eBay Promoted Listings Advanced: Guide to Drive Your eBay Sales

On average, sponsored products on eCommerce platforms see 2x more sales than non-sponsored products. With its eBay Promoted Listings Portfolio, eBay offers sellers different advertising solutions to increase their listings’ visibility and reach by ensuring they are shown to more potential buyers.

eBay introduced Promoted Listings Advanced towards the end of 2021 in order to complement the original Promoted Listings Standard campaigns and to make the eBay marketplaces more competitive with other platforms that offer PPC-based marketing solutions (PPC = Pay Per Click).

eBay’s Promoted Listings Standard

Promoted Listing Standard campaigns are a great way for sellers to begin advertising on eBay. These campaigns display product listings in different placements across eBay, and sellers only pay an advertising fee when a buyer clicks on their ad and purchases the product within 30 days.

eBay’s Promoted Listings Advanced

eBay Promoted Listings Advanced uses a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign model that grants preferred access to the top slot of eBay’s search results. Sellers can bid on keywords to win the pole position in relevant search queries buyers use, while an advertising fee is charged for each click on the ad. With eBay stating that one in five purchases starts with a listing that appears at the top of the search results page, PLA campaigns seem to be a highly attractive opportunity for sellers to increase sales on eBay.

So, while both campaign types are very useful and it is beneficial for sellers to use them in parallel to increase the visibility of their products on eBay, there are some key differences:

Both campaign types can be combined by sellers to maximize coverage and results on eBay.

Pro Tip

Want to supercharge your Promoted Listings Advanced (PLA) campaigns without breaking a sweat? With the help of our best ad-tech AI, you can effortlessly get your products to the top of eBay’s search results at the best price possible.

Find out more how can our eBay Ads optimization tool set efficient bids and find the best keywords take a load off your shoulders and maximize your profit! Our smart AI has got it all covered. And the best part? You can try it out with your eBay Ads for FREE with a 30-day trial!

Promoted Listings Advanced is a pay-per-click, auction-based advertising solution where sellers bid against each other on keywords to win the top slot of eBay’s respective search results page.

While sellers have little control over where their ads appear on eBay with PLS campaigns, they can bid strategically on relevant keywords with PLA campaigns to make sure their listings appear at the top when buyers search for their products.

Now, let’s take a closer look at how exactly keyword selection, bidding, and auctions work for PLA Campaigns on eBay.

Pay-per-Click (also referred to as Cost-per-Click) is a common advertising model used on many media, eCommerce and advertising platforms (like Amazon Ads, Google Ads, Facebook etc.) to drive traffic to a website, shop or product details page.

In this model, advertisers/sellers pay for every click on their ad, regardless of whether it leads to a purchase or not.

In a PLA campaign on eBay, sellers define a daily budget – the maximum amount they are willing to pay per day. Once their daily budget has been reached, the campaign will stop showing ads until the next day.

However, if the ads do not get enough clicks and the daily budget is not spent, it will not be carried over to the next day.

Targeting in eBay’s PLA campaigns is based on a selection of keywords. Sellers define the keywords for which their ads should be displayed in eBay’s search results.

In order to make the best use of their budget, sellers can also set negative keywords for which they do not want their ads to be displayed. Negative keywords are search terms that sellers consider less relevant for their listing or that they think are less likely to lead to a purchase.

For each targeted keyword, eBay sellers set a bid – the maximum amount they are willing to pay for a click on their listing’s ad. eBay will consider these bids for the auction for the top position in the search results, and the sellers will never be charged more than the maximum bid they’ve set.

To determine which eBay Promoted Listings Advanced ad is shown to shoppers and how much a seller pays for a click on his ad, eBay uses a second price auction system. Different sellers place a bid on a certain keyword and the seller with the highest bid can win the auction.

The amount the winning seller has to pay for a click on their ad will then range between their and the second highest bid – but never more than their maximum bid for the keyword. However, just setting a high bid doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a seller will win the auction.

In order to ensure a good buyer experience, eBay also considers factors such as listing quality, relevancy, competition, and more, in determining who will win the auction.

1. Open the eBay Seller Hub.

2. Click the “Marketing” tab.

3. Then click “Create new campaign”.

4. Choose the “ADVANCED option”.

5. Now set your campaign details.

Pro Tip

For your campaigns to run continuously, you can set “continuous” as your campaign end date.

6. Create an ad group and name it.

Pro Tip

It’s recommended to organize and name your ad groups based on the types of listings you want to include or the goal you want to achieve. By grouping similar listings, you can target them with the same keyword set and bids.

Nevertheless, you should keep the number of unique products within each of your ad groups limited so that all the keywords within the group are relevant to all the listings.

7. Add listings to your ad group.

Pro Tip

When selecting listings for your ad group, keep in mind that eBay doesn’t just consider your bid to determine which ad wins the PLA auction and appears in the shopper’s search results.

The quality of your listings, the relevance of your keywords, and your daily budget are some of the factors that are also taken into account.

8. Add and exclude keywords.

When adding or excluding keywords, you have to select a keyword match type. eBay currently provides the following match types for targeting:

+++ Adding keywords +++

Exact match with variants: Ads show on searches that are exactly the same as the keyword. So for the exact match keyword “red shoes”, ads may show on searches for “red shoes” or “red shoe”, but not on searches for “red sneaker” or “red soccer shoes”.

Phrase match: Ads show on searches that include other words before or after the keyword, but in the same order. So for the phrase match keyword “red shoes”, ads may show on searches for “soccer red shoes” or “red shoes for men”, but not on searches for “red tennis shoes” or “soccer shoes red”.

Broad Match: Ads show on searches that include other words as the keyword and in any order. So for the broad match keyword “red shoes”, ads may show on searches for “red soccer shoes” or “men’s soccer shoes red large”, but not on searches for “white shoes” or “red jeans”.

+++ Excluding keywords +++

Negative exact match (without variants!): Ads won’t show on searches that are exactly the same as the negative keyword. So for the negative exact match keyword “red shoes”, ads will not show on searches for “red shoes”. But since negative exact match keywords come without variants, your ads may show for “red shoe”. So you should add variants as well to your negative list.

Negative phrase match: Ads won’t show on searches that include other words before or after the negative keyword and in the same order. So for the negative phrase match keyword “red shoes”, ads won’t show on searches for “red shoes”, “soccer red shoes” or “red shoes for men”.

9. Set keyword bids.

10. Choose your bidding strategy.

11. Click the “Launch” button to publish your PLA campaign.

To optimize the performance of their PLA campaigns, eBay sellers have several options. They should especially focus on the optimization of their product listings and always keep an eye on the performance of their campaigns in order to refine the keyword selection and adjust bids regularly.

To ensure they always target the right keywords and set the most efficient bids, eBay sellers can also use a PPC optimization software like Adspert to automatically optimize their PLA campaigns 24/7.

Since eBay also takes quality factors into account during the auction for PLA Ads, sellers should optimize their listings for Best Match to increase their chances of winning an auction.

Pro Tip

A good product listing on eBay fulfills the following criteria:

Under the “Marketing” tab of the Advertising Dashboard, eBay sellers can monitor the campaign performance and download reports for their PLA campaigns, such as:

Sellers can leverage these reports to evaluate the performance of their keywords and bids, and make adjustments to use their budget more efficiently.

When evaluating the performance of your PLA campaign, you should especially focus on these Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

Continuously monitoring, analyzing and adjusting PPC campaigns can get quite time-consuming. PPC Optimization Tools can help improve the results of Promoted Listings Advanced campaigns by constantly tracking the performance of various parameters and automatically making the necessary adjustments in time.

We use artificial intelligence with algorithmic bidding to automatically identify good and poor performing keywords and adjust their bids accordingly to maximize the campaign’s efficiency.

We also use the so-called keyword refinement and suggests new promising keywords. You can then review these keywords or let our smart AI automatically transfer them to their PLA campaigns to increase the performance.