay Promotion sales by getting the product's ad in front of more buyers through search engines.

You could imagine eBay Promoted Listings as a significant boost in eBay SEO. If a buyer searches online for a product you are promoting, eBay, search engines, and eBay partners attempt to match these shoppers with your listing ad. 

Well-promoted listings make this process easy for eBay by including content that mirrors shoppers' searches.   

Optimize Keywords

When creating any textual content for your listing, use keywords associated with searches—more search keywords or phrases in your listing yield a greater chance of being promoted properly. 

Title: If possible, write product titles using only top search keywords and phrases. Model Numbers and Brand Names are optimal keywords for eBay titles. You can also get inspiration from eBay title builders that find the best titles on eBay for you.

Item Specifics: Include every detail about the item possible in your eBay Item Specifics. If an online searcher uses a specific attribute in their search, you want your Item Specifics to include the same info. Search engines and eBay's system can also help connect you with customers through machine learning your product attributes.

Description: Include keywords and keyphrases from your Title and Item Specifics multiple times in the eBay description. Do not copy and paste your Item Specifics verbatim. Instead, include the Item Specifics in sentences of text. Embedding keywords in text like this is excellent for SEO, enhancing how eBay Promotions will advertise with your listings.

Optimize Listing and Seller Statistics

Price: Competitive pricing can also be a determining factor in your success with eBay Promotions. Like eBay's search system, automated ad systems such as eBay Promoted Standard may consider the product price before promoting the item to help ensure more engagement.

Promotion Fees: eBay sellers will update promotion fees based on performance to save ad costs and increase sales flow. If promotion performance is down, consider increasing eBay's promotion fee. (Pro Tip: Advanced eBay Listing Tools can change promotions in bulk) On the other hand, if you suspect the products are now in a more "sustainable" or proven sales arena, you may consider lowering promotion fees to save on costs. However, take care to consider eBay's expenses when reducing their pay. Does your Promotions conversion rate justify decreasing the promotion fee?) 

Free Shipping: In addition to the natural appeal of Free Shipping, Promotion Standard ads may consider shipping costs when deciding whether to showcase your products to buyers. In other words, offering free shipping attracts buyers and better ad placement.

Fast Handling: 1-day shipping intrinsically increases purchases, but it may also increase your promotion chances. Like Free Shipping and Price may play a part in eBay's placement of your ads, handling time is another critical listing detail for eBay and buyers. 

Seller Rating: Top Rated eBay sellers are favored highly by eBay. eBay's favorability to you as a Top Rated seller will positively affect how often and where your promoted items display. You can increase your seller rating through smooth transaction history and excellent customer care.

Pro Tip: Buyer feedback is essential to marketing and to getting favored by eBay in search results. Using eBay tools to get more feedback may be worth considering!

Use HD Product Photos

If Product Images are sub-par, you risk losing shoppers' interest in the ad and their trust in the product, leading to fewer clicks and sales. 

More importantly, eBay remembers which items did not advertise effectively and may dismiss them when choosing which listings to promote. So even if you upload new photos later, it may take time to see the promotions working.

So, it is vital that you only promote eBay listings with high-quality product images, upholding your ad statistics and reputation.

How to Manage an eBay Ads Campaign Effectively

The first step is to remain methodical when creating eBay ad campaigns and adding listings. Organized ad campaigns will allow you to see trends and apply the correct settings to listings.

Monitoring your ad performance

You'll want to gather as much data as possible from previous periods and organize it by campaigns with custom filters, creating charts and totals for key listing details and ad info.

Some sellers use CSV reports from eBay and organize them in spreadsheets. Even though this approach is viable, the process takes too much time and is prone to human error. 

Proficient eCommerce merchants use marketing and sales data platforms to extract new insights into their campaign performance and organize them in a unified storage.

For example, let’s take a look at Improvado. The platform extracts data from 300+ marketing data sources, including eBay ads, to help teams understand how their marketing dollars convert into revenue.

The platform gathers data from all required sources and streamlines it to a unified dashboard in Data Studio, Power BI, Tableau or any other visualization tool of your choice. 

Improvado also cleans and normalizes data automatically, to supply you with analysis-ready insights. Even if you don’t have any SQL knowledge, you can still query data like an SQL guru due to platform’s automated transformation recipes.

With the platform’s capabilities, you can dive into the customer journey, understand how different touchpoints contribute to the conversion, and how your campaigns can be improved for the optimal results.

When reviewing promotion performance this way, you can easily view which listings, in which categories, and with which promotion rates correlate with each other. Finding correlations between multiple ads performances may confirm whether a campaign is working or not.

In addition, you can use this data to accurately calculate profit margin differences before updating fees and ad-spend, helping to ensure a healthy acquisition cost. Combining correlation and acquisition cost in analysis can provide powerful insight into your next campaign management task.

Accelerate your revenue growth with eBay Ads campaigns

eBay Ads are proven to drive more sales and can significantly grow your income when managed attentively. The software and ad slots eBay provides sellers are also comparable to top-tier advertising services but with generally easier management. Plus, eBay's best interest is your sales, advertising you as a partner, not a client.

It is in every eBay business's best interest to use eBay Ads to promote listings in places other than eBay Search and learn to manage them effectively.