Comparison of Promoted Listings: Standard, Advanced, and Express
Advertising technology is a major part of eBay’s tech-led reimagination. Over the past few months, the marketplace has expanded its offering of advertising solutions that help sellers grow and expand their business. The evolving Promoted Listings portfolio offers sellers of all sizes different ways to boost visibility and drive sales, by choosing the campaign type that’s right for their business.
| ⠀⠀⠀⠀ | Promoted Listings Standard | Promoted Listings Advanced | Promoted Listings Express |
|---|---|---|---|
| Description | Quick, simple and low-risk. Promote your listings with ads across the eBay network and only pay when your items sell. | Visibility and control come together. Promote your listings in the top slots or premium placements on the search results page and pay per click on your ads. Advanced campaigns give sellers more control over their budget and keyword targeting. | Promotion of auction-style ads. Attract buyers to your auction-style ads across eBay. |
| Best for | Sellers who need low risk, automation and reporting | Sellers who need velocity, predictability and standardization | Sellers who need to reach more potential buyers |
| Cost model | Cost-per-sale | Cost-per-click | Flat fee |
| Listing format | Fixed price | Fixed price | Auctions |
| Placement | Across eBay network | Top slots or premium placements on the search results page | Similar listing pages |
Let’s take a look at the different features, available to Above Standard and Top Rated sellers with enough account activity, in our Promoted Listings portfolio.
Promoted Listings Standard
New name, same campaign type. Promoted Listings Standard is what most sellers are already familiar with. If you’ve never tried Promoted Listings Standard, think of it as the most popular way to dip your toes into advertising on eBay, as it offers high flexibility and a lower barrier to entry.
Promoted Listings Standard ads are shown across the entire eBay network. Sellers have the power to set the ad rate that’s right for their business, decide what to list, and make modifications to the campaign. And here’s the best part, sellers are not charged until a buyer clicks on their promoted listing and purchases any of their promoted items within 30 days. It’s quick, simple and a low-risk way to increase sales and grow further on eBay.
For Promoted Listings Standard, eBay is launching enhanced management capabilities through a new Campaign Dashboard. You can use filters to see what’s working and learn what needs improvement in each Standard campaign. Campaign Dashboard gives you extra visibility of metrics, as well as competitive insight reporting to help you get ahead. You can also make updates to your campaigns directly from the dashboard, without having to go through the 3-step campaign flow. Please note that Campaign Dashboard is currently not available for any Automated Campaigns.
Read this article to learn more about Promoted Listings Standard.
To create a Standard campaign, open Seller Hub > Marketing > Advertising Dashboard or follow the direct link.
Promoted Listings Advanced
Promoted Listings Advanced is an exciting new campaign type in our portfolio for sellers looking for another option to increase traffic to their listings, with increased control of their campaigns. While this feature is still in beta testing, sellers have already found success using it.
Promoted Listings Advanced is not a replacement for Promoted Listings Standard. In fact, they’re meant to complement one another. Promoted Listings Advanced is a cost-per-click (CPC) campaign model specifically targeting the highly coveted top of search slots and additional premium placements on eBay. Sellers have the control to create a daily budget to bid on keywords of their choosing.
Please note that eBay has expanded the definition of a click for Standard and Advanced ads to include interactions with new features and functionality of your ads (effective March 30, 2023). In addition to when a buyer clicks through to your listing page, the system now includes when a buyer clicks on the heart icon to add an item to their watchlist from a Promoted Listing.
New keyword targeting capabilities
For Promoted Listings Advanced, eBay’s working to expand our keyword match types to provide more opportunities for your listings to get seen by buyers. Match types are used to control how your listings appear and/or don’t appear in buyers’ search results based on specified keywords.
eBay currently offers exact match and phrase match targeting but eBay plans to start testing broad match keyword targeting capability soon. This can help to increase the visibility of your listings by allowing your listings to surface when your keyword is included as part of a search phrase, not just an exact match.
For example, if you bid on the keyword ‘red shoes’:
- Exact match only allows your listing to appear for that exact keyword, so if the buyer’s exact search is 'red shoes’.
- Phrase match allows your listing to show if the buyer’s searched phrase includes other words before and/or after your keyword, such as ‘size 6 red shoes’.
- Broad match means your listing could appear if ‘red shoes’ is anywhere in the search query, so if the buyer looks for ‘red running shoes’.
When adding keywords, you’ll be able to decide how specific you’d like to be by choosing whether to bid on each keyword as broad match, phrase match or exact match.
On top of this, eBay will also be expanding to negative phrase match targeting capability to give you more control and help your listings only appear for relevant searches. Currently, you are able to set negative keywords that you don’t want your listings to show up for, however this is only available for exact match. For example, if you marked ‘red sandals’ as a negative exact match, those exact keywords would have to be searched in order for your listing not to show.
With negative phrase match, you can choose specific phrases that you don’t want your listings to appear for. This prevents your listing from showing even if a buyer’s search includes additional words, as long as the negative phrase match keywords are in the same order. For example, if a buyer searches for ‘red sandals size 6’, your listing would still not appear.
Will Promoted Listings Advanced work for you?
For sellers unsure if Promoted Listings Advanced is right for them, here are a few considerations based on the successes of early adopters.
- Evaluate your experience running CPC models on other platforms. One of the main reasons to build Promoted Listings Advanced was because sellers wanted a tool to help accelerate sales velocity and leverage learnings from other channels. Promoted Listings Advanced lets you take those combined learnings and apply them to eBay’s unique audience.
- Think about how important keyword relevancy, listing quality, and search popularity is for your inventory. New and unique products, at the right, will stand out the most on eBay. Using Promoted Listings Advanced to bid against specific keywords will help give your listings more discoverability against other products.
- Visit Ads Academy, a self-paced e-learning platform containing tutorials, articles and more focused on our new Advanced campaign type on eBay. Sellers can access Ads Academy via this link or through their advertising dashboard on Seller Hub. The Ads Academy link can be found at the top of the Advanced campaign management page, which you can access either by editing an existing Advanced campaign or by clicking on the create new campaign button and selecting the Advanced campaign type.
Checklist: will Promoted Listings Advanced work for you?
☐ You have new or trending inventory that can competitively target slot 1 in search
☐ You have experience in running and optimizing cost-per-click campaign types
☐ You have items with high prices better suited for cost-per-click campaign types
☐ You want the ability to control your daily advertising budget
☐ You have popular items that need more visibility to begin performing well
Promoted Listings Advanced is still undergoing development and growing to fit the needs of our sellers. There is a group in the eBay Community for sellers to join and share feedback. Besides, you can learn more about Promoted Listings Advanced from the FAQ section of this article.
With all these tools in hand, you can create your first Promoted Listings Advanced campaign on this page.
Promoted Listings Express
Rounding out our portfolio is Promoted Listings Express, a new way to advertise your auction listings. It lets you boost visibility for your auction-style listings with ads on similar listings’ pages. For one flat fee, your listing receives increased exposure during the auction period to help drive views, bids and sales.
It could previously only be enabled from the eBay app, but this year eBay’s adding more ways for you to opt in through multiple desktop entry points. You'll be able to access this:
- when creating a new auction listing on desktop (in the classic listing tool)
- from My eBay Active and Overview on desktop
- from the quick listing tool
Reporting for Promoted Listings Express is now available on the eBay app and coming soon to desktop.
Promoted Listings Express is available to all sellers whose seller level is Above Standard or Top Rated with enough account activity.
Visit eBay Seller Center for more information and updates about Promoted Listings Express as they become available.
Three options. Three different ways for sellers to reach more buyers and grow further on eBay. Each unique campaign type in our Promoted Listings portfolio is tailored to help eBay sellers in different ways. To discover what works best for you, test different campaign types. Experimenting and learning is a great way to work towards stronger marketing performance in the future. Visit the Ad Formats page to learn more and get started today.
eBay encourages you to visit Ads Academy, an e-learning platform, designed to help you get the most out of Promoted Listings through interactive courses. Whether you’re new to cost-per-click advertising or are searching for information on a specific feature, this resource is available to you at any time to help you along the way. You can access Ads Academy straight from your Campaign Manager.