The ultimate marketplace advertising guide
Marketplace advertising means paying to boost the visibility of your products inside a marketplace, mainly through sponsored search, sponsored display, sponsored brand placements, and promotional offers. The strongest results come from combining automatic and manual campaigns, testing your ads continuously, and analyzing the data to find what converts. Because many shoppers now begin their product search directly on marketplaces rather than on a search engine, advertising where they already shop is no longer optional for a healthy ecommerce business.
A large share of consumer product searches now starts on Amazon rather than on general search engines like Google. That shift carries two clear implications for sellers. First, if your products are not promoted on marketplaces, you are missing a sizeable pool of buyers who never reach a search engine at all. Second, while marketplace ad competition is still maturing for many product categories, that window of relatively lower bids will not stay open forever, so it pays to build your advertising expertise now.
Types of marketplace ads
Most marketplaces offer four broad advertising and promotional options, though the exact features differ from one marketplace to the next. The four main methods are sponsored search, sponsored display, sponsored brand, and promotional offers. Each one serves a different stage of the buyer journey, so a balanced strategy usually uses more than one.
1. Sponsored search (sponsored products)
Sponsored search, also called sponsored products, promotes a specific product listing inside the marketplace search results. These placements appear on almost every page a shopper sees, so they are central to the buyer journey. They work through keyword bidding and are known for a high conversion rate, which makes them a mid to low funnel strategy.
2. Sponsored display
Sponsored display ads are different from the others because they are not keyword based. Instead, they rely primarily on customer behavior. What a shopper bought, what they previously viewed, and what they searched for all influence which display ads they see, which makes this another mid to low funnel strategy.
3. Sponsored brand
Sponsored brand ads highlight your brand, and on some marketplaces a small selection of products alongside it. This format is keyword based and is effective at driving brand awareness. Because it introduces shoppers to your brand rather than closing a single sale, it sits at the mid to high funnel.
4. Promotional offers
Promotions tempt customers to buy and can nudge the marketplace algorithm to favor your placement over competitors. On Amazon, for example, you can create Lightning Deals, which Amazon then promotes on your behalf and which can lift sales significantly when used well. It is an expensive method, but a successful promotion can create a halo effect that raises your rank and sales for days, weeks, or even months afterward.
The bidding approach you use depends on the method you choose, since some methods support automatic bidding and others manual bidding. The next section explains the difference and how to use each.
Automatic versus manual campaigns
Successful sellers rarely pick one approach. They run both automatic and manual campaigns and let the two reinforce each other. How you split your effort between them depends on your goals, whether you are chasing scalability or efficiency, plus your level of expertise and how much time you can commit.
Automatic campaigns are well suited to beginners in pay per click advertising. They take less time to run, gather and store data for future campaigns on most marketplaces, are the easiest way to experiment, and surface long tail keyword insights you might not have thought to target.
Manual campaigns reward sellers who have the expertise and time to manage them closely. They are very effective in experienced hands, let you maximize sales volume against your target ACoS, allow more precise targeting, make it easy to lower bids or pause keywords that underperform, and let you test single keyword ideas quickly.
A strong strategy is to make manual and automatic campaigns work together. Start with an automatic campaign, wait for it to collect data, then analyze which keywords are most profitable. Build a manual campaign with higher bids on those proven keywords. In effect, the automatic campaign becomes your research tool while the manual campaign gives you the customization and flexibility to scale what works.
General tips for advertising on marketplaces
Beyond choosing ad types and bidding methods, a few habits separate sellers who treat marketplaces as a real revenue channel from those who simply run ads and hope. The tips below help you stay ahead of the competition and keep your campaigns profitable over time.
Use a marketing calendar
Plan and time custom ads around events and holidays with a marketing calendar, which can lift profitability during peak demand. A calendar that fits the geography of your market keeps your promotions aligned with the moments your customers are most ready to buy, so seasonal spikes do not catch your campaigns off guard.
Willingness to test determines success
With paid online marketing, you have to keep testing your ads and promotions. Competition, customer behavior, and marketplace algorithms all change constantly. If you are not regularly switching out creative, titles, bids, and descriptions, you will fall behind the curve.
Analyzing your data
To advertise and sell well on marketplaces, you need to be confident with data analytics and use capable tools to turn raw numbers into insight. Strong analytics give you visibility into the competition, the market, your own products, and the performance of your ads, which is what lets you decide where to spend more and where to cut back.
Optimizing your marketplace sales
Advertising is only one lever. There are many other aspects of a marketplace listing and operation you can optimize, from product content to pricing and fulfillment, and improving them makes every advertising dollar work harder.
Every marketplace is different
Every marketplace uses its own interface, so uploading products, building and managing ad campaigns, and analyzing data can be challenging, especially for small and mid sized companies. Managing each platform separately multiplies the effort and the room for error. A single connected interface removes that friction.
e-tailize gives you one consistent interface across every connected marketplace. From that single place you can build campaigns, upload them, and push them out to all your marketplaces at once, rather than rebuilding the same work in each separate dashboard. e-tailize also provides data analytics powered by AI and machine learning, turning your marketplace performance into insights you can act on.
Frequently asked questions
- What are the main types of marketplace ads?
- Most marketplaces offer four broad options: sponsored search (also called sponsored products), sponsored display, sponsored brand, and promotional offers. Sponsored search and sponsored brand are keyword based, sponsored display is driven by customer behavior, and promotional offers like Amazon Lightning Deals reward shoppers and can boost your placement in the algorithm.
- Should I use automatic or manual marketplace campaigns?
- Use both. Automatic campaigns are easier for beginners, take less time, and are great for gathering keyword data and experimenting. Manual campaigns give you precise targeting and control over bids. A common approach is to use automatic campaigns to discover profitable keywords, then build manual campaigns with higher bids on those keywords.
- What is the difference between sponsored search and sponsored display ads?
- Sponsored search promotes a specific product listing inside the marketplace search results and works through keyword bidding. Sponsored display is not keyword based; it targets shoppers based on their behavior, such as what they previously bought, viewed, or searched for.
- Why advertise on marketplaces instead of only on search engines?
- A large share of consumer product searches now begins directly on marketplaces such as Amazon rather than on a general search engine. If your products are not promoted on marketplaces, you miss buyers who never reach a search engine, and ad competition in many categories is still maturing, which can mean lower bids than on Google or Facebook.
- How do I keep marketplace ad campaigns profitable over time?
- Keep testing. Competition, customer behavior, and marketplace algorithms change constantly, so regularly refresh your creative, titles, bids, and descriptions. Pair that with solid data analytics to see what converts, and plan promotions around a marketing calendar that matches your market and its seasonal peaks.