eBay Previews New CPC Advertising Product – Promoted Listings Advanced

eBay has been working on a new Promoted Listings product called Promoted Listings Advanced, which is currently in the beta stage and will be released to eligible sellers later this year.

In a blog post, the company previewed this new advertising product to all sellers and how it may benefit them. We will also explain how it differs from Promoted Listings Standard, which is an updated name for Promoted Listings, the advertising program many sellers are familiar with.

For clarity, we will refer to eBay’s Promoted Listings product from now on using the new name, Promoted Listings Standard.

Promoted Listings Advanced

The new Promoted Listings Advanced product uses the cost-per-click (CPC) advertising model that’s like those used by other marketplaces, ecommerce platforms, and digital publishers. A fee is charged to advertisers (in this case eBay sellers) for each click by a shopper on a promoted listing.

Here is the primary difference between the two Promoted Listings products, sellers that use Promoted Listings Advanced will pay a fee for each click on a keyword, while sellers using Promoted Listings Standard, will only pay a fee when the item sells.

With that in mind, there are two aspects of Promoted Listings Advanced to help seller run successful advertising campaigns, Keyword Control and Budget Control.

Keyword Control

As many other CPC advertising models, advertisers bid on keywords to drive traffic to their website, listings, or products. On eBay, it will be eBay sellers bidding on keywords to drive shoppers to their listings.

eBay will give sellers full control over keywords used in Promoted Listing Advanced. They can pick their own keywords, or they can use keywords suggested by eBay that its algorithm recommends being most relevant and best performing for the seller.

The company says this kind of “keyword control gives sellers the ability to target their listings, reaching shoppers while they are actively searching for products the seller has listed.”

For each keyword, eBay sellers will be able to determine how much each click is worth to them. Sellers “can bid on a keyword to ‘win’ the auction, which is run every time a user does a search.”

Promoted Listings Advanced is very much like most other CPC programs, but it is quite different from the Promoted Listings Standard product eBay sellers are used to using. It will require sellers to do a lot more strategy and campaign analysis to avoid paying too much for advertising.

That is why eBay will provide a budget planning tool for Promoted Listings Advanced that should help sellers stay within their budget.

Budget Planning

Obviously, most sellers can’t afford to run high-priced keyword CPC advertising 24/7. Therefore, eBay provides a means for sellers to control their advertising budget when using Promoted Listings Advanced.

“Promoted Listings Advanced has a daily budget feature with which the seller controls how much they want to spend on a campaign per day. This level of control helps sellers manage their advertising investment and overall margins. Once a campaign hits its daily budget, charges are paused until the next day when the budget resets,” the company explained.

TIP: For sellers new to CPC advertising, it’s wise to start with a low daily budget number and experiment with various keywords to understand which keywords drive traffic that leads to actual sales.

In that regard, Promoted Listings Standard is a bit simpler because sellers know the cost of their advertising beforehand, while with Promoted Listings Advanced the cost of advertising will vary based on the amount and number of clicks a seller pays before the item (hopefully) sells.

In conclusion, eBay’s Promoted Listings Advanced product offers more flexibility for sellers that have good insight which keywords drive sales and could be more cost-effective than Promoted Listings Standard. But it requires a lot more baby-sitting to avoid run-away spending, especially for sellers that are new to CPC advertising.

eBay Partnerships

eBay has partnered with leading software providers for online businesses to make Promoted Listings Advanced more widely available through popular platforms sellers already use.

Currently, these partnerships include ChannelAdvisor, Frooition, Just Applications, Pacvue, Push Auction, SoldEazy, Teikametrics and TongTool.

Teikametrics, which specializes in advertising optimization, announced it will hold a FREE Webinar with Elisabeth Rommel, GM, NA Advertising at eBay and Kohl Perkins, Sr. Manager Business Development at eBay on Tuesday, August 31 at 1 pm (EST) discussing eBay’s new Promoted Listings Advanced program.

Interested eBay sellers can click here for more details on the Teikametrics webinar.

If we hear about more webinars by other eBay software providers discussing eBay’s new Promoted Listings Advanced product, we will update this post.

One Final Clarification About Promoted Listings Advanced vs Standard

The Promoted Listings Advanced product is an on-platform product and should not be confused with the Promoted Listing Standard expansion eBay announced in July for US sellers and UK sellers this month.

Those announcements gave sellers in the US and the UK the option to make their listings visible on partner websites and search engines and are only applicable to Promoted Listings Standard.

The new Promoted Listings Advanced will only be available on eBay’s marketplace platform.

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