Ebay Launches New PPC System

with a few twists

[CollateralEstoppel]

[webmasterworld.com...]

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Haven't seen this posted anywhere. It looks like Ebay is now offering sellers a chance to buy banner placements based on keywords.

[ebay.admarketplace.net...]

A few points of interest. For starters, the max bidder doesn't necessarily get a "top position" like traditional PPC engines, but rather more frequently served banner ad impressions. Also, the max bid amount is like Overture, in that your max might be $2.00, and your next closest competitor's max is $1.50. Therefore, you will automatically pay $1.51... Perhaps the most humorous provision of this new program is that advertisers can't bid on keywords that direct visitors to "unfounded criticism" of particular brand names. So, I wonder who determines whether criticism is unfounded. Ah well, so much for free speech.

I wonder how much traffic Ebay has in order to justify building a PPC system like this. It got me thinking. I wonder if a similar system for use in other high traffic, commerce oriented websites. (ie., Amazon) would work?

[Iguana]

I've seen Google Adwords on Amazon - I think titled 'You may also be interested in ...'

[Andy_Reid]

I saw this as well. Since my auctions come up under the keyword search anyway, I am not sure how thrilled I am about it. Since I would end up paying more for traffic (and I sell a service) my prices would have to go up, which may deter my potential customers. I am adopting a 'wait and see' attitude about this one.

[basecan]

Cool thanks didn't know about this program.
Might give an edge to crowded product or service categories.

[Jenstar]

I didn't see this thread earlier. It was discussed here [webmasterworld.com] and that thread includes more information, including a link to a news story about it.

[sdang]

I read that the landing pages for your ad can only go to an ebay page where you actually sell the product. In otherwords you can't link your ad to your own website outside of ebay (but you can obviously link from within the ebay page to your site). Maybe 2 clicks to your site is not as effective as 1 click from adwords, but I guess you could do your "special" on ebay and have links to your store for other types of traffic.