Offsite Ads gives sellers the ability to extend reach off eBay to a wider audience of new potential buyers. By creating an Offsite Ads campaign, a seller’s entire eligible inventory can appear as an ad within these external placements. Offsite Ads supports increased traffic to seller listings with more ads on leading external channels.

Important! Offsite Ads is only supported for the COST_PER_CLICK funding model.

Offsite Ads Campaign creation

The following diagram illustrates the suggested steps to create your Offsite Ads campaign:

Using the flow above, you can complete the following steps to create and configure an Offsite Ads campaign:

  1. Check seller’s eligibility

  2. Retrieve suggested budget

  3. Create the Offsite Ads campaign

  4. Monitor campaign with reporting

Important! Only one campaign per seller is supported.

Offside Ads Impressions are not currently available in reporting.

eBay suggests that you consider building a proprietary reminder to trigger 1-3 days prior to a campaign's end date. This will help sellers extend their Offsite Ads campaign or create a new one.

Check seller's eligibility

Sellers can use the getAdvertisingEligiblity method of the Account API v1 to determine if they are eligible to create an Offsite Ads campaign.

Retrieve suggested budget

Sellers can use the suggestBudget method of the Marketing API to retrieve the suggested budget for an Offsite Ads campaign. This endpoint is only valid for Offsite Ads.

Create the Offsite Ads campaign

If eligible, sellers can create an Offsite Ads campaign using the createCampaign method of the Marketing API by configuring the following fields: 

Input

POST: https://api.ebay.com/sell/marketing/v1/ad_campaign 

Request payload

For an Offsite Ads campaign set with a budget: 

{
  “startDate”: “2023-09-28T06:12:09Z”,
  “campaignName”: “Public OA Demo 001",
  “channels”: [
    “OFF_SITE”
  ],
  “budget”: {
    “daily”: {
      “amount”: {
        “value”: “30”,
        “currency”: “USD”
      }
    }
  },
  “fundingStrategy”: {
    “fundingModel”: “COST_PER_CLICK”
  },
  “marketplaceId”: “EBAY_US”
}

Request payload

For an Offsite Ads campaign set without a budget: 

{
  “startDate”: “2023-09-28T06:12:09Z”,
  “campaignName”: “Public OA Demo 001",
  “channels”: [
    “OFF_SITE”
  ],
  “fundingStrategy”: {
  “fundingModel”: “COST_PER_CLICK”
  },
  “marketplaceId”: “EBAY_US”
}	

Output

The response http status for Offsite Ads should be 201 created. Otherwise an invalid request will receive a response field with an error code.

Monitor campaign with reporting

Sellers can use the createReportTask method of the Marketing API to monitor their Offsite Ads campaign.

Offsite Ads metrics are compatible with the Promoted Listings campaign, listing, and transaction report types.

Note: The createReportTask method request payload for Offsite Ads should pass: 

  1. The required field fundingModel with value COST_PER_CLICK

  2. The optional field channels with the value OFF_SITE

Request fields

The following request fields are available for Offsite Ads:

Note: The createReportTask method request payload for Offsite Ads should pass:

  1. fundingModel is a required field and must be passed as COST_PER_CLICK.

  2. channels is an optional field and should be passed as OFF_SITE.

  3. For sellers with existing campaigns set to flat rate, please manually update the pricing policy to Dynamic CPC. Net-new campaigns will automatically be in Dynamic CPC.

  4. If a seller calls the createCampaign endpoint and sets the budget too low, an error response will return the minimum budget, which is set at the seller, marketplace and daily level; meaning there can be variation by seller, by day or by marketplace.

Input container/Field Type Description
budget CampaignBudgetRequest

The allocated daily budget for the Cost Per Click (CPC) Promoted Listings Campaign.

Required if the campaign funding model is CPC.

Occurrence: Conditional

budget.daily BudgetRequest

The daily budget limit for a CPC Promoted Listings campaign.

Occurrence: Required

budget.daily.amount Amount

The allocated budget amount for a CPC Promoted Listings campaign. Both the currency and value must be specified.

Occurrence: Required

budget.daily.amount.currency CurrencyCodeEnum

The base currency applied to the value field to establish a monetary amount.

The currency is represented as a 3-letter ISO 4217 currency code. For example, the code for the Canadian Dollar is CAD.

Default: The default currency of the eBay marketplace that hosts the listing.

Occurrence: Conditional

budget.daily.amount.value string

The monetary value in the specified currency.

Required in the amount type.

Occurrence: Conditional

campaignName string

A seller-defined name for the campaign. This value must be unique for the seller.

You can use any alphanumeric characters in the name, except for the less than (>) or greater than (>) characters.

Max length: 80 characters

Occurrence: Required

endDate string

The date and time the campaign ends, in UTC format (yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ). If this field is omitted, the campaign will have no defined end date, and will not end until the seller makes a decision to end the campaign with an endCampaign call, or if they update the campaign at a later time with an end date.

Occurrence: Optional

fundingStrategy FundingStrategy

This container is used to set the funding model and default bid percentage for a Cost Per Sale (CPS) campaign .

Occurrence: Required

fundingStrategy.fundingModel FundingModelEnum

Indicates the model that eBay uses to calculate the Promoted Listings Fee.

For a description of the funding model types, refer to FundingModelTypeEnum.

Occurrence: Required

marketplaceId MarketplaceIdEnum

The Id of the eBay marketplace where the campaign is hosted. See the MarketplaceIdEnum type to get the appropriate enumeration value for the listing marketplace.

Occurrence: Required

startDate string

The date and time the campaign starts, in UTC format (yyyy-MM-ddThh:mm:ssZ). For display purposes, convert this time into the local time of the seller.

On the date specified, the service derives the keywords for each listing in the campaign, creates an ad for each listing, and associates each new ad with the campaign. The campaign starts after this process is completed. The amount of time it takes the service to start the campaign depends on the number of listings in the campaign. Call getCampaign to check the status of the campaign.

Occurrence: Required

Retrieving ad groups and listings

Please note that listing selections and the retrieval of ad groups is not supported with Offsite Ads. This is because Offsite Ads is an account-level opt-in, and therefore ad groups and listing selections are not applicable.

In some instances, you may have an automated job to retrieve GET campaign requests. If this job automatically proceeds to request ad groups or listings, you will receive an error when the optional channels field has an input value of OFF_SITE (as OFF_SITE denotes an Offsite Ads campaign).

In order to mitigate such errors, eBay recommends that you:

  • Update any hard-coded logic to exclude OFF_SITE campaigns from requesting ad groups or listings. This can be done by passing an extra filter in the getCampaigns method to differentiate between PLA and Offsite Ads campaigns.

  • Exclude any OFF_SITE campaigns from additional, non-reporting, automated job workflows.

  • Treat OFF_SITE campaigns as a standalone campaign.

Without a filter, getCampaigns will return all campaign types, including Offsite Ads.

Marketing API supportability

Offsite Ads is currently only supported by the following Marketing API endpoints: