Marketplace performance marketing runs separate budgets and creative for buyer acquisition and seller recruitment, preventing one funnel from starving the other. LinkedIn and Google Search fit B2B seller recruitment; Meta and Google fit consumer-facing recruitment. Measured against cost per transacting buyer and cost per onboarded seller, tracked separately.
Liquidity first, growth second
A marketplace that buys too many buyers and too few sellers disappoints everyone. The reverse wastes seller goodwill. So we plan paid media around liquidity: how quickly a listing sells, how many options a buyer sees, and where the supply gaps are. Budgets move to whichever side is holding the market back.
Separate funnels, separate creative
- Buyer acquisition: Google Search and Shopping where the category supports it, Meta and TikTok for discovery-led categories
- Seller recruitment: Google Search for "sell my" and "list my" intent, LinkedIn for B2B sellers, partnerships and referral offers
- Retention: retargeting and CRM audiences so first-time buyers come back
The biggest marketplaces spend heavily here for a reason
Amazon reported around $68 billion of advertising revenue in 2025 (Marketing Dive, 2026). Part of what makes a marketplace valuable is the ad business its sellers create. For growing marketplaces, a simple sponsored listing product can fund part of your own acquisition, once there is enough buyer traffic to make it worthwhile for sellers.
Referral loops beat paid for many marketplaces once they are working. Dropbox is the famous example outside marketplaces: its double-sided referral offer is widely credited with much of its early growth. We set up referral tracking alongside paid from day one so you can compare them.
What we report
Cost per transacting buyer, cost per active seller, time to first transaction on each side and liquidity by category and city. See marketplace SEO for the organic side.