eBay Does "Deep Dive" On Suggested Ad Rates, Seeks Seller Feedback On Promoted Listings
eBay has posted a "deep dive" on Suggested Ad Rates to their community forum, addressing common questions and requesting seller feedback about Promoted Listings ads.
The post titled "Promote with confidence: A deep dive into suggested ad rate" says the suggested ad rate is a "data-driven recommendation" designed to help sellers balance performance and cost for listings, so they can promote with confidence and less guesswork.
What is the suggested ad rate?
eBay says the suggested ad rate is a "recommended percentage unique to your specific listing and current marketplace conditions...because it’s calculated for each listing, it can be a helpful starting point – especially in competitive categories."
The suggested ad rate uses AI to evaluate multiple factors and signals daily to calculate a competitive rate, including:
- Competition: Ad rates set by competitors, number of listings in the item’s category, increase or decrease in traffic for the item or category, start or stop of other promoted listings
- Listing attributes: Price, quantity available for sale, item details
- Listing quality: Photos, description, and completeness
- Past performance: Seasonality, days listed, quantity sold, organic impressions, ad impressions, organic clicks, ad clicks
The post goes on to describe three common outcomes from raising your ads to the suggested rates.
"I got more impressions and clicks, and the item sold. This is ideal and what we expect to happen. In fact, sellers saw over 100% more impressions when promoting their listings with a general strategy compared to non-promoted items, on average (Data from Jan 2026 – Mar 2026)."
"I got more impressions and clicks, but the item didn’t sell. When you increase your ad rate, your promoted listing is eligible to show more often and in more places across eBay. As a result, visibility and engagement increase, but conversion may lag. This could be an opportunity to improve your listing."
"I didn’t get more impressions or clicks. Competition may be high, or your listing may not yet be competitive enough to get more visibility."
While eBay likes to focus on impressions, it's important to understand how they define these terms.
Just because the ad dashboard and traffic reports record an "impression" doesn't necessarily mean that a potential buyer saw an ad for your item - it simply means that ad was displayed somewhere on the search or listing page, whether the buyer ever actually scrolled to bring it into physical view on their screen or not.
Following controversial changes to Promoted Listings General ad attribution that rendered Return on Investment (ROI) practically useless, sellers have been pushing eBay to provide better reporting to track how campaigns are performing - but so far they've received only vague promises and no explicit timelines for improvements.
Liz Morton
The "deep dive" closed out with suggestions for how to improve listings to get the most out of increased visibility from ads with listing best practices and tools to use to make your items stand out.
- Price competitively: Use the eBay research tool or view recently sold listings.
- Write a relevant title: Include keywords specific to the item and organize them in a legible order.
- Write a helpful description: Start by generating an AI description and then add key item details.
- Add more photos: Add at least 4 unique, high-quality photos. Try videos too!
- Provide item specifics: Select the right category and include as many details as possible.
- Appeal to potential buyers: Allow offers, provide free shipping, and decrease handling time.
The community post is locked, so sellers can't post their feedback publicly on that post - but that didn't stop them from opening their own forum thread to discuss the topic, with several questioning how "deep" this supposed "deep dive" really went.
There is nothing new being announced here , so I'm not sure why it is classified as an "Announcement". Also, frankly, if this is ebay's idea of a "deep dive", well....sorry, but it seems to be pretty shallow to me.
I dove in and smacked my head at the bottom. The only thing I got out of it was a headache.
Another suggested that eBay's advice is focused too much at the category level and may not be helpful for those who sell a variety of one of a kind items.
I read it. It explains why it is ineffective, without actually saying so, because its focus is at the category level.
Those of use who sell items which are a tiny part of the listings in a category, do not get the predicted results.
For its part, eBay says they do want to hear feedback from sellers, they just want to collect it in a survey linked to in the "deep dive" post.
The survey asks sellers if they want to give feedback about promoting listings, promoting their store, or promoting offsite then poses questions about how easy it is to assess effectiveness of ad campaigns and confidence in eBay's suggestions and recommendations with a blank text box to provide additional comments if desired.
What do you think about eBay's suggested ad rates for Promoted Listings? Let us know in the comments below!
