Advertising Consulting

eBay has decided to cut ties with Triad Retail Media to pursue a new course with an in-house advertising team. eBay will also be retiring some of their iconic ads including product listings due to retire sometime between April and May of 2017, according to Josh Wetzel, the senior director of sales and marketing at eBay. However there will still be ads that take eBay users offsite and these ads will be relevant. For example, if you were browsing through eBay in search of clothing then you would see relevant ads for complimentary clothing services.

In the 4th quarter of 2016, eBay generated $313 million in ad revenue on its marketplace platform. However, moving to an in-house solution isn’t necessarily going to decrease your overhead. In fact, the cost in employees and vetting can be well greater than paying for an ad firm to handle your advertising and marketing. Worse yet, a mistake in hiring could lead to a costly recovery as a result of hiring individuals that don’t understand their platform, or make mistakes. When an employee makes a mistake, the company pays for it. But when an out-sourced firm makes a mistake, they are responsible for the fees.

In some cases you may want to consider keeping a firm on board for their expertise. Paying a retainer to get monthly updates on how visible your products and services are and to deliver actionable objectives, allows for you to hire employees to do the grunt work, while ensuring that you are always taking the best steps for the market at that time. For example, you could hire in-house search engine optimizers, while paying a retainer to an ad firm to make sure that their actions are compliant and wont get you banned from Google and other less popular search engines. This is incredibly important because the rules for SEO are often changing and if you’re not constantly up-to-date, then you risk losing all of your SEO efforts in one fail swoop. This has been such an issue that some large companies have gone so far as to file suit against Google after they lost rank, sales, and then had to layoff thousands of employees. This desperation only further cost them money that they could not afford to lose after losing the law suit.