Marketplace advertising agency

We go through the listings you intend to advertise: title structure, the bullet points or key features, the attribute fields the marketplace uses for filtering, images that show the product in use and against something for scale, the variant relationships, and the questions buyers keep asking in reviews. Advertising a weak listing is the fastest way to spend a budget with nothing to show. Where a listing cannot be made competitive, we say so and leave it out of the plan rather than bidding on it.

Automatic targeting is useful as a research tool and expensive as a permanent strategy. We run it deliberately, read the search term report on a schedule, and promote the terms that convert into their own targeted campaigns with their own bids. Terms that spend without converting become negatives. Over a few months the account moves from mostly automatic to mostly deliberate, and the automatic campaigns keep running on a small budget purely to keep finding new terms.

Ads on your own brand name and ads on generic category terms do different jobs and should never share a budget. Brand terms are cheap, convert well and mostly reach people already looking for you, which flatters the account average. Category terms cost more and bring people who did not know you existed. We split them, set different targets for each, and report them separately, so nobody mistakes defending a position for growth.

The console reports advertising cost against advertising revenue, which ignores everything the marketplace takes. We build a per-product figure that starts from the sale price and subtracts the referral fee, fulfilment, returns provision and cost of goods. What is left is what the advertising can spend against. Products with almost nothing left get a low ceiling or no advertising at all, and products with room get the budget. It is the same principle as any other channel, with more fees in the middle.

Marketplace ads stop or waste money for reasons outside the ad console. An item goes out of stock, a listing loses its eligibility to be featured, a variant gets suppressed for a missing attribute, or a pricing rule pushes you out of the buy position. We check those daily on the advertised range, pause spend on anything that has become unbuyable, and restart when it is fixed. Half the wasted spend in most accounts is here rather than in the bids.

The two channels affect each other and are usually reported apart. We look at them together each month: what a marketplace order is worth after fees against what a direct order is worth, whether marketplace demand rises when you advertise elsewhere, and which products are better sold direct because the margin cannot survive the fees. Sometimes the honest recommendation is to advertise a product on one channel and not the other.