Walmart Connect and eBay Promoted Listings: Running Marketplace Ads Beyond Amazon
How Walmart Connect Sponsored Products and eBay Promoted Listings charge, how to structure campaigns on each, and the metrics that show whether the spend is working.
Most marketplace sellers learn advertising on Amazon first, then copy the same playbook to every other channel. That rarely works cleanly. Walmart Connect and eBay Promoted Listings are built on different pricing models, different auction mechanics and different definitions of what an ad is supposed to do. Running them well starts with understanding those differences, not with copying your Amazon campaign structure.
This guide walks through how each program works, how the costs are charged, and how to structure campaigns and budgets so the spend is easy to read.
Why ads off Amazon need their own plan
Three things change when you leave Amazon:
- Search volume is smaller and more concentrated. Fewer shoppers mean fewer search terms carry meaningful traffic, so broad keyword harvesting takes longer to produce useful data.
- The cost model can be different. eBay offers a fee-per-sale option that has no direct Amazon equivalent.
- Listing quality weighs differently. On Walmart, content quality and listing health affect whether items are shown at all, which our guide to Walmart Marketplace account management covers in detail.
If you already run Amazon campaigns, the structure in our article on Amazon advertising management is a useful reference, but treat it as a starting point rather than a template.
Walmart Connect: Sponsored Products
Walmart Connect is Walmart's retail media business. For marketplace sellers, the core format is Sponsored Products, which places items in search results and on product pages. It is pay-per-click: you're charged when a shopper clicks the ad.
Campaigns come in two main types:
| Campaign type | How targeting works | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Automatic | Walmart chooses where to show the item based on the listing content | Discovering which searches and pages bring traffic |
| Manual | You choose keywords and set bids, with exact, phrase and broad match options | Controlling spend on terms that already convert |
A common pattern is to run an automatic campaign to collect search data, then move proven terms into a manual campaign with tighter bids. Keep the two separate so you can see which one is doing the work.
Before spending on Walmart ads, check the basics: the item is in stock, priced competitively, and has complete content. Ads send traffic to a listing; they don't fix a listing that isn't ready.
eBay Promoted Listings: two ways to pay
eBay's Promoted Listings has two main strategies, and the difference in how they charge matters more than anything else in the program.
General strategy (cost per sale). You set an ad rate as a percentage of the sale price. You only pay when a buyer clicks the promoted listing and buys the item within eBay's attribution window. If nobody buys, there is no ad fee. This makes it a low-risk way to start, but the fee is charged on top of the usual selling fees, so it has to fit inside your margin.
Priority strategy (cost per click). You build keyword-based campaigns with daily budgets and pay when a buyer clicks, whether or not they buy. This gives more control over placement, particularly at the top of search results, and behaves more like Walmart or Amazon advertising.
eBay also runs offsite ads that promote listings on external sites on a cost-per-click basis. Treat those as a separate test with its own budget.
Structuring campaigns so the numbers are readable
Good structure is mostly about being able to answer "what did this spend do?" later. A few rules that apply on both marketplaces:
- Group by margin, not by catalog category. Products with similar margins can tolerate similar ad costs, so they belong in the same campaign.
- Separate discovery from proven terms. Automatic or broad campaigns find terms; manual or exact campaigns spend on them.
- One goal per campaign. A launch campaign and a profitability campaign shouldn't share a budget.
- Name campaigns consistently. Channel, strategy, product group and start month in the name make reports easy to scan.
Budgets and the metrics that matter
Set a monthly ceiling per marketplace, then divide it across campaigns based on margin and goal. Review on a fixed cadence rather than reacting to single days, since smaller marketplaces produce noisy daily data.
The metrics worth tracking:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Ad spend as a share of ad-attributed sales | Whether the ads pay for themselves at your margin |
| Total sales, not just attributed sales | Whether ads are adding sales or only claiming ones you'd have had anyway |
| Click-through rate | Whether the listing's image and title earn the click |
| Conversion rate from clicks | Whether the listing itself closes the sale |
When conversion is low, the fix is usually on the listing, not in the bid.
Inventory and fulfillment come first
Advertising an item you can't ship on time hurts more than not advertising it. Late shipments and stockouts affect seller metrics on both Walmart and eBay. Before raising budgets, make sure stock levels and handling times can keep up with the extra orders.
Where this fits
Marketplace advertising works best as one part of running the account, alongside listings, pricing, inventory and customer service. IDCEA's ecommerce management services include marketplace marketing and advertising alongside those other account tasks, so campaigns are planned with the catalog and the inventory in view.