eBay Moves To Monthly Budget Pacing For Promoted Listings Priority Cost Per Click Ad Campaigns
eBay is making changes to Promoted Listings Priority cost per click campaign management, moving to a monthly rather than weekly timeframe for budget averaging.
The announcement was posted on the eBay Advertising blog yesterday, the change set to go into effect June 18, 2025.
Brandy Yarema
At eBay, we’re committed to empowering sellers with tools that enhance their marketing strategies. As part of this commitment, we’re excited to announce an update to our budget management approach for priority campaigns. Starting June 18, 2025, we’ll introduce budget pacing for priority campaigns and transition from weekly to monthly budget averaging, offering greater flexibility and optimization opportunities.
What’s changing
- Currently, priority campaigns optimize daily budgets over a week, ensuring your spend does not exceed seven times your target daily budget. This approach has facilitated effective budget management, but we’re evolving to provide even more strategic advantages.
- Beginning June 18, 2025, we’ll enhance our priority campaigns by implementing budget pacing and transitioning from weekly to monthly budget averaging.
- This means your campaigns will optimize spending over a calendar month, without exceeding 30.4 times your target daily budget. On any given day, you could spend less than your target daily budget, or up to double the highest target daily budget in effect on that day.
- This change allows us to allocate your budget more efficiently, capitalizing on peak traffic days to boost sales, while ensuring opportunities are consistently captured each day.
How it works
eBay says your target daily budget will serve as a guideline for calculating your potential monthly spend and they will optimize spending across the month, helping you to spend more of your advertising budget on high-opportunity days and less on others.
The impact of the change may depend on when and how you make changes to your campaigns at different times of the month, so eBay provided the following examples for a few different scenarios:
- Mid-month campaign start: Your total monthly spend will not exceed your target daily budget multiplied by the remaining days in the calendar month, including the start day.
- For Example: If you start a new campaign with a $10 target daily budget on January 15th, there are 17 days left in the month (including the 15th & 31st). Therefore, the maximum spend for the remainder of the month would be $170 ($10×17 remaining days).
- Mid-month budget adjustment: Your total monthly spend will not exceed the amount already spent plus your new target daily budget multiplied by the remaining days in the calendar month.
- For example: If you raise your campaign’s target daily budget from $10 to $15 on January 15th, assuming you’ve spent $150 by then, your total monthly budget will increase from $304 to $405 [i.e. $150 + (17*$15)]. Therefore you will have $255 left to spend for the rest of the month.
- Mid-month campaign end: Your total monthly spend will not exceed your target daily budget multiplied by the number of days from the start of the calendar month up to and including the campaign’s end date.
- For Example: If your campaign starts on the 1st with a $10 daily budget and is set to end on the 15th of the month, the maximum spend for the month would be $150 ($10×15 days, including the 15th).
No action is needed and existing Priority cost per click campaigns will be transitioned to this new budget model automatically - so sellers are highly encouraged to read all of the FAQs in that blog post to understand how this may impact their specific advertising campaigns and strategies before June 18th.
When the first cost per click ad product was introduced by eBay in 2021, then called Promoted Listings Advanced, the budget settings were a straightforward maximum daily amount - once that maximum was reached on any given day, ads would turn off for the rest of the day and start up again the next day to run until/unless the budget was met.
Then in 2023, eBay introduced Smart Targeting, which allowed sellers to "set it and forget it" while eBay manages bid and keyword optimization.
But even with Smart Targeting, the only budgeting option sellers had at that time was to set the maximum cost per click and a static, flat daily total ad spend budget.
As part of the Summer 2024 Seller Update, eBay announced they were streamlining the ads process with a new dashboard and renaming the different ad types - with Promoted Listings Advanced now being called Promoted Listings Priority.
And then in November 2024, eBay introduced daily budgets would become targeted to help maximize sales potential, with actual daily cost per click ad spend changing dynamically depending on demand and costs averaged out over a 7 day period.
Liz Morton
Importantly, switching to a dynamic target daily budget model instead of a flat rate capped daily allowed eBay to spend up to 2x your set daily budget amount in a day - with the idea being that on other days they will spend less so it will all average out.
That still stays the same with this new update, only now the budget will be averaged out over a 30.4 day period instead of a 7 day period.
How does the target daily budget affect my campaign's maximum spend?
Your target daily budget serves as a guideline for daily spending, but our pacing system allows for flexibility to optimize performance.On high-opportunity days, spending may reach up to double the highest target daily budget in effect on that day to capitalize on increased opportunities, balanced by lower spending on other days.
The maximum monthly spend will not exceed 30.4 times your set target daily budget, unless you adjust the budget during the month.
Changes made to your target daily budget during the month can impact your campaign’s maximum monthly spend. For planning purposes, the calendar month begins on the first of the month.
eBay says this model optimizes your ad spend, providing flexibility to spend more on higher traffic/better opportunity days and less on days which are deemed not better opportunities.
But in practice, sellers say what has been happening with the weekly timeframe is that eBay often maxes out their budget quickly toward the beginning of the week and by mid-week, they are getting "nudged" to increase the budget to keep their ads running - making this a sneaky way for eBay to pull levers and ratchet up ad budgets beyond what sellers may have spent with the flat rate model.
Again, it looks like that will not be changing with this update, eBay will just have more time/opportunities to burn through your budget on "high opportunity" days so they can prompt you to make incremental increases to keep those ads active.
Why is my campaign “Limited by budget”?
If your campaign is limited by or out of budget, it means your campaign has either spent all of its daily budget, has been out of budget several times over the past week, or your daily budget is lower than our suggested amount. Our suggested budget takes into account factors like listing details and marketplace competition to help find the best balance between performance and cost.To reactivate an out of budget campaign, the new budget must exceed the initial budget value set at the beginning of the day. If the adjusted budget is less than or equal to the maximum budget at which the campaign went out of budget, it will remain inactive.
eBay of course is not the only company which runs cost per click advertising by this model - this change actually brings them more in line with others like, Google Ads which similarly average out daily budget over a 30 day timeframe.
But eBay's ad offerings are often targeted at small business or consumer sellers without the background, experience, or knowledge that many advertising professionals or agencies may have - making it easier for them to be overwhelmed, confused, or taken for a ride by policies which are intentionally complex, filled with corporate or legal jargon, and/or outside of industry standard practices.
For example, recent Promoted Listings General cost per sale ad attribution changes first rolled out in Germany and now coming to the UK, Australia, France, Italy and Germany have sparked both seller ire in the eBay community forums and stunned reactions from advertising pros on LinkedIn.
Liz Morton
Strategic Brand Consultant Mark Smith did not beat around the bush with his opinion of this change, saying it's not attribution, it's a scam.
Another consultant, John Toskey (who previously worked at eBay from 2012-2021) said he almost couldn't believe this new attribution model is true and he is embarrassed for the good people at eBay who have to stand behind it.
John Toskey
Sellers have also grown weary of shady at rate shenanigans with eBay making stealth updates in Q4 2024, first raising the Promoted Listings General Dynamic rate minimum from 2% to 5% and then instituting a massive 10X minimum bid increase on Promoted Listings Priority cost per click ads, going from $0.02 to $0.20 per click - with no notice to sellers.
Liz Morton
When eBay was publicly called out for these rate hikes, they tried to cover their tracks by issuing a Marketing Terms Update which allows them much more wiggle room to make future ad rate and attribution changes at any time with no notice to sellers required.
eBay's Q1 2025 earnings call showed that the company's insatiable appetite for ever increasing ad revenue is not going away any time soon, but it also showed that sellers' willingness to participate may be hitting a wall.
Liz Morton
First party ads (all of the various seller paid Promoted Listing ad products including cost per sale, cost per click, store display ads, and offsite ads) contributed $418M in revenue in Q1.
That represents 14% year over year growth but notably is down from $434M in Q4, which could indicate that those changes eBay made to ratchet up minimum rates have slowed adoption rates and caused sellers to pull back on advertising as it continues to eat further into their profit margins.
Interestingly, eBay made a change to the Ad Revenue chart in their earnings presentation, adding a new metric for "Off-Platform Ads" to track ad revenue from subsidiaries like TCGPlayer and Qoo10 in Japan, which likely means those sites are soon to see an influx of ads as well.
Liz Morton
Meanwhile, eBay continues blasting sellers with limited time fee discounts and credits in a desperate attempt to get them hooked with a "the first taste is free" (or 50-75% off) offer to entice them into giving Promoted Listings ads a try.
What do you think of eBay moving Priority cost per click target daily budgets to monthly instead of weekly pacing? Let us know in the comments below!
