7 min article

Promoted Stores

Promote your eBay store with eye-catching ads that highlight your top inventory or coupons. With a guided campaign set-up, it's easy to launch targeted ads that attract interested buyers.

Promoted Stores is an advertising solution that allows you to easily launch eye-catching ads that drive interested buyers to your eBay store. These ads highlight a coupon or category of items in your store and contain your store’s name, logo, a headline, a link to your store, and several of your top performing listings.

If a buyer clicks on a listing image on a Promoted Stores ad they are directed to the listing page to view the item and make a purchase. If a buyer clicks anywhere else on the ad, they are taken to either a specific category page or a sale page on your eBay store, depending on whether the ads are highlighting a category of items or a coded coupon.

Fees for using Promoted Stores

Promoted Stores uses a cost-per-click (CPC) model, meaning you only pay for clicks on your ads, up to your set daily budget.

The cost for each click is based on a second price auction, which means the fee charged will be determined by factors like historical performance on eBay, your bid amount, other sellers' bids, and a reserve price (the minimum amount we've determined a click is worth, taking competition and marketplace thresholds into consideration).

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.

Promoted Stores best practices

  • Customize your store's branding - Enhance your storefront with a store name, logo, and billboard to establish your brand identity and help build trust with buyers
  • Optimize your store - Create custom or automated inventory strips to feature your top-selling items and most popular categories to capture buyer attention and to help drive sales
  • Create multiple Promoted Stores campaigns - Launch campaigns for different categories and coupons to attract a wider range of buyers to your store
  • Use Smart targeting - Let eBay update your targeting and bidding automatically with our latest suggestions on a daily basis.
  • Bid effectively - Use Dynamic bidding to automatically update your bids to our suggestions daily.

Promoted Stores campaign set up

You can create Promoted Stores campaigns from your Advertising dashboard - opens in new window or tab. Here's how:

  1. In Seller Hub, go to your Advertising dashboard.
  2. Select Create new campaign.
  3. Select Promote your store from the ad type options.
  4. Follow the prompts to set up your campaign. You can choose to highlight a category or a coupon.
  5. Once you review your campaign details, you can Launch your campaign.

Category

If you select to promote your store with a category, in the dropdown menu you’ll see a list of all the eBay categories that have active listings in your store. Select a category you would like to highlight in your Promoted Stores ads. You can only select one category per campaign, but you can create as many campaigns as you’d like.

Tip
eBay may make occasional updates to our category structure. Your campaign will automatically adjust to reflect any category structure updates.

Coupon

If you select to promote your store with a coupon, in the dropdown menu you’ll see a list of all your active, public coupons. Select a coupon you would like to highlight in your Promoted Stores ads. You can only select one coupon per campaign, but you can create as many campaigns as you’d like.

Promoted Stores keyword and sub-category bids

The bid amount you set for each keyword or sub-category is important in determining if your ads are shown to buyers. A higher bid can improve the competitiveness of your campaign. Here are some tips on setting your bids:

  • Use Smart targeting or Dynamic bidding to keep your bids competitive
  • If you select fixed bidding, regularly monitor performance after you launch your campaign to optimize your campaign

Suggested bids

Suggested bids are designed to help you select a competitive bid for your sub-categories and keywords. They are derived from a variety of factors, including historical bid averages for sub-categories and keywords. Using suggested bids can help increase the likelihood of your ad being shown to buyers.

Note that suggested bids can fluctuate. With Dynamic bidding, we’ll automatically update your bids to our suggestions daily.

Tip 
Use Smart targeting to take the guesswork out of setting up your campaign.

Visit our Seller Center - opens in new window or tab to learn more about Promoted Stores.

Promoted Stores FAQs

How can eBay help me promote my store to potential buyers?

Promote your store with ads that showcase one of your categories or coupons. These eye-catching ads highlight your top, relevant inventory to buyers and can include your store name and logo.

How is Promoted Stores different from Promoted Listings?

While Promoted Listings help buyers discover your listings, Promoted Stores drives traffic to your eBay store and helps buyers discover your brand with ads that can feature multiple listings.

Where can my ads appear?

Your Promoted Stores ads can appear in highly visible places across eBay such as the home page, top of search results, or listings pages. We are constantly looking to improve the experience of Promoted Stores so we may expand to other placements in the future.

How does eBay determine which listing images will appear in my ads?

Your top performing listing images are selected for your ads and are personalized for each buyer based on relevance to their search keywords or the specific sub-category the buyer is shopping in. The buyer's past shopping history on eBay may influence the listings that are selected.

How is it determined if my ad will be shown?

Whether or not your ad is displayed to a buyer depends on the amount you bid for each keyword/sub-category and a variety of relevance factors. These relevance factors include attributes of the eBay pages the buyer visits and the items displayed, the categories and keywords you target, their location relative to your items, account information they provide to us, and eBay marketplace shopping activity, which may include their shopping experiences with eBay.

How am I charged?

The cost for each click is based on a second price auction, which means the fee charged will be determined by factors like historical performance on eBay, your bid amount, other sellers' bids, and a reserve price (the minimum amount we've determined a click is worth, taking competition and marketplace thresholds into consideration).

For example, if Seller A had the highest bid at $0.75 and Seller B had the second-highest bid at $0.50, and both items are of equal quality, Seller A wins the auction. The amount that Seller A will pay per click will be between $0.50 and $0.75, but will never be more than $0.75.

How do I measure the performance of my Promoted Stores campaigns?

For detailed metrics on how your campaign is performing, go to your Advertising dashboard. From here you can monitor:

  • Store views
  • New to store
  • Impressions
  • Clicks
  • Quantity sold
  • Sales
  • Ad fees
  • Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

You are able to download performance reports for your campaigns from the Campaign dashboard and campaign details page.

How do I become eligible for Promoted Stores?

Promoted Stores is available to all eBay sellers with an active store subscription. We are always looking for ways to improve and will regularly add new features to help you drive more buyers to your eBay store.

If you’re not a store subscriber, you can explore the benefits of having a store and how to create one here - opens in new window or tab.

What is Smart targeting for Promoted Stores?

Smart targeting for Promoted Stores automatically adjusts ad campaigns by updating targeting and bidding elements daily based on our recommendations.

Can I make changes to my campaigns after launching a smart targeting campaign?

Once a Smart targeting campaign is launched, the targeting type cannot be changed, but you can adjust other campaign settings such as daily budget and campaign dates.

What’s the difference between Dynamic and fixed bidding?

With dynamic bidding, bidding is optimized by eBay so you don’t have to make changes yourself. Bids are automatically updated daily based on the latest market dynamics and suggestions from eBay. 

With fixed bidding, sellers control bidding in this strategy. You can select sub-categories, keywords, and also manually set bid values for the campaign. All targeting and bidding settings remain unchanged unless manually edited by the seller.

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