A Frictionless Digital Experience for eBay’s Global Marketplace
eBay Ads connects brands and sellers with more than 180 million global shoppers, delivering personalized, location-based content with a unified WordPress site built by The Code Company.
Industry: Digital Marketing
Site: ebayads.com | thecode.co
Challenge
Build a highly performant, centralized WordPress site to unify disparate regions and landing pages for eBay Ads while empowering the business’ internal teams.
Solution
The Code Company led a major redevelopment project, rebuilding the eBay Ads site on WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform for performance at scale, enterprise-grade security, and 24x7 access to a dedicated success team.
Results
A highly performant, frictionless digital experience. With the introduction of block-based editing and improvements to page speed and content personalization, the new eBay Ads site has helped connect the brand’s global regions, resulting in an explosion of new leads and more visitors than ever before.
eBay Ads works to enrich the eBay marketplace experience by making advertising relevant to real people, helping them find more than what they search for. With more than 180 million global eBay user journeys as its data source, eBay Ads combines innovation with a transparent approach to data, working in partnership with clients to help them understand their audience best.
The Code Company is a specialist technical agency that focuses exclusively on engineering-grade website projects. The agency helps media companies discover the best way to build, operate, and monetize their digital publishing platforms, and its team is made up of technical and marketing strategists with vast experience in online media and an obsession with finding the best possible solution to the most perplexing of digital challenges.
"We were tasked with creating a streamlined WordPress solution for a rapidly growing arm of eBay's business, and for an enterprise client of this size and scope, engaging with WP Engine was a no-brainer.'
—Ben May, Managing Director, The Code Company
A Single Home for a Global Footprint
The eBay global marketplace needs little introduction.
Launched in 1995, eBay quickly assumed the role of eCommerce pioneer, and it has remained a digital force to be reckoned with, even as formidable competitors have come and gone.
Today, the global marketplace—where you can buy anything from baseball cards to building materials—serves more than 180 million shoppers around the world, as well as a growing list of sellers who cater to them.
To equip those sellers with powerful, data-informed insights for ads that reach the most relevant audiences, eBay Ads was launched in 2015 as the central hub for advertising on the global marketplace.
While the service has seen rapid growth since its launch, global expansion also created new challenges for the business, as regional locations built out their own digital footprints.
By 2020, the central hub for eBay’s advertising services was no longer centralized.
With clients and offices in Australia, the U.S., UK, and Germany, different regions had begun operating from their own individual landing pages, and the need for a unified system became a priority.
As part of a major rebranding campaign, eBay Ads approached WP Engine Strategic Partner The Code Company, a specialist technical agency based in Brisbane, for help designing a new site that would connect its disparate regions with a single, seamless digital experience.
“Overall, we were tasked with creating a streamlined WordPress solution for a rapidly growing arm of eBay’s business,” said Ben May, Managing Director at The Code Company.
“And for an enterprise client of this size and scope, engaging with WP Engine was a no-brainer.”
Smart, Scalable, Enterprise WordPress
Channeling the open source foundations used of its original site, The Code Company reimagined the digital experience for eBay Ads as a new WordPress environment, built on WP Engine’s enterprise platform, where all regional landing pages could live under a single, high-performance umbrella.
Using Geo Target, WP Engine’s user segmentation system, The Code Company put a system in place that allows eBay Ads to serve up different content specific to individual regions, based on the geolocation of their visitors.
For added personalization, WordPress taxonomy filters were used to ensure visitors automatically see the most relevant case studies, insights, and blog posts, all backed by highly scalable infrastructure that provides a fast, seamless user experience no matter how many concurrent visitors are on the site.
The Code Company also developed a series of custom Gutenberg blocks and pre-configured templates (pattern libraries) that made it easy for the eBay Ads in-house team to create and edit content.
“Each block pattern includes preloaded default content that gives editors a realistic impression of how it will look and feel once it’s live on the site,” May said. “This easy, straightforward approach to content creation was immediately apparent to eBay Ads’ internal teams, as it allows them to go to market more quickly, without the need for a developer.”
Using a combination of those custom blocks and Core Blocks in React, The Code Company also extended block-based functionality to include multiple parts of the site.
The new, flexible system has unlocked creative agility for the eBay Ads team and significantly reduced their reliance on developers. Meanwhile, WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform powers the site with advanced performance and security features that a global brand like eBay Ads demands.
The Results
In addition to a frictionless, unified system for all of eBay Ads’ regional locations, the combination of an improved digital experience and added content personalization has resulted in an explosion of new leads for eBay Ads’ across all regional teams.
These regional business units, which had previously been unable to benefit from targeted inbound leads, have suddenly been flooded with new opportunities.
“It’s been really exciting for our regional partners to get local leads, as this never happened before,” said Brandy Yarema, Senior Manager of Marketing and Communications at eBay Ads.
“As we continue to build our global business it’s important that our website has the flexibility to evolve with us, and this type of added, personalized functionality is exactly what we were looking for.”
In addition to better lead generation, the eBay Ads site is faster than ever, providing users with a fresh, engaging digital experience that captures the essence of the business’ advertising acumen.
“Moving the eBay Ads site to WP Engine’s enterprise WordPress platform resulted in improvements to page speed that simply eliminated the site’s historical performance issues,” May said.
“When you combine that performance, security, and dedicated support with the design elements and back-end editing capabilities The Code Company brought to this project, you can clearly see how WP Engine’s Agency Partners benefit from their platform as they serve enterprise clients with the very best in WordPress.”
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