Shopee Ads are a paid promotion tool within the Shopee marketplace that allows sellers to increase the visibility of their products or their shop to buyers who are actively browsing or searching on the platform. Unlike Google or Meta advertising, Shopee Ads keep the user within the Shopee app or website throughout, which means there is no landing page to build and no external traffic to manage.
What types of Shopee Ads are available?
Shopee offers three main ad formats:
- Search Ads: keyword-based ads that appear in Shopee search results when buyers search for relevant terms. You bid on keywords and pay per click.
- Discovery Ads: placement-based ads that appear in Shopee's recommended product feeds, category pages, and the homepage. Shopee decides which buyers to show them to based on purchase behaviour and browsing patterns.
- Shop Ads: ads that promote the seller's shop page rather than an individual product, useful for building follower count and shop visibility.
How do you set up a Shopee Search Ad?
- Log into Shopee Seller Centre and navigate to My Ads under the Marketing Centre section.
- Click Create New Ad and select Search Ads as the ad type.
- Select the product or products you want to advertise.
- Choose your keyword targeting method. Broad Match targets a wider range of related searches; Exact Match targets only the specific keyword entered.
- Set your cost-per-click (CPC) bid for each keyword and define a daily budget cap.
- Review and publish. The ad enters an auction each time a relevant search is made, with placement determined by bid and product quality score.
What should you know about Shopee Ads bidding?
Shopee Ads use a cost-per-click model for Search Ads: you only pay when a buyer clicks your listing. The minimum bid varies by category and competition level. Shopee provides a suggested bid range to help set competitive bids; bidding below the suggested range typically results in low impression volume.
Daily budgets prevent overspend, but a budget that is exhausted early in the day means the ad stops showing until the following day. Monitoring the Ads Manager dashboard for click-through rate, conversion rate, and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) helps identify which products and keywords are performing well.
Are Shopee Ads worth it for businesses in Thailand?
Shopee is one of the leading e-commerce platforms in Thailand and has a highly active buyer base, particularly for consumer goods, fashion, electronics, and home products. For sellers who already have a Shopee store, ads can increase product visibility significantly in a competitive catalogue environment. The key measure is whether the advertising spend produces a positive ROAS: the cost of the ads should be justified by the incremental sales they generate above organic traffic. Products that already sell well organically are typically better candidates for ads than slow-moving items, which tend to have poor conversion rates even with additional exposure.
Shopee sellers can also run CPAS Collaborative Ads on Meta, which retarget marketplace shoppers with products from your live catalogue.