Promoted Listings

Promoted Listings is an eBay advertising service that sellers can use to market and promote selected listings from their inventory.

The Marketing API works with listings that have been created with the Trading API as well as items that are managed with the Inventory API.

Promoted Listings ad campaigns

Sellers create ad campaigns to promote sets of listings, and sellers can add and delete the listing ads in their campaigns as needed. To streamline this process, ads can be added or deleted from campaigns in "bulk."

Sellers can increase the visibility of their listings, which can lead to more sales, by creating Promoted Listings ad campaigns. When you promote a listing, it increases the likelihood that the listing will be surfaced to active shoppers throughout the eBay buyer flows.

When an ad is created for a listing and added to a running campaign, a SPONSORED badge is added to the listing on search result pages. In addition, eBay also displays sponsored listings in the sponsored section of search result pages, as well as in other buyer flows on the eBay site. The frequency that eBay displays an ad depends on the seller's configuration of the funding model used to calculate the Promoted Listings fee.

Although there is no cost associated with creating campaigns and listing ads, Promoted Listings is a service where the seller is assessed a Promoted Listings fee if an item sells via a Promoted Listings action. For complete information on how the Promoted Listings fee is calculated and assessed, see the section below, Promoted Listings fees.

Campaigns are flexible, you can modify the dates over which they run and you can clone campaigns, which makes it easy for you to maintain ongoing promotions.

For details on creating and managing campaigns, see Creating a Promoted Listings campaign.

How campaigns work

On the start-date of a campaign, the Promoted Listings service derives keywords for each ad in the campaign and associates the keywords with the respective listings. The service then adds a SPONSORED badge to each listing in the campaign, after which the campaign is started.

The amount of time it takes for the service to start a campaign depends on the number of ads in the campaign. Use either the getCampaignByName or getCampaign methods to see if the processing has finished and the campaign has started. When the campaign starts, the campaignStatus is set to RUNNING.

During the campaign run, the "visibility" of the listings in the campaign is increased in eBay flows by an amount that's based on a coefficient of each ad's bid percentage.

Ads surface in prominent locations on search result pages when buyers search with keywords that match ad keywords. The frequency that an ad displays, and its placement on the search results page and in other buyer flows, is influenced by the ad's bid percentage, the listing’s relevance to the buyer's keyword search, and other factors. A higher bid percentage increases the likelihood eBay will surface the ad.

When a listing runs out of stock, the sponsored listing is removed from search results. If stock is again added for a sponsored item, the ads will again surface and will continue to do so for as long as there is stock and for as long as the campaign runs.

Although sellers can use Promotions Manager on the eBay site to create and manage their item promotions, the Marketing API gives you the ability to create customized flows that sellers can use to manage and view their item promotions.

Promoted Listings fees

Promoted Listings is a fee-based service where the seller is assessed a Promoted Listings fee if an item in an ad campaign sells via a Promoted Listings action.

Whenever a buyer clicks on an item's Promoted Listings ad, such as when the ad is displayed on a search results page, the buyer is directed to that item's View Item page.

A Promoted Listing action occurs when a buyer purchases an item from it's View Item page after clicking on the item's ad, or when a buyer purchases an item anytime within the 30 days after clicking on its ad, regardless of how that buyer gets to that item's View Item page (for example, if they use a bookmark to get to the View Item page).

Funding models

Each campaign is configured with a funding model that determines how the Promoted Listings fee is calculated.

Currently, Promoted Listings supports only the cost-per-sale funding model, where the Promoted Listings fee is based on the final price of an item that is sold via a Promoted Listings action. In this funding model, the amount of the Promoted Listings fee is calculated by multiplying the seller-specified bid percentage (or "ad rate") by the final sales price of the listing in the campaign.

You can set bidPercentage to anything between 1% and 100%, and eBay uses that value to calculate the amount of the Promoted Listings fee. The higher the bid percentage you specify for an ad, the more likely eBay will display the listing in eBay buyer flows.

The cost-per-sale model can be contrasted to the funding model that Amazon uses for their Sponsored Products service, which uses a cost-per-click model. In a cost-per-click model, the seller pays for each click received on their item's ad, regardless of whether or not the item sells.

Campaigns and eBay marketplaces

Campaigns are marketplace-specific and you can add an item to a campaign only if the item is listed on the marketplace on which the campaign is running. For example, if listing is on EBAY-US (ebay.com), the sponsored listing shows up only on ebay.com, even if the item can be shipped to another country (such as Australia). To create a campaign for domestic Australian buyers on EBAY-AU (ebay.com.au), the seller needs to accept the Australian marketplace terms and conditions and create the campaign on ebay.com.au. They can then create ads in the campaign for the listings that are current on ebay.com.au.

Monitoring Promoted Listings campaigns

eBay provides a few ways to monitor your Promoted Listings campaigns.

Promoted Listings reports

A seller can view reports for their Promoted Listings campaigns by visiting Seller Hub on the eBay site. For details on creating Promoted listings reports via the API, see Creating Promoted Listings reports.

The Campaign Management Tool

In addition to using the Marketing API, sellers can create and manage Promoted Listings campaigns using the Campaign Management Tool, which is accessed via My eBay on the eBay website. The Campaign Management Tool also provides performance data, which can be viewed on the seller's Dashboard page.