eBay Moves To Monthly Budget Pacing For Promoted Stores Cost Per Click Ad Campaigns
eBay is making changes to Promoted Stores cost per click ad campaign management, moving from a daily to monthly time frame for budget averaging.
The changes goes into effect October 28, 2025, leaving sellers only a week to make adjustments - assuming they are even aware of the update since eBay has not posted a public announcement to the eBay community and eBay no longer has a standalone Ads blog, which is where these kinds of announcements would have been posted in the past.
Liz Morton
Instead, the announcement is buried within the new eBay Ads section within Seller Center:
What’s changing
- Currently, Promoted Stores campaigns optimize daily budgets and your spend never exceeds the amount you set for that day. This approach has facilitated effective budget management, but we're evolving to provide even more strategic advantages.
- Beginning October 28th, 2025, we'll enhance our Promoted Stores campaigns by implementing budget pacing and optimization, and transitioning from daily 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.
- If your campaign hits its daily spend limit, which can be up to double the target daily budget, it will pause showing ads until the budget window resets the next day. Spending won't always reach double the daily budget, as it varies based on factors like traffic and competition. However, if you increase the target daily budget for a campaign marked as "Limited by budget," your ads will be eligible to appear again.
- This change allows us to allocate your budget more efficiently, capitalizing on peak traffic days with the potential for more sales opportunities, while ensuring opportunities are consistently captured each day.
How it works
Your target daily budget will serve as a guideline for calculating your potential monthly spend. eBay says it will optimize spending across a given calendar month to target budget spend 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 Promoted Store cost per click campaigns will be transitioned to this new budget model automatically - so sellers are highly encouraged to read all of the FAQs to understand how this may impact their specific advertising campaigns and strategies before October 28th.
eBay similarly switched Priority cost per click ads to monthly budget pacing earlier this year, saying this model optimizes your ad spend, providing flexibility to spend more on higher traffic/better opportunity days and less on lower performing days.
Liz Morton
But in practice, sellers say that since eBay can use up to double the daily target budget on any given day, this model often maxes out their total monthly budget very quickly and once that happens, sellers are "nudged" to increase the budget to keep their ads running.
Here's what eBay says about what happens when a campaign is "limited by budget":
Why is my campaign “Limited by budget”?
A campaign can be limited by budget for two reasons:
- Daily budget reached: Your campaign has spent all of its target daily budget. If this is the case, for the remainder of the day, your campaign will stop showing ads to buyers unless you increase your budget. If you don’t increase your budget, your campaign will resume automatically the following day, with your target daily budget applying to a new 24 hour period. Over a month, you won’t be charged more than 30.4 times your set daily budget, unless you set or change it mid-month.
- Frequently out of budget: Your campaign went out of budget 10% or more of the time during the last 7 calendar days. In this case, we consider it “frequently out of budget” and provide a suggested budget, which can help increase your store traffic by maximizing the amount of time that your ads show to buyers.
How do I reactivate an out-of-budget campaign?
To reactivate, you’ll need to increase your budget to more than the amount set at the start of the day. If your adjusted budget is less than or equal to the budget at which the campaign went out of budget, the campaign will remain inactive.
That makes monthly budget pacing a sneaky way for eBay to subtly ratchet up ad budgets beyond what sellers may have spent under the previous model.
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.
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.
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.
Beyond playing around with rates, eBay has also been making moves to increase ad attributable sales either through user experience changes like manipulating social share links or introducing a new attribution model to Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain and Australia which has exponentially increased ad attribution while not providing any significant increase in sales or ROI.
Liz Morton
US sellers have been anxiously waiting for their turn to have the new money grab attribution model applied to them since stealth changes to policy pages were noticed back in June.
Liz Morton
So far eBay has been tight lipped about when/if expansion to the US might happen, but many sellers have assumed that eBay may want to have it in place before peak holiday shopping events at the end of November.
Given the fact that eBay is only giving 1 week notice of the changes to budget pacing for Promoted Stores ads, it's still entirely possible they may spring an attribution update for Promoted General ads on US sellers before Black Friday/ Cyber Monday, but we'll just have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, eBay is taking inspiration from Amazon in hiring for new advertising strategy position - a move that is not likely to quell seller concerns about the future roadmap for Promoted Listings as eBay continues looking for ways to squeeze more revenue out of sellers instead of growing the buyer-base to make more sales.
Liz Morton
What do you think of eBay moving Promoted Stores cost per click ads to monthly budget pacing? Let us know in the comments below!
