How to Promote an eBay Listing: The Complete Guide

With over 1.7 billion listings on eBay, getting your listing noticed is by far the most important thing you can do to drive sales. Oftentimes, however, that’s much easier said than done. To successfully promote an eBay listing you’ll need to take a multifaceted approach, combine paid advertising and SEO strategies, utilize social media, and place emphasis on your existing customers. This guide will teach you how to promote an eBay listing, and provide you with a better understanding of each of these proven listing promotion strategies. Keep reading to find out how you can promote your eBay listings to boost your sales and make the most out of your listing promotion resources.

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Understanding Promoted Listings on eBay

The most obvious way to promote an eBay listing is to utilize the marketplace’s built-in listing promotion tools. All too often, however, sellers jump head-first into eBay’s listing promotion tools without fully understanding how to use them, ultimately resulting in a less than optimal return for their time and money. Before deciding how to promote an eBay listing, you’ll need to ensure that you understand both your target audience and your competition. This section will explain how to accurately identify your target audience and how to assess your competition, and help you utilize that knowledge to your advantage when promoting your eBay listings.

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Identify Your Target Audience

The first step to successfully promoting an eBay listing is to precisely define who it is that you’re promoting your eBay listing to. To do this, you’ll need to identify and clearly define your target audience. Before we go over how you can identify your target audience, we’ll need to clarify what a target audience is. Your target audience is a group of people, who can be grouped together by one or more factors, who have both the desire and the means to buy the goods you’re selling. This does not mean that you won’t be selling to other potential customers; it simply means that you’ll be focusing your marketing efforts and budget where it counts to get the best return on your investment.

A tried and true approach to figuring out your target marketplace is by utilizing market segmentation on the consumer data you already have. This simply means that you’ll analyze things like demographics, language/geographical location, and interests of your buyers to get a better idea of who your average customer is. Segmentation helps you create strategic ad group to target with each campaign, ensuring more successful promotion of each listing. Segmentation is often utilized to create a marketing funnel, in which you arrange each segment as a sort of “filter” to create a funnel structure, with each phase narrowing down the pool of potential customers until you’re left only with your target audience.

It’s important to understand that your target audience and your target market are two different things – you may be selling women’s jewelry, meaning one of your target audiences is (broadly) women who wear jewelry. Your target market, however, is not just women. You’ll also want to market to their significant others and their family, who represent additional target audiences for which you’ll want to tailor specific marketing campaigns.

Research What You’re Selling and Your Competition

The second thing you’ll need to understand in order to successfully promote an eBay listing is your product in relation to your competition. You probably have a good idea of who your competitors are, but it’s always a beneficial to take a moment to slip into a customer’s shoes in order to gain their perspective on your competitors as well. Remember that you can’t compete with everyone in every ad campaign, but knowing who your competition is can make each one of your ad campaigns more focused and more effective.

Knowing your competition is a great way to figure out what you want to promote at any given time. The smartest choice may not be to directly compete with your competitors’ ad campaigns, but rather to promote an eBay listing than offers something your competitors do no

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Strategies for Promoting an eBay Listing

eBay offers sellers two options for promoting their listings – the Promoted Listings Standard program and the Promoted Listings Advanced program. But simply enrolling your listings in either one of these programs does not necessarily mean you’ll have successful ad campaigns; to effectively promote an eBay listing with these tools, you’ll need to ensure you craft a quality listing that you’ll also promote through social media and word-of-mouth marketing. This section will cover these methods for promoting an eBay listing on a multitude of platforms, teach you the basics of creating a high-quality listing, explain how to utilize eBay’s Promoted Listings Standard and Promoted Listings Advanced programs, and give you tips on how to maximize word-of-mouth marketing to promote your eBay listings.

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1. Create a Listing That’s Worth Promoting

Before you begin thinking how to promote an eBay listing, you’ll want to ensure that the eBay listing you’d like to promote is a listing that’s worth promoting. This means that the listing is well-made, attractive to buyers, and search engine optimized to ensure that buyers can easily find it when they input relevant search terms into eBay. This section will go over good practices for creating a quality eBay listing that’s worth the time, money, and effort to promote, to ensure that you get the most out of every eBay listing promotion strategy.  

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Optimize Your Listing for SEO

Like all search engines, eBay’s search engine (known as Cassini) uses an algorithm to analyze listings in order to match them with the most relevant search queries. When you optimize your eBay listing, you’re simply ensuring that the algorithm that powers Cassini is able to match your listing with relevant buyer searches.

In practice, this means incorporating relevant keywords into both your title and text, and doing the necessary research to know which keywords buyers are using to find what they want. To help you do the latter, eBay offers all of its sellers free access to a market research tool called Terapeak. Use it to fine-tune your keywords and discover new keywords, and take advantage of third-party SEO tools to get information such as keyword volume.

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Use High-Quality Images

A quality eBay listing doesn’t just mean a listing with the right keywords – it also means a listing that looks good to your buyers. A selection of quality images is important for a good search engine ranking as well as for enticing buyers to click the “Buy it Now” button, which is why it’s so important to ensure that the images in your listings are the best that they can be. eBay provides its sellers with tips on how to take good listing pictures, and we encourage you to review them before taking listing photos of your item. Remember that the first thing that buyers will see when you promote an eBay listing is the main item image, so you’ll want to make sure that it’s one that will get buyers to click on your ad.

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Use Professional Copywriting

Quality content for your eBay listing can make all the difference between a sale and a flop, which is why it’s so important to have professional-level copywriting. This is important for SEO, but it’s also important for potential buyers; buyers want to feel confident when making a purchase online, and quality copywriting gives your eBay listing a credible feel that instantly puts buyers at ease. Professional copywriting can take a basic listing to the next level, and make it a listing that’s worth your time and effort to promote.

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Offer Free Shipping

Nothing gets buyers to hit the back button on their cart faster than surprise shipping costs, resulting in a lost sale. Listings with free shipping are so popular with buyers that eBay even has a “free shipping” toggle as one of its search filters. For many buyers, it’s less about the actual cost of shipping, but more about the surprise charge tacked on at checkout.

Instead of charging your buyers shipping, see if you can offer free shipping and raise the price of the item to offset the cost while still remaining competitive. Your listing will be more attractive to buyers, and will yield better results when you go to promote it.

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2. Advertising with eBay Promoted Listings Standard

The first listing promotion tool that eBay offers its sellers is known as Promoted Listings Standard. Provided your account health is at least Above Standard and that you have sufficient account activity, this program is available to all sellers who wish to promote their fixed-price listings. The Promoted Listings Standard program is designed to promote an eBay listing by giving it more visibility in search results, product detail pages, and on eBay’s partner sites.

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How Does it Work?

The Promoted Listings Standard program allows you to set a bid on the maximum percentage of the resulting order total you’re willing to pay for the ad. The higher your bid, the more optimal promotion spots you’ll receive across the eBay network. You’ll only pay a fee if your item sells by means of a Promoted Listing Standard ad, and a sale is considered to have resulted from a Promoted Listing Standard ad if a buyer purchases the item within 30 days of clicking on the ad. eBay will also charge a fee for what it calls a “Halo item sale” – a buyer has purchased another promoted item within 30 days of clicking another item’s Promoted Listing Standard ad. Read more about how eBay’s Promoted Listings Standard program works here.

Benefits of Promoted Listings

As opposed to cost-per-click ads, the bid you enter when promoting your eBay listing through Promoted Listings Standard ads is for the fee after a sale has been made, meaning you can always budget ahead of time to ensure you’re never selling an item from a promoted listing at a loss. This is the main benefit of eBay’s Promoted Listings Standard program – you only pay for what you sell.

How to Set Up Promoted Listings

You can enroll any one of your fixed-price listings in two ways:

• Select individual listings for promotion by logging in to your eBay account and navigating to your Seller Hub. There, click the “Listings” tab, tick the listings you wish to promote, then select “Sell It Faster.” You’ll be able to define your ad rate for the promotion, start a new campaign, or add the selected listings to an existing campaign.
• To create a new Promoted Listings ad campaign, navigate to the advertising dashboard by clicking “Sell” at the top right-hand corner of any eBay page, clicking the “Marketing” tab, and clicking “Dashboard” under the “Advertising” section. At the top right, you’ll see the “Create New Campaign” button. You can select listings for your campaign manually, in bulk via CSV upload, or set up an automated campaign using rules. Utilizing a third-party tool like 3Dsellers can help you more easily manage your eBay Promoted Listings campaigns and get more out of each campaign.

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3. Use Paid Advertising with eBay Promoted Listings Advanced

After many years of offering its sellers a very basic listing promotion program with Promoted Listings Standard, eBay recently launched a cost-per-click advertising program known as Promoted Listings Advanced. This program allows for more optimal placement of your promoted eBay listings, including eligibility for placement in the top slots of the searches you bid on.

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How Does it Work?

As opposed to the Promoted Listings Standard program, you’ll be paying for clicks on your ads, rather than for sales. This payment structure is known as CPC (cost per click) or PPC (pay per click), and necessitates a highly-targeted approach in order to get a good return on your investment. If your ads are poorly targeted, you’ll be paying for clicks that don’t result in sales.

In each CPC ad campaign, you’ll select the keywords you want to place a bid on. This bid is the highest amount you’re willing to pay for a click on your promoted listing. The higher your bid, the more likely your promoted eBay listing is to appear in the top slots of a given search. In addition to your maximum bid on the keywords you target, you’ll also be able to define a daily budget for your campaign, meaning you won’t have to worry about going over your budget when you launch a keyword-targeted CPC campaign.  

Benefits of Paid Advertising

Promoting an eBay listing via paid advertising has a major benefit over unpaid eBay listing promotion tools – it lets you create highly-targeted campaigns that produce sales, and in turn provide you with a wealth of data to drive more campaigns (as well as a variety of other business decisions) in the future. This data includes a detailed report of the performance of each promoted eBay listing, an overview of the performance of each keyword you’ve targeted in your campaign, and even a report of the search queries that resulted in a click on one of your promoted listings. Information like this can be incredibly valuable for fine-tuning your future paid advertising campaigns, as well as provide detailed insights into your target market’s interests.

How to Set Up Paid Advertising

You can easily promote an eBay listing by setting up an ad campaign directly through your Seller Hub. Start by logging into your eBay account, navigating to the Seller Hub, clicking the “Marketing” tab, and clicking “Dashboard” under the “Advertising” section. Click the “Create new campaign” button on the right. At the next screen, choose the type of paid advertising campaign you wish to create – Promoted Listings Advanced. Then, begin filling out the details of your campaign. You’ll assign a name to your campaign, set your daily maximum budget, and select the date range during which the campaign will run. Then, you’ll choose the type of setup – quick setup or manual. With quick setup, you select the listings you want to promote, and eBay decides which keywords to target, divides them into ad groups, and sets bids on each keyword; in manual setup, you can define all of these yourself.

You can learn more about eBay’s paid advertising and how to promote an eBay listing using these tools with the help of eBay’s Ads Academy.

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4. Maximize Your Exposure with Social Media

Another proven way to promote an eBay listing is via social media. There are so many ways to do this on so many platforms, that social media marketing is a field all on its own. That said, the barrier of entry to social media is practically nonexistent – social media is free to join, and if you’re tech-savvy enough to run an eBay store, you’re tech-savvy enough to begin promoting your eBay listings on social media. Below, we’ll go over the four main social media platforms for promoting an eBay listing: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. For each of these platforms, you’ll want to have an account that is dedicated to your eBay store and specifically for promoting your eBay listings.

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How to Promote Your Listing on Facebook

As a platform, Facebook enables its users to upload a variety of content. From a post that is just a direct link to the eBay listing you wish to promote, to image-focused posts, video clips to text posts, Facebook users can upload virtually every type of content under the sun. This flexibility often leaves sellers stumped as to how to promote an eBay listing in the best possible way.

As with many things, the key is to utilize each type of post in moderation. Begin by linking your eBay and Facebook accounts with eBay’s Facebook Connect integration. This will allow you to share listings as a post on Facebook through the widget that appears on each listing, making it simple to promote your eBay listing in just a single click. For new items you’ll soon upload, you can post promotional pictures or create buzz leading up to the big reveal, for example. You can also upload a Facebook story to share with your followers specifically to promote an eBay listing. The more engaging and attractive your Facebook content, the more successful you’ll be at promoting your eBay listings.

How to Promote Your Listing on Instagram

As opposed to Facebook, Instagram is far more image- and short clip-focused, and it’s important to play into these strengths when you promote an eBay listing via Instagram. You can and should include a keyword-optimized description, but know that it won’t be the thing that catches your buyer’s eye. Promote the product in the listing with a series of images that draw the eye, a short video, or even a story, and include a link to your promoted listing at the end of the description.

How to Promote Your Listing on Snapchat

In May of last year, eBay partnered with Snapchat to help sellers create Snaps specifically for promoting an eBay listing. To promote an eBay listing via Snapchat, you’ll need to work through the eBay app on your phone. Navigate to the listing in the eBay app, tap the share icon, and tap Snapchat on the share menu. This will open the camera on Snapchat, with an automatic eBay sticker already in place. Edit your Snap with stickers and filters as you see fit, then hit send. This Snap can be shared by other users on their story or directly with friends, and whenever a user clicks the eBay sticker they’ll be directed to your promoted eBay listing!

How to Promote Your Listing on YouTube

In contrast to the aforementioned social media platforms, YouTube’s strength is in its suitability for longer content, ranging from simple YouTube Shorts to full-fledged YouTube videos that are several minutes long. When considering how to promote an eBay listing on YouTube, it’s important that you offer your audience an informative video and take care to craft a keyword-optimized description to maximize visibility. Your YouTube channel should be more than just a means of promoting your eBay listings, however; strive to put out content that is either informative or entertaining to your target audience, too, to encourage more interaction and ensure a higher rate of success whenever you do use your YouTube channel to promote a listing.

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5. Maximize Word-of-Mouth

Word-of-mouth marketing encompasses a wide range of marketing approaches and strategies that focus on promoting an eBay listing through existing buyers. Word-of-mouth marketing is a highly effective form of marketing that relies on your buyers recommending your store or listing to people they know. Strategies for driving word-of-mouth marketing include taking advantage of your own existing network, partnering with influencers in your relevant field, employing referral programs, and offering buyers enticing discounts and promotions that encourage them to buy and share their experience with family and friends. Below, we’ll take a look at each one of these strategies, and see how you can promote an eBay listing with each one of these proven word-of-mouth marketing approaches.

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Utilize Your Network

No matter what you sell, it’s likely you’ve established even a network in your relevant sales niche. Whether it’s a few collectible figurine enthusiasts, PC-building hobbyists, or the project car types, growing your own network of happy buyers is a great way to ensure more sales in the future, and can be a great way to organically promote an eBay listing with zero hands-on involvement. Remember that the smaller and more specialized your niche, the more benefits you’ll enjoy from establishing yourself as a trusted seller. Always strive to keep your buyers happy, provide excellent pre- and post-sale service, and stand behind your products to reap the rewards of one of the most powerful tools for promoting your eBay listings.

Leverage Influencers

Take word-of-mouth marketing to the next level by partnering with influencers who can promote an eBay listing or product for you. By definition, influencers have amassed a following of people on their social media platform (or platforms) of choice, making them a great avenue for getting the word out about an eBay listing you wish to promote. Influencers will work with sellers using a variety of models – some will happily accept a free product in exchange for an honest review, while some offer only a paid promotion collaboration. Decide on the best method for promoting your eBay listing based on the product you’re selling, your budget, and the influencer you’ll partner with.

Use Referral Programs

Referral programs are a tried-and-true way of driving word-of-mouth marketing, and when done right, can yield very lucrative results. Simply put, referral programs are marketing schemes that offer an incentive to your buyers to recommend your eBay store or listing to their network. The incentive can be in the form of a discount on a future purchase, for example. You can get the word out about your referral program through your social media channels, through your after-sale messages, and even in the products you ship out to your customers.

Create Discounts & Promotions

Nothing gets buyers interested like a good sale, and the better the sale, the more likely your buyers are to recommend it to their friends and family. Offer attractive sales and promotions, and do everything you can to get the word out about them before they go live. Notify customers on your mailing list about upcoming promotions, and post about them on social media for all your followers to see and share.  

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Final Thoughts & Key Takeaways: The Benefits of Promoting Your eBay Listings

Figuring out how to promote an eBay listing in the best possible way requires a good deal of research, as well as some degree of trial and error. But successfully promoting an eBay listing can have far-reaching benefits, far beyond the scope of a single listing – you’ll expand your customer base, grow your outreach on social media, and establish your eBay store as a trustworthy place for customers to take their business. No matter which promotional strategy you employ, the benefits of promoting an eBay listing are well worth their investment of time and money.

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FAQs for Promoting an eBay Listing

In this final section, we’ll take a look at a few of the common questions eBay sellers have when they set out to promote their first eBay listing. Read over the questions below to see if they answer any of your still-unanswered questions, and let us know if you have any questions of your own you think we should add.

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Q:  What are the best tips for promoting an eBay listing?

Before promoting an eBay listing, it’s important to keep in mind a few key tips. Firstly, you want to make sure that the listing is one that’s worth promoting. This means it needs to be competitively priced, optimized for SEO, and visually attractive to potential buyers. Secondly, you’ll want to analyze you listing to figure out what the best possible promotion strategy is. You’ll need to choose between on-platform paid advertising (such as CPC through the Promoted Listings Advanced program), off-platform paid advertising (such as paid influencer collaborations), word-of-mouth promotions, and more. Finally, you’ll want to ensure that the time, money, and effort you’ll invest in promoting a given eBay listing is truly worth it – don’t spend time and money promoting listings that won’t yield a worthwhile return.

Q:  How can I optimize my eBay listing for SEO?

Optimizing your eBay listing for SEO simply means creating a listing that is more likely to appear in relevant searches, both on and off eBay. An optimized eBay listing will have the relevant keywords incorporated into both its title and description, and include a selection of high-quality photos of the item for sale. It’s important to avoid keyword stuffing or simply pasting a list of keywords; you’ll want to incorporate your keywords where relevant and natural into the text. Low-quality listings with poor text and images will not rank well in search engines, even if they have all the relevant keywords in the title and item description.

Q:  What are the benefits of using promoted listings on eBay?

The benefits of promoted listings are manifold – you’ll of course be promoting an eBay listing and driving more sales through that listing, but you’ll also be growing your customer base and maximizing your outreach by increased word-of-mouth marketing. When utilized correctly on the right listings, promoted listings on eBay can help you establish yourself a trustworthy eBay seller, and cement your store as an attractive place to get quality items at competitive prices.

Q:  What is the best way to use social media to promote my eBay listing?

Social media is an incredibly powerful promotional tool when used correctly, with endless possibilities for promoting an eBay listing through a variety of social media channels. A good social media campaign will include promotion of your eBay listing in relevant communities, and emphasize engaging content that encourages buyers to interact with your post and ultimately make a purchase through eBay. Avoid spamming links to the listing on all possible social media platforms, and instead opt to create quality content that buyers will want to engage with.

Q:  How can I maximize my word-of-mouth to promote my eBay listing?

The most important thing to focus on when seeking to maximize word-of-mouth in promoting an eBay listing is high-quality pre- and post-sale service. Happy customers are much more likely to recommend your store or product to their network, which results in more sales for you with zero marketing dollars spent. Don’t be afraid to ensure that happy customers get the word out about their experience – ask! Most buyers who’ve had a good experience are more than happy to take a moment to leave you positive feedback or write about their experience on social media, and sometimes they simply need a small reminder to nudge them in the right direction.