As the holiday season gets into swing, eBay sellers have more tools than ever before to maximize their growth on the retail site in Q4 and beyond. 

eBay’s advertising ecosystem dramatically scaled over the past year, and sellers who understand the latest best practices stand to better outflank their competition both during, and after the high-traffic period.

In this webinar, eBay joined Teikametrics to discuss what’s changed within the retail site’s advertising technology, statistics in terms of what to expect during Q4, and a deep dive on best practices sellers should take into account as we enter the holiday shopping season.

What We Covered

  • Key trends on past Q4 eBay shopping activity
  • The latest best practices in campaign structure and management
  • The latest eBay advertising features and how to best leverage them
  • How these and other Q4 learnings can dovetail into 2022 success

Show Notes

Watch the Full Replay

Webinar Highlights

eBay Isn’t What It Used To Be

Taylor dispelled outdated myths about eBay. The site offers much more for sellers and brands than you might realize.

“I hear so many times from merchants, now eBay is not for me. I don’t think it’s a great fit.

It’s too hard to sell. These are all things that maybe in the past, were true. But we have really set out on a mission to improve our technology to enable a more seamless customer experience for both our buyers and our sellers. We are a large marketplace. In Q3, we did close to $20 billion of GMV. In Q4 of last year, we did close to $27 billion of GMV. We have 154 million active buyers as of today with over 1.5 billion listings and close to 20 million sellers.” -Taylor Munguia, eBay Business Development

Christmas Shopping Is Happening Earlier Than Ever

Especially as consumers are educated about supply chain challenges, they’re starting their Christmas shopping earlier in the season this year than ever before.

“Consumers are shopping earlier and earlier. So, it’s important to have a presence, especially right now. If you’re not up and running currently, this is the best time to get up and running on our marketplace. Our audience has told us that they begin their holiday shopping at the beginning of November to well throughout December. And we’re seeing trends, especially this year with supply chain shortages, that consumers are shopping earlier and earlier wanting to get their holiday shopping complete, due to shipping and supply chain risk constraints.” -Taylor Munguia, eBay Business Development 

Certain Categories Get The Most Lift In Views In November and December

The data is clear, some categories more than others get the biggest lift in views on eBay during November and December:

  • Video Games & Consoles
  • Dolls & Bears
  • Toys & Hobbies
  • Pottery & Glass
  • Music
  • Collectibles

“If you’re a merchant, a small brand, a medium-sized brand, or a large brand that has any of this inventory, or if you’re a reseller that has access to any of the brands in these categories, eBay should absolutely be part of your marketplace strategy. These are the categories with the biggest lift in November and December that we’ve seen.” -Taylor Munguia, eBay Business Development

eBay Offers Promoted Listings To Improve Product Visibility

The scale of eBay’s offerings means it can be difficult for shoppers to discover your products amongst everything else for sale there. That’s why eBay’s suite of Promoted Listings ad types helps you to boost visibility on the site.

“With billions of listings, across hundreds of categories on eBay, making sure that your products are visible and seen by our vibrant community can sometimes feel daunting. So to help solve this challenge, Promoted Listings is eBay’s advertising solution that helps boost listing visibility to help maximize exposure and ultimately increase the likelihood of sales.”  -Christian Garcia Rinkert, eBay Strategic Partner Manager

Teikametrics Can Optimize Promoted Listings Advanced

In particular, make sure you’re up to date on Promoted Listings Advanced (PLA). This is eBay’s latest ad type which gives you new types of controls and which Teikametrics can manage for you, along with Promoted Listings Standard. 

“The primary topic for today is our recent addition, Promoted Listings Advanced, available via the Teikametrics platform. Promoted Listings Advanced lets you promote your listings in the top slot of search results through a cost-per-click model. It gives sellers like you the high visibility you want and the control you need with daily budget, keyword targeting, and keyword bidding and reporting.” -Christian Garcia Rinkert, eBay Strategic Partner Manager

PLA Gets You The Powerful Top Of Search Placement

What makes PLA so powerful is that it provides top of search placement which is proven to be shoppers’ preferred choice on the SERP.

“Maximizing visibility in search is critical to your success on eBay. Did you know that 70% of purchases begin from search and, more specifically, one in five begin from the top slot? With these insights in mind and feedback from our seller community, we’ve carefully designed Promoted Listings Advanced as a way to help capture the top slot and search and drive sales velocity.” -Christian Garcia Rinkert, eBay Strategic Partner Manager

PLA Gives You Control Over Budget, Bidding, Keywords, and Match Type

In addition to top of search placement, there are a number of other ways PLA differs from eBay’s legacy ad product, including control over budget, bidding, keywords, and match type.

“In addition to different keyword selection, we also offer a variety of match types for a well-rounded advertising strategy. Match types dictate how closely keywords match a buyer search query, which helps increase the likelihood that your ad will appear. Exact match, phrase match, a negative exact, are all match types that we offer.” -Christian Garcia Rinkert, eBay Strategic Partner Manager

Follow Best Practices For Best Results on eBay

Christian offered a summary of best practices for best results selling on eBay.

“To summarize best practices, we encourage sellers to do a number of different things. One, choose the right items to promote, make sure that you’re being strategic in your listings and selection. To reach active buyers with suggested keywords, take advantage of what eBay is giving you. We have a lot of data and insights that power these suggestions. Stay competitive by considering suggested bids. Be strategic in how you organize your campaign and ad groups and ensure that you’re including high-quality listings. Again, relevancy and different factors are really important to maximize your exposure on the site.” -Christian Garcia Rinkert, eBay Strategic Partner Manager

Screenshot of Emma + Oliver store on Amazon.com

Meet The Emma + Oliver Furniture Business 

Emma + Oliver is a furniture business selling on marketplaces that had eBay advertising on autopilot.

“We launched in 2018. We are furniture only, and we’re marketplace only. I’m the general manager for the Emma + Oliver brand. As a brand that sells exclusively online. We’ve always felt it’s vital for us to be represented across all available places where products can be sold. Since almost day one for our brand, we did recognize the prominence of eBay as a marketplace, and also knew it had a sizable share of the ecommerce shopping market. So, with that in mind, we knew it was a place where we wanted our products to be featured, but, unlike some of the other marketplaces, cost-per-click advertising was not yet available on eBay. So cost per sale, as an advertising mechanism became available. And we used it, but honestly, we never really gave it much more attention than just kind of applying that suggestion.”-Ryan Rediger, Emma + Oliver General Manager

Emma + Oliver Worked With Teikametrics To Reach ROAS and Budget Goals

Ryan described how working with Teikametrics to manage eBay PLA helped them to grow top line sales and meet efficiency goals.

“Since beginning to use the Promoted Listings Advanced beta, and partnering with Teikametrics for the ongoing management, we’ve been able to grow our top-line sales on eBay. And the team at Teikametrics worked with us to achieve and work towards our ROAS and budget goals.

I can say, with relative certainty, we wouldn’t be using those Promoted Listing Advanced type campaigns if it weren’t for Teikametrics. And we probably wouldn’t have seen the growth on our eBay account like we have been. So, while we’re still in our early stages of the usage of CPC on eBay, and frankly, the ROAS is not as high as what we’ve seen for cost-per-sale on eBay, getting that exposure at the top of search has definitely helped us to grow. And as a seller, I would recommend using this type of advertising if you’re selling on eBay.” -Ryan Rediger, Emma + Oliver General Manager

Teikametrics Manages The Details So Emma + Oliver Can Focus On Strategy

For Emma + Oliver, the key to PLA success is frequent data-backed ad optimization.

“The key, like in any ad platform, is to stay on top of those ongoing bids and budgets, which, frankly, I would not be doing if it weren’t for some of those periodic reports provided by the Teikametrics Team that break down those campaign and item level performances on the week and month. Having that allows me to stay focused on overall strategy and not just the minute detail. -Ryan Rediger, Emma + Oliver General Manager

Good Catalog Organization Made It Easy To Onboard eBay PLA

According to Ryan, already having excellent data organization on their thousands of SKUs made it painless to onboard for PLA.

“One of the things that I find very important in running a marketplace business, especially with the broad assortment – I think we have somewhere around 5 to 6000 SKUs – you really have to stay on top of the overall data and, you know, categorical data of item level detail, that sort of thing. So having that made the onboarding process able to focus on those things that it’s intended to focus on. We didn’t have to focus too much on “How are your products organized?” It was more after I let Teikametrics know I was interested in the service following the webinar, we had a discussion about what products to advertise. I provided the data on those products and our campaigns were live probably about a week later.” -Ryan Rediger, Emma + Oliver General Manager

You Can Still Claim First Mover Advantage On eBay 

Chet pointed out that it’s still early days on eBay for PLA and the potential for brands to claim market share.

“When you can get on a platform like eBay in the early innings of them expanding their advertising program and providing that top slot to the winner of a cost-per-click auction, it’s a huge first-mover advantage. And I recommend to all the sellers on the line, really think about that, the opportunity that’s available. Right now there’s a specific window of time when you can strike while the iron is hot. I can guarantee that, as the months go by, the competition is going to only get more intense. It’s still going to be a good program, still going to be critical for your brand to adopt these new advertising strategies, but when you can get it now, it just gives you such a great advantage.” -Chet Butikofer, Teikametrics VP of Innovation

Start With Several Listings

The recommendation based on the Teikametrics team’s experience with eBay advertising is to not limit yourself to a test with just a small number of listings. Start with a line of several related listings for the most rapid learning and growth.

“We have had a few sellers that have just wanted to start with a couple of listings and that’s OK and they’ve done great. They’ve found success. But what we found is, when you start with more listings that have similar characteristics, they’re in similar categories, you really increase your likelihood of learning and understanding how to successfully sell your product line on the eBay marketplace. And the risk is really minimal. It just makes sense to start with more listings and accelerate your learning and understanding of how this works, and specifically how you and your brand can accelerate.” -Chet Butikofer, Teikametrics VP of Innovation

Structure Ads So You Can Constantly Optimize Keywords

As with any other marketplace, the Teikametrics advice is to carefully structure ad campaigns to give you the most power and flexibility to constantly optimize keywords to meet your advertising goals.

“You really want to spend some time structuring the ad groups within campaigns, such that keywords maximize your return on advertising spend for every listing that they’re associated with. It’s a regular maintenance item that you have to do on keywords, but making sure that you’ve got the right ad groups and the right keywords associated with those ad groups and you continue to optimize for the highest converting, highest return keywords for those ad groups is critical. eBay’s got a great report that shows suggested keywords and bids that you should be considering and as you see those keywords that may initially not make complete sense, I’d give it a shot. Give it a chance. I would recommend that you allow eBay’s AI to work for you. And just be vigilant in tracking, managing, and doubling down on the most impactful keywords from that tool.”  -Chet Butikofer, Teikametrics VP of Innovation

Want more eBay advertising advice?

Read 5 Expert Tips For Advertising On eBay