eBay offers promoted listings campaign types for every type of seller. Learn more about what we offer on our Promoted Listings overview page
How it works
For each Promoted Listings Advanced campaign you run, you'll be charged for the clicks on your ads up to, but never more than, your campaign's daily budget. Once your campaign has reached its daily budget, your campaign will stop serving ads until the next day, when the daily budget resets. Any unused daily budget will not roll over to the next day.
Above Standard or Top Rated sellers with enough account activity can promote fixed price listings for most categories.
The following are not eligible for Advanced campaigns:
- Auction listings and Auction listings with Buy It Now
- Listings in Wholesale & Job Lots, Cars, Motorcycles & Vehicles, Events Tickets, Property, E-Cigarettes, Vapes & Accs or Everything Else categories
- Listings that are out of stock
Using Promoted Listings Advanced
You can access Promoted Listings Advanced from the advanced listing tool or the Advertising Dashboard within Seller Hub Marketing. From the Advertising Dashboard you can create a campaign using smart targeting or manual targeting.
Smart targeting campaigns are ideal for sellers who want simplified setup and campaigns that automatically update to maintain ad settings. Manual targeting campaigns are ideal for sellers who want to maintain control over all aspects of campaign creation and optimization.
Smart targeting
Smart targeting campaigns offer easy setup and automatically update over time to optimise your campaign on search results and listing pages. Here's how to get started:
- In Seller Hub, go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Create new campaign.
- Select Smart targeting under Create campaign in the Promoted Listings Advanced box.
- Name your campaign.
- Set your campaign start and end dates.
- Select Add listings to add listings to your campaign.
- Once you've added your listings, select Save.
- Set your campaign daily budget and max CPC.
- Select Launch.
Maximum cost-per-click
In smart targeting campaigns, you have the option to set a maximum cost-per-click, or max CPC, which will limit the bids eBay will place on your behalf. The max CPC is the maximum amount you'd be willing to pay for each click on your ad. Your cost-per-click will never exceed this amount. To help you get started, eBay provides a default max CPC that is based on a number of factors, including marketplace competition.
Tip
Using smart targeting campaigns can help you save time while reaching your advertising goals.
Manual targeting
Manual targeting campaigns give you control over all aspects of campaign setup for ads that appear on the search results page. You'll select how to manage ongoing optimization. Here's how to get started:
- In Seller Hub, go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Create new campaign.
- Select Create campaign in the Promoted Listings Advanced box.
- Name your campaign
- Set your maximum daily budget and your start and end dates
- Choose Quick setup or Manual setup.
- If you select Quick setup:
- Select Add listings to add listings to your campaign.
- Once you've added your listings, select Save.
- Select Review campaign to proceed to the next page and review your optimised campaign.
- If you select Manual setup:
- Name your ad group.
- Select Add listings to add listings to your ad group.
- Once you've selected your listings, select Add.
- Choose from our Suggested keywords or Add your own.
- Select Add keywords.
- Set your Keyword bids and choose whether to use a dynamic bidding strategy.
- If dynamic bidding is on, eBay manages your campaign's keyword bids and will automatically update them daily to the suggested bid
- If dynamic bidding is off, you will set your keyword bids and be responsible for monitoring their performance to keep your campaign competitive
- If you select Quick setup:
- Select Launch.
Ad groups
Ad groups help you build more effective manual targeting campaigns by organizing your listings and keywords into a common goal or category. Grouping together similar listings allows you to target them with the same set of keywords.
Campaigns can have up to 500 ad groups and up to 1,000 listings in each ad group. You can use up to 1,000 keywords per ad group.
Tip
We recommend 10-15 keywords per unique product type.
Match types
Exact match allows your listing to appear for search terms that match your keywords character-for-character with slight variations like misspellings, capitalization, and abbreviations.
Phrase match allows your listings to appear for search terms that include your exact keyword and may include other words before and/or after your keyword.
Phrase match is designed to match your ad to search phrases where your keyword retains its original meaning. It will not appear for search phrases that add a word to the middle of your keyword.
Broad match allows your listings to appear for search terms that include your exact keyword terms, even if there are other words before, between, and/or after your keyword.
Broad match is designed to help you reach a wider audience by matching your keywords with buyer search terms that have the same meaning, even if other words come before, between, and/or after your keyword.
Negative keywords are terms which are excluded from your ad group. Meaning, when a buyer searches for a term that you've added as a negative keyword, your Advanced ads will not be eligible for display.
Negative keywords are exact match without variants, meaning that for a keyword to be excluded, it needs to match the buyer's search term character for character.
Negative phrase match keywords will exclude your item from appearing for search terms that include your exact keyword and may include other words before and/or after your keyword, but not between
Bidding strategy
A campaign bidding strategy is the option you can select to determine how your keyword bids are managed throughout the duration of your campaign. There are two campaign bidding strategies you can choose from: fixed and dynamic.
A dynamic bidding strategy will automatically update keyword bids daily to the suggested bid. With this strategy, sellers do not need to make daily, manual updates to keep their keyword bids competitive in the marketplace.
Suggested bids are calculated based on a variety of factors that may include item attributes, seasonality, past performance, and current competition to find an optimal balance between performance and cost.
A fixed bidding strategy will not change once it's been set. You can review your performance and update your campaign bidding strategy at any time.
Promoted Listings Advanced Fees
Advanced Ad fees are based on your bid, the level of competition for queries in which your ad appears, and the clicks your ads have received.
For each campaign, the total ad fees charged for Advanced ads cannot exceed the daily budget you set each day.
Here's how Advanced fees work:
- The amount that you will be charged for each click is based on a second-price auction
- All Advanced ad fees are charged at a listing level. Charges are determined by the sum of all cost-per-click clicks a single listing receives within a day
- Promoted Listings Advanced campaigns offer two ways to bid, manual targeting and smart targeting. With manual targeting, you select the bid amount; with smart targeting, eBay will bid for you subject to a max CPC you set
- Your bid is entered into a second price auction to determine which ads are shown to buyers and how much you're charged for each click on your ad. If you win the auction, your ad may appear in an eligible ad slot, and you'll be charged an amount between the next highest bid and your bid for each click on your ad. You won't be charged more than your daily budget each day or your bid for each click on your ad, regardless of the targeting strategy you select for your campaign
- For example, if Seller A had the highest bid at £3.00 and Seller B had the second-highest bid at £1.50, and both items are of equal quality, Seller A wins the auction. The amount that Seller A will pay per click will be between £1.50 and £3.00, but will never be more than £3.00
- Any applicable VAT may be applied to your advertising fees
- Because the listings, keywords, and bids in each ad group are unique, each cost per click calculation is dynamic
- Sales will be attributed within a 30-day window of a click on your ad
While it is possible to be charged for multiple legitimate clicks from the same buyer, we have checks in place to filter out invalid clicks. If clicks on an ad are identified as invalid, you will not be charged. Note that you will also be charged if you click on your own Advanced ad.
Viewing your fees
- Fees for your Advanced campaigns will appear as "Ad Fee Advanced" in your Payments tab or on your seller invoice
- We combine all clicks a seller receives on a Promoted Listings Advanced ad in a given campaign on a daily basis and sellers are generally charged for these clicks up to 72 hours after the clicks take place
- Your charges are reported at a listing level. From your Payments tab or invoice, you'll see the campaign ID, click date, total number of clicks, and average cost-per-click per listing
The daily campaign cost is calculated by multiplying the total number of clicks received per keyword by their respective price. The daily budget is the maximum amount that you're willing to spend on a single campaign per day.
Once your campaign has reached its daily budget, your campaign will stop serving ads until the next day, when the daily budget resets. Any unused daily budget will not roll over to the next day.
Updates to your daily budget are made in real time. If you update your daily budget below what has already been spent, your ads will stop serving and your new daily budget will go into effect the next day.
Listings in a campaign will be eligible to begin surfacing again if you increase the daily budget of an out-of-budget campaign.
- If you update your daily budget below what has already been spent, your ads will stop serving and your new daily budget will go into effect the next day
- There is a £1 minimum and a £1,000,000 maximum daily budget
Monitoring your campaigns
Campaign dashboard
Your campaign dashboard lets you see detailed ad group-level, keyword-level, and listing-level reporting and make edits quickly within the context of your performance. To get there, go to your Advertising dashboard, select Promoted Listings Advanced from the Campaign type dropdown, and select the campaign name in the campaign section of the page.
To find the Campaign dashboard:
- Go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Promoted Listings Advanced from the Campaign type drop down.
- Click on the campaign name in the campaign section of the page.
From here you can monitor:
- Impressions— The number of times your promoted listings have appeared across eBay
- Clicks— The number of interactions with your ad
- Sold— The number of promoted items purchased within 30 days of a click on your promoted listings
- Ad fees— The total amount of fees incurred by clicks on your Advanced ads
- Sales— The amount of total sales generated by promoted items sold within 30 days of a click on your promoted listings. Total sale amount includes your item price, postage, taxes, and any other applicable fees. This figure shows all sales via promoted listings, including returned or canceled transactions
- CTR (Click-through rate)— Clicks divided by Impressions. The CTR is the percentage of times buyers saw your ad and clicked on it. Use this figure to measure how appealing your listings are to potential buyers
- Average CPC (Cost-per-click)— Ad Fees divided by the number of clicks
- Sales conversion rate— Quantity sold divided by clicks. The sales conversion rate is the percentage of promoted listings that are sold compared to the number of clicks on your promoted listings. Use this figure to measure how well your listing pages are converting buyers
- ACOS (Advertising cost of sale)— Ad Fees divided by Sales. The amount you spent on ad fees per sale generated by your ads. Use this figure to determine if your campaigns are cost-efficient
Campaign name, Status, Start and End date, and listings are updated in real time, as those events are happening. Performance metrics are reported in near-real time though they may take up to 72 hours to reconcile.
Downloading and scheduling Reports
From Seller Hub, you can download and schedule search query, keyword-level and listing-level reports for each of your Advanced campaigns, here's how:
Downloading reports from the Marketing tab
- Go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Promoted Listings Advanced from the Campaign type dropdown menu.
- Go to the campaign grid at the bottom of the page and expand the menu next to Edit.
- Select Generate listing report, Generate keyword report, or Generate search query report.
After launching your campaign, allow up to 72 hours for some reporting metrics to appear in downloaded reports. Campaign details and reporting will be in the time zone for the site your campaigns were created in.
Downloading reports from the Reports tab
You can also save time by scheduling and downloading reports from the Seller Hub Reports tab by downloading reports at the account level and for multiple campaigns at once.
- Go to Seller Hub Reports - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Download.
- Select Download report.
- Select the following report parameters:
-
- Source → Marketing
- Campaign type → Promoted Listings Advanced
- Type → Keyword, Listing, Campaign, or Search query
Scheduling reports from the Reports tab
- Go to Seller Hub Reports - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Schedule.
- Select Schedule report.
- Create a download schedule by selecting the following report parameters:
-
- Source → Marketing
- Campaign type → Promoted Listings Advanced
- Type → Keyword, Listing, Campaign, or Search query
- Frequency → Daily, Weekly, or Monthly
Tip
Visit the Seller Centre - opens in new window or tab to learn more about Promoted Listings Advanced.