eBay has a new webpage up about in-app mobile advertising, where it is courting advertisers to appear in its apps.
As AdAge notes, the company tested ads in its mobile apps in 2012, but decided not to run with it. With PayPal possibly being spun off next year, it’s apparently had a change of heart.
“With $20 billion in mobile commerce generated in 2013 and 260 million (and counting) global app downloads, eBay is a leader in m-commerce,” eBay says. “What’s more, eBay mobile users are highly engaged. They spend 3x the amount of time on eBay compared to the nearest competitor. Now, for the first time, we’re giving you the opportunity to connect with eBay users throughout their entire shopping journey. eBay mobile advertising will be a native experience, beautifully integrated into the eBay app.”
“eBay is one of the world’s largest online marketplaces with more than 149 million active users driving nearly $75 billion in sales volume in 2013,” it says. “As one of the only ad-targeting platforms to naturally possess first-party data, we have enormous insight into user interests and intent based on actual shopping and purchase behavior. In fact, eBay tracks over 290 million hours of shopping activity each month. We harness the power of this data to help our advertising partners reach their ideal audience anytime, anywhere and on any device.”
It goes on to tell advertisers they’ll have access to over 60 predefined audience segments, powered by “real commerce data”. It also creates custom segments with an Audience Discovery tool.
It then talks about cross-device targeting and its suite of products, which includes programmatic buying, eBay Audience Platform, and mobile.
As The Wall Street Journal, which reported on eBay’s offering earlier, points out, the move risks sending potential buyers away from eBay to competitors, but that “advertising is an attractive market because it tends to generate much higher margins than the sale of goods.”
Amazon is also working on its own AdSense competitor, while Google itself just announced AdSense for Shopping, enabling third-party commerce publishers to run Google product ads.
eBay is working with Triad Retail Media on its offering.
Image via eBay