Marketplace seller - can I run PMax if my products live on someone else's site?

Question

Most of my volume is on marketplaces. I have a small own-brand site but it's maybe 15
percent of sales.

Can I run PMax pointing at marketplace listings, and if I can, should I? The conversion
tracking is the part I cannot see a way around - I do not control those pages and cannot put
a tag on them.

Priya Deshmukh · Accepted Answer

Technically you can send traffic to a marketplace listing. You should not, and the reason
is exactly the one you spotted.

Without a tag you have no conversion data. Without conversion data smart bidding has
nothing to optimise toward, so PMax degrades into buying traffic that looks vaguely
relevant, and you find out how it went from your marketplace dashboard a week later with
no way to attribute anything.

Some marketplaces also restrict paid traffic to listings, or run their own ads on the same
inventory. Worth reading the terms before spending anything.

What I would do with your 15 percent site: run PMax to your own site only, tag it properly,
and accept the smaller volume in exchange for a campaign that can actually learn. If the
economics work there you have something you can scale by growing the site, which you
control, rather than by feeding a channel you cannot measure.

Marta Silva · Answer

Would add: the own-brand site being small is not a reason to skip it, it is the reason to
build it. Every client I have had who was marketplace-dependent eventually wanted the
direct channel, usually the week after the marketplace changed its fee structure.

Paid traffic is a good forcing function for making that site decent.

Marketplace seller - can I run PMax if my products live on someone else's site?

Replies (2)

Keyword Ninja

Hi there 👋

What can we help with?

Let's get you an answer