I might advertise more expensive pieces like this one
Roughly a year ago I wrote that the Etsy search engine gave priority to new listings and renewed items, and as a result it gave poor search results and was an ineffective form of advertising. I termed this Etsy’s 20 cent addiction because it earned the company a short term revenue increase while making shopping on Etsy more difficult. Back in June Etsy changed its search engine to give priority to relevant items instead of recently listed! This change was a step in the right direction and was the first suggestion that I made to improve Etsy.
There was still a major problem with giving priority to relevancy because for sellers that wanted to advertise they still did not have an effective way to advertise on Etsy. That changed this week! YKK Zippers informed me that Etsy announced that Etsy will have sponsored search results at the top of the page. Like Google Adwords these ads will be clearly delineated as ads so that consumers will not be confused. This is almost exactly what I suggested as the solution, which was to provide a sponsored search area so sellers can advertise effectively and try to get their ads to appear at the final phase of the online shopping cycle.
Another advantage of the new ad system is that it is much easier to use than Google Adwords or Project Wonderful. The sellers select if they want to advertise their whole store, a section, or a individual item. Then Etsy provides a selection of keywords that work with those items and the tags that you already applied to the items. You can remove the keywords you don’t want and then select your weekly budget. At this point you can either make it renew automatically or have it stop after a week.
One of the advantages for smaller sellers is that the ads are set to impressions and there is no bidding on keywords. This allows someone who is selling part time or is not Internet savvy time to not waste bidding on keywords and figuring out ad copy. I wish that they would add the ability to add negative keywords or to turn some of the suggested keywords negative.
For example, I only sell silver jewelry. Therefore I would put a negative on the keyword gold (example: -gold) as a negative keyword so that anyone searching for gold jewelry will not see my ads. Another example is that in general I sell more high end jewelry so I might want negative keywords like the following: -plastic, -cheap, -inexpensive, -costume and –children. Often negative keywords are better at getting the right customer to see your ad at the right time.
For big time sellers who have an internet marketing strategy these changes can fit into the over all online advertising scheme. I know many sellers are not happy about this change , at the same time there are many sellers who get upset with any change Etsy makes. I know I have not been a huge fan of every Etsy change but there are a few that I love, including the new way of listing items, which is easier and saves time. I believe this new advertising will increase sales for sellers who want to use it, won’t penalize sellers who don’t use it and will force sellers to use more accurate tags on their items. The last point of more accurate tags is extremely important because if sellers use inaccurate tags they result in bad search results and encourage buyers not to use the site.
I raise my glass to Etsy and say “thank you” for creating this wonderful new ad feature. I intend to try it out in a few weeks, once all the gremlins are figured out.
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