Is advertising on OTTO worth it for small sellers?

The minimum cost of advertising on OTTO

Advertising on otto.de is called Sponsored Product Ads. According to OTTO, campaigns have no monthly fees and no upfront fees. You only pay when someone clicks your ad. Your bid is the most you're willing to pay for a click. The minimum bid is 0.20 €, and you're charged the click price you actually reached in the auction.

The budget is the amount a campaign may spend. OTTO names no minimum budget for campaigns you book yourself in the partner portal, but measured on a real OTTO account, OTTO doesn't accept a budget below 5 €. According to OTTO, a minimum booking volume of 2,500 € exists only in Managed Service, where OTTO runs the campaign for you. There's no maximum budget.

Regardless of advertising, every seller on OTTO pays the OTTO base fee of 99.90 € a month plus VAT, however many items they offer. It's first due for the month after you're technically able to sell. That also applies if you haven't loaded any items yet. From every sale, OTTO also keeps an OTTO commission between 7% and 22% of the price including VAT. The total cost is covered in What does it cost to sell on OTTO?

How much budget OTTO names for a first evaluation

OTTO gives a rule of thumb. An item should have had at least 50 € of ad spend before you read anything into its numbers. According to OTTO, only then can you draw first conclusions. To start a campaign, OTTO advises at least 5 items, ideally 15 to 20.

From that you can work out your starting budget. OTTO doesn't print this calculation, it follows from the two recommendations. 5 items times 50 € is 250 € of ad spend until the first evaluation, 15 to 20 items is 750 to 1,000 €. How fast you get there depends on your daily budget and your bids.

What OTTO requires, however big you are

OTTO names no minimum size or minimum revenue for advertising anywhere. You can book campaigns yourself, without support from OTTO. Only an item where you hold the BuyBox can take part in the bidding, meaning OTTO offers your offer for purchase on the product page. If an item counts as sold out because fewer than half of its variants are available, OTTO doesn't show it.

Besides the bid, what counts in the auction according to OTTO is how likely a click on your product is. That includes price, shipping costs, delivery time and your product data. OTTO doesn't mention the size of your shop. You can't bid on other sellers' brands.

Whether advertising pays off for your item

Whether ads pay off is decided by your item, not your account. From the price of a sale, VAT, OTTO commission, purchase price and shipping come off. OTTO doesn't know your purchase price and shipping, they're in your own records. What's left is your room for advertising. If you spend more on ads for a sale than that, you lose money on it.

You measure this with ACoS, the share of your ad spend in ad revenue, meaning revenue from purchases after a click on your ad. OTTO shows it in the partner portal as „KUR (ACoS)“, where KUR stands for Kosten-Umsatz-Relation (cost-to-revenue ratio). The break-even ACoS is the ACoS at which you stop earning on a sale. It's your room for advertising divided by the price. If 35 € of a 100 € price is left before ads, it's 35%. Your target ACoS sits below that, the highest ACoS at which you still keep the margin you want. How to calculate your target ACoS has its own guide.

What OTTO says about ads and regular search

OTTO writes that Sponsored Product Ads could have positive effects on organic ranking, which is your place in regular search without ads. OTTO's advertising guide explains it like this. More clicks and sales raise your product's relevance, and it then ranks higher in regular search too. OTTO publishes no evidence for this, only individual case studies of campaigns from 2024. One of them also says that after the campaign ends, the gain gets “nibbled at” by competitors. What OTTO sorts regular search by is covered in How does the OTTO search algorithm work?.

In practice ads and sales without ads are still connected. Many sellers keep switching ads on and off because they look expensive. If you switch off, you hand your spot to competitors and can also lose places in regular search. It's better to keep ads running continuously, with a target ACoS per item against which you lower or raise bids.

How to check today on OTTO whether ads pay off

You'll find all of this in OTTO Partner Connect, the partner portal for sellers.

1. Open „Marketing“ → „Sponsored Product Ads“ and the tab „Prognose-Report“ (Forecast report). For each item it names an „Empfohlenes CPC Gebot“ (recommended CPC bid), meaning a bid per click, plus how often OTTO would show the ad and how much competition there is. It also shows the „Erwartete Return on Investment der Produktgruppe“ (expected return on investment of the product group), the ROAS of similar items over the last 90 days. ROAS is your ad revenue divided by your ad spend.
2. Work out your starting budget, the number of items times 50 €. For each item, work out what's left of the price after VAT, OTTO commission, purchase price and shipping. Take purchase price and shipping from your own records. What's left is the upper limit for your ad spend per sale.
3. Book the campaign, according to the Helpdesk under „Marketing“ → „Marketing Services buchen“ (Book marketing services) → „Jetzt buchen“ (Book now). There you set the name, budget, items and bids. The step-by-step version is in How does advertising on OTTO work with Sponsored Product Ads?
4. Check the result under „Marketing“ → „Sponsored Product Ads“ in the „Dashboard“ tab. It lists spend, clicks, CPC, revenue, ROAS and „KUR (ACoS)“ per campaign. CPC is the average price of a click.
5. You see your place in regular search under „Analysen“ (Analytics) → „Potenzialanalysen“ (Potential analyses) → „Suchbegriff Analyse“ (Search term analysis) in the tab „Suchbegriffe nach Produkt“ (Search terms by product). Enter the OTTO item number and you'll see the search terms of the last 30 days with your product's average position. This costs nothing and needs no campaign.
6. According to the Helpdesk, your total revenue, including revenue without ads, is under „Analysen“ → „Controlling“ → „Nachfrage- und Umsatz-Analysen“ (Demand and revenue analyses).

OTTO doesn't show you whether ads improve your place in regular search. You won't find a metric in the partner portal that separates sales from ads and sales without ads. You have to save the position of your search terms yourself before, during and after a campaign and compare, because OTTO only ever shows the last 30 days. You also calculate TACoS yourself, the share of your ad spend in your total revenue. A sale from an ad appears in OTTO's ad numbers on the day of the click, but under „Controlling“ on the day the goods were shipped. So the numbers don't match exactly.

How to work out your starting budget for ads on OTTO

Say you start with 5 pieces of garden furniture in one campaign, including the oak table. It costs 100 €, and after VAT, OTTO commission, purchase price and shipping you have 35 € left before ads. Its break-even ACoS is therefore 35%. Your garden furniture has a target ACoS of 25%, and your bid is 0.40 €.

Don't judge the table before that. Only once it has had 50 € of ad spend do you check how many tables sold through the ad. At a 25% target ACoS, 50 € of ad spend should bring 200 € of ad revenue.

If the table has sold once after those 50 €, you're above target and lower its bid. With three tables sold you're well below target and can raise the bid. Either way you change the table's bid and don't switch off the whole campaign.