4 min article

Promoted Listings Advanced

Promoted Listings Advanced is a cost-per-click advertising solution that provides priority access to placements across eBay. With advanced campaign management options like keyword targeting and budget controls, you can grow your business and increase sales, and you only pay when your ad is clicked.

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:

  1. In Seller Hub, go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
  2. Select Create new campaign.
  3. Select Smart targeting under Create campaign in the Promoted Listings Advanced box.
  4. Name your campaign.
  5. Set your campaign start and end dates.
  6. Select Add listings to add listings to your campaign.
  7. Once you've added your listings, select Save.
  8. Set your campaign daily budget and max CPC.
  9. 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:

  1. In Seller Hub, go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
  2. Select Create new campaign.
  3. Select Create campaign in the Promoted Listings Advanced box.
    • Name your campaign
    • Set your maximum daily budget and your start and end dates
  4. Choose Quick setup or Manual setup.
    • If you select Quick setup:
      1. Select Add listings to add listings to your campaign.
      2. Once you've added your listings, select Save.
      3. Select Review campaign to proceed to the next page and review your optimised campaign.
    • If you select Manual setup:
      1. Name your ad group.
      2. Select Add listings to add listings to your ad group.
      3. Once you've selected your listings, select Add.
      4. Choose from our Suggested keywords or Add your own.
      5. Select Add keywords.
      6. 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
  5. 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.

Example:

If you're creating an ad group containing inventory that you would like to promote for Father's Day:

  • Campaign: Father's Day
    • Daily budget: £500 
      • Ad group: Best selling men's sneakers
      • Listings: High top sneakers, Running shoes
      • Keywords: Men's athletic shoes, high tops, best running shoes, popular men's sneakers
      • Ad group: Last season's men's athletic wear
      • Listings: Joggers, Sweatshirts, Shirts
      • Keywords: Fleece hooded sweatshirts, athleisure, quick dry t-shirt, high waisted jogger pants

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.

Example:

One of your keywords is electric shears

  • Your ad may appear for:
    • electric shear
    • Electric Shears
  • Your ad will not appear for:
    • electric scissors
    • red electric shears

 

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.

Example:

One of your keywords is yellow socks

  • Your ad may appear for:
    • large yellow socks
    • yellow socks for kids
  • Your ad will not appear for:
    • yellow large socks
    • yellow kids socks
    • Kids socks yellow (Phrase match does not support word reordering)

 

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.

Example:

One of your keywords is women's hat

  • Your ad may appear for:
    • Women's beanie hat
    • Sun hat womens
    • Baseball hat for women
  • Your ad will not appear for:
    • Baseball hat
    • Men's hat
    • Women's accessories

 

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.

Example:

One of negative match keywords is yellow socks.

  • Your ad will only be excluded from buyers using that exact search term

 

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 

Example:

One of your negative phrase match keywords is yellow socks:

  • Your ad will only be excluded from buyers using that exact search term, plus any search term that includes "yellow socks" with other terms either before or after the keyword
  • e.g. "large yellow socks" or yellow socks womens"

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.

Examples:

Daily budget not reached:

  • Daily budget is £500
  • On a given day, Keyword A (average cost per click of £2.50) receives 100 clicks, and Keyword B ( average cost per click of £2.00) receives 50 clicks, which brings the daily campaign cost to £350. The remaining £150 will not roll over to the next day

Daily budget reached:

  • Daily budget is £500
  • On a given day, Keyword A (average cost per click of £2.50) receives 100 clicks, and Keyword B (average cost per click of £2.00) receives 125 clicks, which brings the daily campaign cost to £500. Since the daily budget has been reached, your ads will stop serving and your campaign will resume 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:

  1. Go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
  2. Select Promoted Listings Advanced from the Campaign type drop down.
  3. 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

  1. Go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
  2. Select Promoted Listings Advanced from the Campaign type dropdown menu.
  3. Go to the campaign grid at the bottom of the page and expand the menu next to Edit.
  4. 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.

  1. Go to Seller Hub Reports - opens in new window or tab.
  2. Select Download.
  3. Select Download report.
  4. 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

  1. Go to Seller Hub Reports - opens in new window or tab.
  2. Select Schedule.
  3. Select Schedule report.
  4. 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.

Promoted Listings Advanced FAQs

How is it determined when and where my ads will show?

Your bid amount is a factor in determining how frequently your listing appears in placements across eBay. The more competitive the bid, the more likely your listing appears in an eligible ad slot.

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

 
Once I've launched a campaign, can I change from a smart to a manual targeted campaign, or vice versa?

No, once your campaign is launched you cannot switch from smart to manual or manual to smart. If you'd like to switch, you should end your current campaign and create a new campaign with your desired targeting strategy.

 
How do I add listings to my campaign?

When adding listings to your campaign, you have a few options depending on which targeting strategy you’re using. All campaigns can use manual listing selection and bulk listing selection. Smart Promoted Listings Advanced campaigns can use manual, bulk, and rule-based listing selection.

With manual listing selection, you select individual listings and have the flexibility to adjust your campaign as needed. Manual listings selection is recommended for sellers looking for the most control over their listing selection

Bulk listing selection is an efficient way to create and manage large campaigns by copying and pasting a list of item IDs. Bulk listing selection is recommended for sellers with large inventories.

Use rule-based listing selection to automate listing selection and save time managing your smart Promoted Listings Advanced campaigns. You can use brand, category, price, and condition filters to define a rule that will add current and future listings to your campaign. Rule-based listing selection is recommended for sellers with dynamic inventory and who wish to minimize their campaign management time.

For example, a rule you create could add all men’s shoes and women’s shoes from any brand, priced between £60-£100 and whose condition is new to your campaign. As listings are added to your campaign, eBay will use smart targeting to optimize your campaign bidding and targeting.

 
What are recommended listings?

Recommended listings are those that have the most potential to drive sales based on eBay's historical data.

 
What are suggested keywords and can I choose my own?

Suggested keywords are search terms that we've determined are relevant and likely to perform well in your ad group.

We evaluate keywords based on how frequently they've been used in recent searches and how relevant those searches are to the listings in your ad group. These keyword suggestions are designed to help you target buyers who are actively looking for items like yours.

You can monitor your keyword performance on your Campaign dashboard or by downloading keyword-level reports for each campaign. Remove any low-performing keywords and replace them with new suggested keywords to further optimise your campaign.

 
What is the suggested bid and the bid range?

Our suggested bids and bid ranges are based on a number of factors, including past performance, competition, and marketplace trends. Using the suggested bids and bid ranges can help take the guesswork out of setting competitive bids.

Suggested bids and bid ranges can change over time, so we suggest monitoring your campaign performance and making any needed changes to remain competitive.

There is a £0.02 minimum and £100 maximum bid for keywords.

 
Am I able to bid on trademarked terms as keywords?

We don't restrict trademarks as keywords. If a listing isn't relevant for a particular branded query, however, the Promoted Listings Advanced ad for that listing is not likely to show. Our algorithms are designed with proprietary relevance and performance filters in place, which means that ads will only appear if they pass our relevancy filters and will only continue to show if buyers actually engage with them. If you believe that any content in which you claim trademark ownership has been infringed by anyone using eBay's services, please notify our VeRO team through the Verified Rights Owner (VeRO) Program and eBay will investigate your notice.

 
Will I always be charged my full daily budget?

No. You will only be charged when your ad is clicked. Any unused daily budget will not roll over to the next day. If you meet your daily budget, you will see a notification on the Advertising dashboard informing you that your campaign has met its daily budget and will be paused until the following day.

  • For example, if your daily budget is £100, your average cost per click is £1, and your ad is clicked 40 times in one day, you will be charged £40 for that day. The next day, your daily budget will still be £100, since unused daily budget will not roll over
  • Depending on your country, the corresponding VAT rate can be applied to your advertising fees. Unless you registered as a business account and provided your tax registration details, we'll add VAT to your advertising fees
  • If your registered address is in Australia, Australian GST is payable on your advertising fees. Unless you registered as a business account and provided your tax registration details, we'll add GST to your advertising fees
 
Why is my campaign performance decreasing even though I haven't made any changes?

A number of factors can cause changes in your campaigns' visibility, clicks, or sales, including buyer traffic or demand, seasonality, changes to the competitive landscape, general platform changes, and more.

Selecting the right keywords and setting competitive bids on keywords is crucial (To help optimise campaigns, we provide you with suggested bids and bid ranges for all suggested keywords). Improving the quality of your listings may also increase the chances of your ads performing well.

You should also keep an eye on your campaign performance to ensure your ad groups remain effective. Suggested keywords and bids can change over time, so we suggest monitoring your campaign performance and making any needed changes to remain competitive.

 

Advanced campaigns are based on a cost-per-click model, which means that you pay per click on your ads.

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