eBay Expands CPC Advertising One Year Later

eBay is now offering a “Quick Setup” feature for its CPC ads. Unlike regular Promoted Listing Ads where sellers pay a fee only when an ad results in a sale, Promoted Listings Advanced Beta charges sellers when a buyer clicks on their ad, regardless of whether the buyer make a purchase.

eBay launched Promoted Listings Advanced a year ago and, given the “beta” designation that remains, appears to still be in test mode.

eBay announced the Quick Setup feature on Friday and said it uses several criteria to determine when to display a seller’s ad:

“Factors like quality, keyword relevance, your bid amount, other seller’s bids, and a reserve price (the minimum amount we’ve determined a click is worth, taking item quality, competition, seasonality, and marketplace thresholds into consideration) will continue to play a role in whether your ad will win the auction and appear in the top slots of a buyer’s search results.”

In its announcement, eBay offered the following instructions on how to use the Quick Setup feature for cost-per-click promoted listing ads:

Here’s how Quick setup works

Select Create a new Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA campaign on the Advertising Dashboard in the Seller Hub.

Name your campaign, choose your budget and set your start and end dates.

Choose Quick setup and add your desired listings to the campaign.

eBay will take care of the rest of setup – organizing your listings into ad groups and selecting the suggested keywords, keyword match types and bids.

Finally, review and launch your campaign. Sellers do have the ability to make changes to the campaign in the review phase if desired before launching.

eBay also told sellers they could continue to use a manual process to create ad groups, select listings, keywords and keyword match types, and set keyword bids, and it described some other recent enhancements.

It also pitched the CPC ads as a way to grow sales during the holiday shopping season.

Ina Steiner

Ina Steiner is co-founder and Editor of EcommerceBytes and has been reporting on ecommerce since 1999. She's a widely cited authority on marketplace selling and is author of "Turn eBay Data Into Dollars" (McGraw-Hill 2006). Her blog was featured in the book, "Blogging Heroes" (Wiley 2008). She is a member of the Online News Association (Sep 2005 - present) and Investigative Reporters and Editors (Mar 2006 - present). Follow her on Twitter at @ecommercebytes and send news tips to ina@ecommercebytes.com. See disclosure at EcommerceBytes.com/disclosure/.