Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA is a great way to drive more visibility to your listings on eBay. We’ve talked about how Advanced campaigns can leverage a strong keyword strategy in a previous blog. Another piece of the advertising puzzle that sellers need to pay attention to is your daily budget.
It’s essential to have an optimized budget when launching a campaign. An unoptimized budget can create a snowball effect that will drag down the performance of your entire Advanced campaign. In this blog post, we’ll explore how to set an effective daily budget for an Advanced campaign, and show you how to avoid common budgeting mistakes.
Budget basics
Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA campaigns offer enhanced budget controls and keyword bidding. The cost-per-click model (CPC) model gives you the power to choose how much you’re willing to pay per click for each keyword. For sellers who aren’t sure how high they should value a keyword, eBay provides suggested bids and bid ranges for all our suggested keywords.
To help manage these costs, you’ll set a daily budget that caps your ad spend at a maximum amount each day. It’s a great way to control costs and avoid running over your allotted budget.
eBay Ads Tip: An easy way to create a basic daily budget is by dividing the total amount you are willing to spend by the number of days you plan on running your campaign.
Common budgeting mistakes
We’ve identified a few common mistakes sellers make when setting a daily budget.
Starting with a smaller budget sounds practical, especially when testing to see if a Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA campaign fits your needs. But what if that’s not always the case? From one-week test runs to multi-month campaigns, a small daily budget can limit your campaign’s success. Here’s what can happen if you use a budget that’s too small:
Setting and forgetting. It’s easy to forget about your budget once you’ve launched your campaign. If you don’t monitor your ad spend on a regular basis, you may miss out on important information like how fast you reach your daily cap and what keywords are providing a good return on investment (ROI).
Hitting your daily cap too fast. The relationship between keyword bid amounts and your daily budget is critical. Your campaign might bid on the right keywords and create lots of traffic to your listings, but a low daily budget can act as a brake. It’s common for our experts to see campaigns run out of their daily budget in the early hours of the day when it’s too low. Finding a daily budget that allows consistent traffic throughout the day can bring in accurate campaign data that you can use to evaluate if Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA is right for your listings.
Skewed metrics. Having good data can lead to better campaign optimizations and performance. If you reach your daily budget too fast, your campaign will not be shown to the full audience, and you will have less reliable metrics. These metrics could mislead your campaign strategy and limit the effectiveness of Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA.
Budget solutions
Don’t fret if you’ve made a budgeting mistake. You have access to all the right tools needed to fix them. Here are some easy tactics to follow when trying to address budget issues.
Increase your budget. Sometimes the correct solution is the most obvious one. Increasing your daily budget can help increase visibility for your campaign and avoid traffic stoppages due to hitting your budget cap too fast.
Check your reports. Get familiar with the Search Query, Keyword and Listing reports (located at the bottom of your Advertising Dashboard in the “Campaigns” section) for your Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA campaign. Each of these can provide you with information about what keywords and keyword strategies are effective at driving traffic and sales.
Optimize keyword bids. Your reports will show what keywords are driving the most traffic and sales in your campaign. You can save your budget by not bidding on keywords that bring in low traffic or don’t convert into sales.
Review your keyword match types. Your keyword match types are just as important as the keywords themselves. Using a match type like phrase match will broaden your audience, while negative phrase match helps target specific buyers. Check out our keyword strategy blog for more on this.
Figuring out if Advanced campaigns work for you can take some testing. By using a proper daily budget and building an effective keyword strategy, you’ll have a better chance of evaluating how effective Advanced campaigns are for your listings. Learn more about Promoted Listings AdvancedBETA and launch a new campaign today.
