eBay offers promoted listings campaign strategies for every type of seller. Learn more about what we offer on our Promoted Listings overview page
The priority strategy helps your listings reach highly motivated buyers with priority access to ad placements and advanced targeting. With precise control over your ad spend, you can effectively target your ads while paying only for clicks on your ads.
For each campaign using the priority strategy you run, you'll be charged for the clicks on your ads up to - but never more than - your campaign's daily budget. Once your campaign has reached its daily budget, your campaign will stop serving ads until the next day, when the daily budget resets. Any unused daily budget will not roll over to the next day.
Above Standard or Top Rated sellers with enough account activity can promote fixed price listings for most categories.
The following are not eligible for priority campaigns:
- Auction listings and Auction listings with Buy It Now
- Listings in Wholesale & Job Lots, Cars, Motorcycles & Vehicles, Events Tickets, Property, E-Cigarettes, Vapes & Accs or Everything Else categories
- Listings that are out of stock
Using the priority campaign strategy
You can promote your listings with the priority strategy from the Advertising dashboard, Active Listings, and through the advanced listing tool. Here's how to get started:
Priority campaign targeting strategy
A targeting strategy is a method used to determine how your ads will reach potential buyers. When promoting your listings with a priority campaign strategy, you’ll choose from one of two targeting strategies: Smart targeting or Manual targeting.
Smart targeting
Smart targeting enables easy setup when you promote your listings with a priority strategy. You’ll determine how much you pay each day and we’ll automatically target your ads. Your campaign will automatically update over time to optimize your ads. Here's how to get started:
- Navigate to the Seller Hub, click on the Advertising tab.
- Select Create new campaign.
- Choose Promote your listings from the available ad type options.
- Select a Priority campaign strategy.
- Add listings to your campaign.
- Select Smart targeting to automatically target your ads to buyers.
- Set a daily budget for your campaign and choose a maximum cost-per-click (CPC).
- Enter a Campaign name and set your Start date and End date.
- Launch your campaign.
Maximum cost-per-click
When you set up a priority campaign with smart targeting, you can edit your campaign’s maximum cost-per-click (maximum CPC). This setting determines the highest amount you are willing to pay for each click on an ad. The amount you pay for each click will be up to - but never more than - the maximum CPC you set.
The maximum CPC you choose is essentially your bid in an auction that determines ad placement. A higher bid (maximum CPC) increases the likelihood that your ad will win the auction and appear in a prominent position. This means that your listing is more likely to be shown and clicked on by potential buyers. Conversely, a lower maximum CPC might save you money per click but could result in your ad being shown less frequently, potentially leading to fewer overall sales.
Tip
Using smart targeting can help you save time while reaching your advertising goals.
Manual targeting
Manual targeting gives you advanced control with keyword targeting and bids, so you can determine how much each click on one of your ads is worth to you. You'll select how to manage ongoing optimizations to help your campaigns remain competitive. Here's how to get started:
- Navigate to the Seller Hub, click on the Advertising tab.
- Select Create new campaign.
- Choose Promote your listings from the available ad type options.
- Select a Priority campaign strategy.
- Add listings to your campaign.
- Select Manual targeting to use keywords to target your ads.
- Choose your bidding strategy: Dynamic bidding strategy or a Fixed bidding strategy.
- Review or manually edit your ad groups, keyword targeting, and keyword bids.
- Set a daily budget for your campaign.
- Enter a Campaign name and set your Start date and End date.
- Launch your campaign.
Ad groups
Ad groups help you build more effective manual targeting campaigns by organizing your listings and keywords into a common goal or category. Grouping together similar listings allows you to target them with the same set of keywords.
Campaigns can have up to 500 ad groups and up to 1,000 listings in each ad group.
Tip
We recommend 10-15 keywords per unique product type.
Keywords
Keywords are words or phrases used to target buyers with your priority ads using manual targeting. Use relevant keywords and add relevant search terms as keywords to help improve the visibility of your ads. Suggested keywords can help you identify queries buyers are using to look for items like yours.
You can also use negative keywords to prevent your ads from being matched to shopping journeys that include your negative keywords. Meaning, when a buyer searches for a term that you've added as a negative keyword, your ads will not be eligible for display. You’ll never be charged for negative keywords.
You can use up to 1,000 targeted keywords per ad group. Additionally, you can add up to 1,000 negative keywords per ad group.
Keyword match types
A keyword match type determines how closely your keyword needs to match a user’s shopping journey in order for your ad to be targeted to them.
Broad match matches your ads to keywords based on how related they appear to buyers’ shopping journeys.
Broad match can help you reach a wider audience with fewer keywords. For example, if you add the keyword "kid's shoes" with broad match to your campaign, your ads could show for search queries like "children's footwear".
Phrase match allows your listings to appear when a buyer’s shopping journey includes your exact keyword and may include other words before and/or after your keyword.
Phrase match is designed to match your ad to a buyer journey where your keyword retains its original meaning. It will not appear for search phrases that add a word to the middle of your keyword.
Exact match allows your listing to appear for search terms that match your keywords character-for-character with slight variations like misspellings, capitalization, and abbreviations.
Negative keywords
Negative exact match keywords are terms which are excluded from your ad group. Meaning, when a buyer searches for a term that you've added as a negative keyword, your Advanced ads will not be eligible for display.
Negative keywords are exact match without variants, meaning that for a keyword to be excluded, it needs to match the buyer's search term character-for-character.
Negative phrase match keywords will exclude your item from appearing for search terms that include your exact keyword and may include other words before and/or after your keyword, but not between
Bidding strategy
A campaign bidding strategy is the option you can select to determine how your keyword bids are managed throughout the duration of your campaign. There are two campaign bidding strategies you can choose from: fixed and dynamic.
A dynamic bidding strategy will automatically update keyword bids daily to the suggested bid. With this strategy, sellers do not need to make daily, manual updates to keep their keyword bids competitive in the marketplace.
Suggested bids are calculated based on a variety of factors that may include item attributes, seasonality, past performance and current competition to find an optimal balance between performance and cost.
A fixed bidding strategy will not change once it's been set. You can review your performance and update your campaign bidding strategy at any time.
Priority ad fees
Priority ad fees are based on your bid, the level of competition for queries in which your ad appears, and the clicks your ads have received.
For each campaign, the total ad fees charged each day for clicks on your priority ads cannot exceed the daily budget you set each day.
Here's how priority ad fees work:
- The amount that you will be charged for each click is based on a second-price auction
- All priority ad fees are charged at a listing level. Charges are determined by the sum of all cost-per-click clicks a single listing receives within a day
- When you promote your listings with the priority strategy there are two ways to bid: manual targeting and smart targeting. With manual targeting, you select a keyword bid for each keyword and keyword match type combination. With smart targeting, your bids will automatically be applied for you subject to a maximum CPC you set
- Because the listings, keywords and bids in each second price auction are unique, each cost-per-click calculation is dynamic
- Sales will be attributed within a 30-day window of a click on your ad
While it is possible to be charged for multiple legitimate clicks from the same buyer, we have checks in place to filter out invalid clicks. If clicks on an ad are identified as invalid, you will not be charged. Note that you will also be charged if you click on your own priority ad.
Viewing your fees
- Fees for your promoted listings campaigns using the priority campaign strategy will appear as "Promoted Listings - Priority fees" in your Payments tab or on your seller invoice
- We combine all clicks a seller receives on a priority ad in a given campaign on a daily basis and sellers are generally charged for these clicks up to 72 hours after the clicks take place
- Your charges are reported at a listing level. From your Payments tab or invoice, you'll see the campaign ID, click date, total number of clicks, and average cost-per-click per listing
The daily campaign cost is calculated by multiplying the total number of clicks received per keyword by their respective price. The daily budget is the maximum amount that you're willing to spend on a single campaign per day.
Once your campaign has reached its daily budget, your campaign will stop serving ads until the next day, when the daily budget resets. Any unused daily budget will not roll over to the next day.
Updates to your daily budget are made in real time. If you update your daily budget below what has already been spent, your ads will stop serving and your new daily budget will go into effect the next day.
Listings in a campaign will be eligible to begin surfacing again if you increase the daily budget of an out-of-budget campaign.
- If you update your daily budget below what has already been spent, your ads will stop serving and your new daily budget will go into effect the next day
- There is a $1 minimum and a $1,000,000 maximum daily budget
Monitoring your campaigns
Advertising and Campaign dashboards
Once you have activated a campaign, you can view the performance of all of your Promoted Listings campaigns from the Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
Your Campaign dashboard lets you see detailed ad group-level, keyword-level, and listing-level reporting for each individual campaign. While on the Campaign dashboard you can make edits quickly within the context of your performance. To find the Campaign dashboard:
- Go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- Click on the campaign name in the Campaign overview section of the page.
On the Campaign dashboard and Advertising dashboard you can monitor:
- Impressions – The number of times your ads have appeared on any eBay site
- Clicks – The number of interactions with your ads
- Quantity sold – The number of items purchased within 30 days of a click on your ads
- Sales – Sales revenue generated within 30 days of a click on your ads. Includes item price, shipping, taxes, any other applicable fees, and returned or canceled transactions
- Ad fees – Ad fees incurred by your promoted listings. When using a general strategy, ad fees are incurred by your items sold within 30 days of a click on your ads. When using a priority strategy, ad fees are incurred by clicks on your ads. Visit the Payments tab for final fees, including any applicable taxes or credits
- Sales conversion rate - Quantity sold divided by clicks, multiplied by 100
- Return on ad spend (ROAS) – Your sales, divided by ad fees
- Average cost-per-click (CPC) – Total cost of clicks divided by total clicks
Campaign name, Status, Start and End date, and listings are updated in real time, as those events are happening. Performance metrics are reported in near-real time though they may take up to 72 hours to reconcile.
Campaign recommendations
Campaign recommendations will appear at the top of your Advertising dashboard and provide customized tips to help you optimize your advertising campaigns for performance. These recommendations are updated daily based on your campaign’s performance, eBay’s historical data and best practices.
Getting started with campaign recommendations is easy:
- Go to your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- If there are any opportunities to improve your advertising campaigns, you will see your recommendations at the top of the page.
- Review and implement any or all of the recommendations for your advertising campaigns by clicking on the recommendation.
Check your Advertising dashboard regularly for new recommendations and apply changes to campaigns.
Downloading and scheduling reports
From Seller Hub, you can download and schedule search query, keyword-level and listing-level reports for each of your priority campaigns, here's how:
Downloading reports from the Advertising tab
- Go to the campaign overview section in your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab.
- Find the campaign you’d like to download a report for, and expand the menu in the Actions column.
- Select Generate listing report, Generate keyword report, or Generate search query report.
After launching your campaign, allow up to 72 hours for some reporting metrics to appear in downloaded reports. Campaign details and reporting will be in the time zone for the site your campaigns were created in.
Downloading reports from the Reports tab
You can also save time by scheduling and downloading reports from the Seller Hub Reports tab by downloading reports at the account level and for multiple campaigns at once.
- Go to Seller Hub Reports - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Download.
- Select Download report.
- Select the following report parameters:
- Source → Advertising
- Campaign strategy → Promoted Listings - Priority
- Type → Keyword, Listing, Campaign or Search query
Scheduling reports from the Reports tab
- Go to Seller Hub Reports - opens in new window or tab.
- Select Schedule.
- Select Schedule report.
- Create a download schedule by selecting the following report parameters:
- Source → Advertising
- Campaign strategy → Promoted Listings - Priority
- Type → Keyword, Listing, Campaign or Search query
- Frequency → Daily, Weekly or Monthly
Tip
Visit the Seller Center - opens in new window or tab to learn more about promoting your listings with the priority strategy.