eBay sellers — is anyone else watching their "Consolidated" ad spend spiral?
Summary: lupo-store raised concerns about the rising costs of 'Consolidated data from placements across eBay' in Promoted Listings Priority ads. They noted significant increases in ad spend and impressions on this inventory, which does not perform well compared to keyword ads. ventexclutches confirmed similar issues and expressed frustration over the lack of control over these placements, noting that it's difficult to find information about them. lupo-store shared a strategy of disabling international sales to improve ROAS and reduce spending on consolidated placements. ventexclutches expressed interest in more long-term data once lupo-store has more insights.
If you run Promoted Listings Priority (the CPC/Advanced ads), part of your budget goes to a placement eBay reports as "Consolidated data from placements across eBay." It's off-search network inventory — recommendation strips, "similar items", etc. The problem: you can't bid on it, pause it, negate it, exclude it, or opt out of it. The only control eBay gives you is the overall daily budget cap — which throttles your profitable keyword ads at the same time.
I've just pulled my own numbers across the last 18 months and it's genuinely alarming:
Consolidated spend up ~500% since Feb 2025
Gone from 8% → ~30% of my total ad spend
Now ~91% of ALL my ad impressions
Converts at break-even (~1x ROAS) — while my keyword ads run ~4–5x
Click-through rate on it: ~0.17% (almost nobody clicks it, but it's eating the budget)
So a bigger and bigger share of our ad money is being funnelled into low-intent inventory we can't see into or switch off.
Am I the only one? If you're on Priority ads, please check:
Advertising dashboard → run a keyword report
Find the row "Consolidated data from placements across eBay"
Compare its share of your spend + impressions now vs a year ago
Drop your numbers in the comments — even rough. If lots of us are seeing the same pattern, it's worth eBay hearing it clearly, together.
(Not a rant — I want the ads to work. I just want to control where my money goes.)
ventexclutches
·1 week agoYes we have noticed the same. In fact I came onto the forum to make a thread about exactly this. It does seem to be taking up a much higher % of spend compare to a year ago. Have you managed to get any insight from the ads team at eBay?
Ideally we would just disable those placements. In fact I don't think a single sale has been attributed to consolidated placements for us. I can't seem to find much info online about it either.
lupo-store
OP1 week agoLast Thursday I turned off international orders, GSP, and EXCLUDED all international countries. Since then ROAS has jumped a lot for me (of a proportion of 1/8 - a lot for my goods) and consolidated data spend has dropped from 29 to 20% of sales and ROAS on that improved to 1.5%. This is improving daily.
I can only assume that if you sell internationally eBay will spend 30% of your budget on clicks which will generate maybe less than 1% of sales.
ventexclutches
·6 days agoThat's interesting to know. Well investigated - my mind wouldn't have gone to international sales. If you do another check after a month or so can you bump this thread with the longer term figures? I'm about to get started with eIS so won't be able to turn off the international side for now, but would be helpful to see any longer term data you can gather
lupo-store
OP6 days agoI ran yesterdays KW report through AI:
I’ve checked the 5 October keyword report.
Consolidated data from placements across eBay accounted for:
- £62.05 of £227.89 spend = 27.2% of spend
- 139 of 791 clicks = 17.6% of clicks
- £87.62 of £957.81 attributed sales = 9.1% of sales value
- 15 of 154 sales = 9.7% of quantity sold
- Consolidated ROAS = 1.41
- Consolidated conversion = 10.8%
Everything outside Consolidated ran at about 5.25 ROAS and 21.3% conversion.
So 5 October was better than August’s ~1.0 Consolidated ROAS, but Consolidated was still taking 27% of spend to generate only 9% of sales value.
That also means the very strong overall performance was being driven overwhelmingly by the non-Consolidated traffic.