@my-cottage-books-and-antiques wrote:
@valueaddedresource "That sounds like they are going to be offering some kind of Managed Marketing Service where you would have eBay set up and optimize your campaigns for you. "
Don't they already do that with PLS, if you use the automatic or whatever it's called? The seller can set parameters, but ebay can make changes within those parameters...
@my-cottage-books-and-antiques yes, to some degree, but that wording doesn't sound to me like it's *just* about moving rates up and down automatically or even adding or removing listings from a campaign automatically based on rules (what we have now with auto-campaigns).
The addition of budgets, keywords, and targeting parameters into the mix makes me think they are also talking about PL Advanced Cost Per Click. Maybe they're just going to expand on the auto-campaign idea, but I personally think there may be bigger plans.
*Huge grain of salt warning, this is just my wild guess*
eBay has not hidden the fact that ad revenue is a huge part of their growth plans *and* that they believe they've barely scratched the surface on the potential revenue to be made from ads (they say as much in pretty much every earnings call).
Phase one was introducing different types/models of advertising - CPC, fixed price like PLExpress, and the soon to be seen Store ads. But once they've created all these different ad products, they'll need to find new and more ways to get more people to use them.
I would hazard a guess that many of the biggest spending early adopters of the CPC model are/were larger sellers who either run large multi-channel ecommerce businesses and already have marketing staff well versed in CPC advertising on Amazon, Google, etc. *or* they are working with 3rd party partners like Channel Advisor or Codisto who offer more sophisticated ad management tools and/or their own version of Managed Marketing already.
CPC is a huge thing to wrap your head around and do successfully as far as optimizing, budgeting, etc. - entire industries are built around either teaching people how to do it or, more often than not, doing it for them....for a fee. Just look at how many marketing agencies are out there that will be more than happy to set up and optimize your Google ads for you - it's big business and I fully believe eBay has to know that.
So if I were in Alex Kazim's shoes and wrestling with the question of how do you get more people on board the ad revenue train....one obvious answer to shoot some fish in the barrel is to find a way to tap into the larger market of people who may want to use these ad products (or are already using them but want to do more) but don't have an in house marketing department, don't know how to do it themselves and/or would rather pay an expert to do it for them.
It could be in house eBay Ads experts or maybe they'll work out some deal with those 3rd party partners already offering such services for other channels or maybe something else entirely or maybe nothing at all and I'm just talking crazy. 😂
Again this is all purely conjecture on my part, but I would be very surprised if eBay isn't at least thinking about how to find some way to monetize ad products even further by offering "ad management as a service" in some form or another.
