eBay Advertising
eBay has made advertising a bigger focus in recent years through greater opportunities through its first and third party advertising. They launched greater control through their sponsored product placements with the Advanced feature which was a step to catch up with other media providers. Using Advanced Sponsored Products, advertisers are able to build campaigns that contain lists of keywords with match types and associated bids to have greater control over where their ads appear.
They position their main ads offering to work in tandem to drive greater performance with the use of Sponsored Product Standard as an always on sales driver with the ability of setting a % of sales target (Ad Rates), allowing the algorithm to place ads based on where it sees fit to reach that target. Whilst Advanced Sponsored Products enables the advertiser to target specific keywords that are important to the brand and are considered must win.
New features have recently been launched to elevate their basic Standard Sponsored Product format further. Advertisers can now select between fixed and dynamic ad rates. The latter being a method of following the eBay algorithms recommendations that are set daily to adjust the ad rates dynamically to drive the maximum opportunity which is a new feature that may be welcomed for high sale driving sellers with little advertising experience.
eBay Ads have also launched Ad Rate Forecasting which is a tool in part to drive eBay greater ad spend from its advertisers but also to aid advertisers in understanding the ceiling of their campaign. This new feature gives advertisers the understanding of what their likely impression share will be based on the edits that they are making to the campaign. This is a useful insight as it gives the advertiser the ability to measure how visible they are and can be used to consistently benchmarked the situation whilst optimising campaigns.
These changes will give advertisers more opportunity and tools to enhance their eBay sales channel and show greater parity with the larger media partners in the space from a capability perspective. eBay clearly has some way to go to have the same sophistication as the likes of Google, Meta or Amazon but these strides clearly give the impression that ads is a focus and hopefully those developmental steps continue.
