Jeff Clark's Blog

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:

Maine Red Lobster Illustrated Print – Housewarming, Wedding, Birthday or Anniversary Present for Those Who Love the Beach

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”.

We’ve recently re-focused our efforts on our side business selling unique sealife artwork: Harbor Hangings. The goal is to build this business into something big enough that one or both of us can work on full-time. I’ve identified three channels that we’ll be focusing on in 2015: retail, online and live shows.

For online sales, we’re currently using Etsy exclusively. Etsy provides us with a sales platform that accepts credit cards, a built-in community of buyers and sells, and recently (as in earlier 2014) created an ad engine for promoting your listing in Etsy search results called Etsy Promoted Listings. It’s like Google ads, but Etsy-specific.

I enabled these ads for us a couple of weeks ago using our existing listing information and left the bids at whatever was suggested. The results are pretty crappy: our ads have been seen 3,500 times, clicked on 19 times, and there have been 0 purchases. 0 purchases aren’t going to give us the income necessary to quit our day jobs, so I’ve dug into the stats and found our first opportunity: ad clickthrough conversion.

3,500 ad impressions + 9 clicks = 0.005% CTR. Yikes. Granted, I’ve only spent about $3 in ads, so I’m not really upset. But if I can get that conversion rate into something respectable (1-2%, maybe?), I’d feel better about spending more money on Etsy ads – assuming the sales follow.

Digging into the ad analytics, I found a little pattern. Here’s a screenshot of the promoted listings screen inside my Etsy account, sorted by clicks. 18 of those 19 clicks are on pictures of physical items:

People love our items when they see them. But in my opinion, most of our items aren’t getting the attention they deserve from promoted listings. I believe it’s because the picture we use for most of our listings are pretty terrible:

 

 

So yesterday, I started a test. My hypothesis is that the product shot, when compared against other products in Etsy search results, isn’t helping. And since the name of the game is getting people to click on the ad, I want to test this. For our lobster poster, I am running the standard product shot (my control) against with the following five test product shots:

 

I’m using the lobster because it gets a lot of attention in search results, and I believe that using the lobster will get me enough impressions to consider the results significant enough to make a decision.

Product titles, descriptions, tags and prices all remain exactly the same. I even left secondary images the same on all of these posts since the primary focus of this test is to increase conversion from search ad impressions to clickthrough, and secondary images are only levers after the visitor has clicked through an ad.

Technically, it costs me $0.20 for each new test variant. $1.00 plus ad spend is worth it if we can learn something that gets us closer to closing more sales on Etsy. We also have the annoying side-effect that our storefront now hosts six variants of the exact same item.

I’ll let it run this week and see what happens. While writing this post, I developed a second hypothesis, but I’ll flesh that out after this test is over.