Bol.com

MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you advertise on bol?

Lars Hurkmans·Co-founder·22 July 2026·Temps de lecture 6 minutes

Advertising well on bol is more than bidding: you steer your ads with insight and, where possible, with automation that leans on market context. MarktMentor offers a spectrum from manual (the bulk editor) to fully automatic (strategies), with dayparting and strategies that steer on category benchmarks and your organic position. As far as publicly observable, Rylee offers dayparting and simple rulesets: an integration that turns your own data into actions, but without that market context.

What is advertising on bol, and why does it matter?

Advertising on bol runs through sponsored products. You pay per click: if a consumer doesn't click, it costs nothing, and if they do click, you pay roughly the average winning bid. The share of your revenue that goes to advertising is called ACoS.

Why it matters has everything to do with findability. A new product without sales and reviews is barely found organically. So you advertise to get going: you buy visibility, land your first sales and reviews, and build up an organic position with that. As that position gets stronger, you can scale advertising back. Advertising is therefore a means to grow, not a goal in itself, and we cover the interplay with your organic position in how do you measure your findability on bol. How you factor advertising costs into your margin is covered in launching a product and the advertising costs on bol.

In practice, a large share of sellers still manage advertising entirely by hand, some don't know whether their budget is being used efficiently, and far from everyone has visibility into which keywords and positions actually work. That's exactly where a good tool can make the difference.

What should a good advertising tool be able to do?

Three things, in our view.

• Give insight. You want to see at a glance how your ads are performing: your revenue, costs, ACoS, conversion and impressions, down to product level and per placement. Without that insight you're steering blind.
• Let you choose between manual and automated. Automation isn't all-or-nothing. Sometimes you want to quickly adjust a batch of bids yourself, sometimes you want a recurring action to run on its own, and sometimes you want to hand over complex bidding behaviour entirely. A good tool lets you decide how much you automate.
• Decide on market context, not just your own figures. This is the point that's missing most often. Your own account data tells you what happened for you, but not how that compares to the market. Adjusting a bid at the right moment, or scaling back in the right place, works better if you know the pattern for your whole category and not just for your one product.

How MarktMentor approaches advertising

MarktMentor places management on a spectrum, from manual to fully automatic, so you decide yourself how much you hand off. The dashboarding sits apart from that: you always see your advertising performance, regardless of how you steer.

• Bulk editor. One table with all your advertising data, where you zoom in from any angle and run bulk actions directly. Manual, but fast and at scale.
• Rulesets. If-then rules that automate actions based on your data, for example lowering your bid if your ACoS gets too high, or scaling back on placements where you already rank well organically. You can have them run per hour of the day, choose whether a rule acts once or every time the situation occurs, and quickly undo an executed action if it turns out differently than expected.
• Dayparting. Your bid per hour and per day, higher at busy moments and lower at quiet ones. The difference is in the data source: MarktMentor can use the sales pattern of your entire category, the benchmark, which holds far more data than one product. That's especially valuable for a new product without sales history. So you start with a data-driven template, generated from the order pattern, instead of a blank schedule you fill in by feel, and you adjust that template yourself afterwards.
• Strategies. The most extensive form: goal-directed, phased automation that guides a product from launch to a strong organic position.

For those rulesets there's one property that determines whether they work on time, and it's rarely mentioned: how often the figures underneath them refresh. If a rule runs on KPIs that update once a day, you're by definition reacting to yesterday. Your bid goes down because your ACoS rose yesterday, while the reason for that was already over by this morning. Our performance data updates roughly every two hours, which lets you attach bid rules to hours of the day: scaling up in the window where your revenue peaks, pulling back during the hours where you're mainly buying clicks and barely selling. That's the difference between adjusting on the day itself and being a day behind the competitor who already does.

The strategies deserve some extra explanation, since that's where the most distinctive part lies. Instead of separate rules, you set a goal, for example a target ACoS, and let a product move through successive phases: first data collection, then launch, then organic growth, and finally optimisation. Each phase has different bidding behaviour, and a product only flows through to the next once it hits the current phase's goals. That way you deliberately build up visibility with ads at the start, and the strategy scales back paid traffic as your organic position gets stronger, precisely on the keywords where you already have that position. So you don't need to constantly adjust by hand, but you're also not automating blindly: you steer on a goal, and the phasing does the work.

The common thread: dayparting and strategies lean on the same market data as the rest of MarktMentor, the category benchmarks and your organic positions from our own backend system. That lets you steer on context, not just your own account. The worked-out strategies are starting points you adjust yourself, not a guarantee of results; always look critically at your own product situation.

Why does a rule based on your organic position often not work?

The rule sellers want most often is this one: stop advertising on a keyword where I already rank high organically. That's a logical wish, since there you're paying for a spot you already had. But a rule like that is only usable if your organic position is measured separately, and that's exactly where most tools fall apart.

Rylee reads positions from bol's API endpoint, the same way your seller account does. On a keyword where you're sponsoring, that position is already a weighted mix of organic and paid impressions. So a rule based on that number is judging a position that includes the very ad it's supposed to turn off.

In practice that creates a loop. If you rank position 3 because you're paying for it, the rule sees position 3 and concludes advertising is no longer needed. The campaign goes off, you drop, and as soon as the position worsens the rule turns advertising back on. Your automation then steers on its own effect instead of on the market.

MarktMentor measures the organic position separately from sponsored visibility, and doesn't pull it from that same endpoint. From bol's API we also read whether impressions come from ads or not. That way you keep two layers side by side: where you rank without paying, and what advertising adds on top of that. That's the condition under which the rule you actually wanted does work, and under which scaling back is something other than hoping. How that measurement works is covered in rankings on bol: why you shouldn't rely on a single source.

Where Rylee stops

As far as publicly observable, Rylee offers dayparting and simple rulesets for advertising. That follows the same pattern as the other features: at its core it's an integration that fetches data and executes actions. You can automate recurring actions with if-then rules, and adjust your bid per time slot. That's useful, and enough for a share of sellers.

What's missing is the market context. The rules and dayparting work on your own account figures, not on the broader picture: no category benchmark as a data source, no goal-directed strategies that steer on your organic position and a target ACoS. That's not a matter of unwillingness, but a consequence of the approach. That kind of context requires an underlying data system that tracks the market, and that doesn't fit a tool that positions itself as a budget solution.

And there's something else besides context: oversight. Basic automation works fine as long as you know exactly what needs to happen: you set your rules once and barely look at them again. But that's rarely how advertising works in practice. To be able to steer, you need to see what's happening: what your automation adjusted, when and why, and where it's going wrong. That requires oversight and transparency, think of logs that track your adjustments, so you can always find a change again and undo it if needed. MarktMentor is built on that: you keep sight of what's happening under the hood and adjust based on that. An approach that mainly runs standalone rules leans more on set-and-forget: pleasant as long as everything runs smoothly on its own, but the moment you want to intervene, you quickly lose your grip without that oversight. And steering is exactly what advertising is about.

Cost item or growth engine?

It mainly depends on what advertising is to you. If you see it as a cost item that should be as low as possible, dayparting and a few rulesets get you a long way. But on bol, advertising is rarely something you set up once and leave alone: it's the engine you use to launch, build your organic position and grow your visibility. And you want to be able to steer an engine, with visibility into the market and into what your automation is doing. That's what MarktMentor is built on: the benchmarks, the goal-directed strategies, the interplay with your organic position and the oversight to adjust course. If you take advertising seriously as a growth channel, you need that context, and you keep a grip on where your budget goes.

A difference in approach, not in the buttons

Both tools can adjust your bids and automate part of your work. The difference isn't in those buttons, but in what's underneath. Rylee turns your own data into actions. MarktMentor does that too, but adds the market context: benchmarks, goal-directed strategies and the interplay with your organic position. That's the difference between adjusting based on just your own account and adjusting with visibility into the whole market. Which approach suits you mainly depends on how big a role advertising plays in your growth.

In short

• Advertising on bol is a means to grow: you buy visibility to get going and build up your organic position.
• A good advertising tool gives insight, lets you choose between manual and automated, and steers on market context, not just your own figures.
• MarktMentor offers a spectrum from bulk editor to strategies, with dayparting and strategies that lean on category benchmarks and your organic position.
• Rylee offers dayparting and simple rulesets: an integration that turns your own data into actions, without that market context.
• If you see advertising as a cost item, a budget tool can be enough; if you see it as a growth engine, you need MarktMentor's context and oversight to steer.

Advertising is one of the things you need to master to succeed on bol. The complete overview is in what you need to be able to do to succeed on bol.

Read more:

• Launching a product and the advertising costs on bol
• Findability on bol: how it works and how you improve it
• What you need to be able to do to succeed on bol

Compare MarktMentor and Rylee per feature

• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you do product research on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you grow profitably on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you measure your findability on bol?
• MarktMentor vs Rylee: how do you optimise your listing on bol?

The comparison with Rylee is based on publicly observable information at the time of writing.