The “prettier pictures” test I wrote about here didn’t do anything. Literally no increase in either impressions (which was expected) or click-through rate (which was the point). Click-through rate for our Etsy Promoted Listings for my lobster prints didn’t increase at all.
I’ve started poking around some random Etsy-focused sub-reedits like r/etsy r/smallbusiness and r/etsysellers. While these are mostly quiet communities, there seem to be lots of other who are having similar problems with Promoted Listings – it doesn’t seem to be working as well as the original Etsy search ads work! It’s good to know that it’s not just me.
There seems to be one store that keeps showing up in my search results and on reddit and some of the Etsy forums: busybeeburlap. Busy Bee Burlap has hundreds of sellers and even more admirers. They sell a (relatively) similar product as I sell: small prints (but on burlap instead of paper, obviously). How are they getting so many sales?
Clicking around their site, I see they have loaded their listing titles with all kinds of keywords. Compare one of my titles…:
Maine Red Lobster Vintage-Style Illustrated Poster
…with one of their titles:
Joshua 24, As for Me and My House, We Will Serve the Lord, Burlap Print, Housewarming, Wedding, or Anniversary Present, Christian Art
Which one do you think is more likely to get search results? And more importantly, which one do you think is going to get more Etsy promoted search keywords? It’s not 100% clear how Etsy decides what keywords to use when determining promoted listing search results, but I have to assume that the title gets weighed pretty heavily. Etsy gives you 190 characters to use in the title (I was originally using about 40 characters), and I can’t imagine why they would do this if they weren’t weighing title heavily for search. So with that in mind, I’ve started testing a similarly keyword-heavy title for the lobster print test:
I’ve added this string to the end of all of my test listings:
My hypothesis, assuming that the title is where Etsy is pulling most of their keywords, is that I’ll start to get impressions for not only “Maine” and “Lobster”, but also for more generic (but related) searches like “Housewarming” and “Beach”.