Sponsored Products

Sponsored Products let you pay to promote a specific listing so it appears more prominently than its organic ranking alone would allow. The ads run on a cost-per-click model: you only pay when a shopper actually clicks, not when your ad is merely shown. Placements are awarded through an auction, where your bid is weighed against competing bids and the relevance of your listing to the shopper's query.

Campaigns are usually keyword-targeted (you bid on the search terms you want to appear for) or automatically targeted (the marketplace matches your product to relevant queries for you). Because the ads sit inside the marketplace at the exact moment of purchase intent, they tend to convert well compared with off-platform advertising.

Almost every major EU marketplace now runs a sponsored-listings programme — Amazon Sponsored Products, eBay Promoted Listings, and equivalents on Kaufland, Allegro and bol.com. The mechanics differ in detail, but the core idea is the same: bid for visibility, pay per click (or in some models per sale), and lift a listing above its organic position.

Sponsored Products are most valuable for new listings with no sales history (which struggle to rank organically), for competitive categories where organic visibility is hard to win, and for pushing a product up during launches or seasonal peaks. They also generate keyword data showing which search terms actually convert, which you can feed back into your organic listing optimisation.

The key metric to manage is ACoS (advertising cost of sales) — your ad spend as a percentage of the revenue it generates. If the cost per click times the number of clicks needed to make a sale exceeds your margin, the campaign loses money. Controlling spend means setting sensible bids and budgets, pausing keywords that spend without converting, and making sure the listing you advertise is well-optimised so clicks turn into sales.

Advertising and listing quality work together. Driving paid clicks to a thin, poorly converting listing wastes budget; the best results come from advertising a complete, high-quality listing whose organic performance the ads then reinforce.