How to use Etsy's Promoted Listings Part 1

Youtube Tutorial Video: http://youtu.be/zXhsyqXBWPM

Blog Part 2: http://etsyjewelryfx.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-use-etsys-promoted-listings-part.html

Blog Part 3: http://etsyjewelryfx.blogspot.com/2014/11/how-to-use-etsys-promoted-listings-part_22.html

There has been a lot of confusion and upset since Etsy replaced Search Ads with Promoted Listings. I am here to try and clear up some of the confusion. "Impressions" are the number of times your ad was shown to a user but they did not click on the ad. The "Clicks" are the number of times someone clicked on your ad. ( Those numbers depend on the way your looking at stats. ) There isn't a lot to understanding promoted listings. It's more about what your willing to pay for each time a user clicks on your ad. You can customize the bid, only feature a couple of items, or you can feature your entire store if you wanted. This gives you a lot more control over the amount of money being spent. You ONLY pay when someone clicks on your ad.

When setting promoted listings to auto bid, Etsy is choosing the maximum cost per click for you. They determine this by the popularity of the keywords that are used on your listing ( among other things), this is why you see a difference in each items maximum bid. They want you to be the most likely person to win the bid. I personally do not recommend using the automated feature, it's going to eat up your budget pretty quickly. 

The most important thing to remember is that you DO NOT want to max out your daily budget. When you max the budget out, Etsy STOPS showing your ads until the day rolls over. 

Above is a screen shot the results of my daily budget set to 1.00 and I allowed the auto bid to handle my cost per click. As you can see I maxed the budget out at 2pm on Monday October 27. I barely had any Impressions and I only gained 5 clicks from the ads. I paid 1.00 for a total of 5 clicks! My budget was maxed out before the highest traffic time ( afternoon / evening ), so I missed out on a lot of potential customers. This is why many people do not see the results they want from promoted listings. Their daily budget is being eaten up with very little return. The likelihood of gaining a sale in just 5 clicks isn't very high.

Above is a screen shot of my results from Tuesday October 28th. Look at the HUGE difference! My impressions are over five times higher than they were the day before! I have over five times the number of clicks, and my cost is BELOW half what I spent the day before! How did I accomplish this? I took my promoted listings off the auto bid. I manually set every single listing I am promoting to .02. Yes, this is low, and .02 might not work for you like it is for me. But you can see a CLEAR difference and positive impact.

If you have your listings set to .20 per click, and your daily budge is only 1.00 your only going to get a maximum of 5 clicks out of your budget before Etsy stops showing them to people. It's possible you can get sales from 5 clicks, but its -more- likely you'll get a sale out of 50 possible clicks than just 5. That is the thing that damages you the most. If your ads are not being shown during the higher trafficked times on Etsy - your losing possible sales and throwing your money away on promotions that are probably not going to do much for you. Changing my maximum cost to .02 on my listings means I am going to get a maximum of 50 clicks out of my daily 1.00 budget before Etsy would shut my ads off. 

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Let's look at some more numbers. Below are two screen shots of my promoted listings. Each of them are for a 7 day period. On the first screenshot I got under 3,000 impressions, only got 38 clicks on my ads, maxed out my budget -every- day and paid the full 7.00. I did manage to get a couple of sales for the first time since Promoted Listings started, which to say the least, I was incredibly surprised to see.

Now let's look at the second screen shot. Over 10,000 impressions, 88 ad clicks, I paid Etsy 2.34, but I did not make any revenue that week from the ads. I am no longer maxing out my daily budget of 1.00 and I gained almost four times the number of impressions doubled the clicks and spent only a fraction of the amount of money from the previous week! Using Promoted listings this way, it is far more likely that I am going to get sales from the ads. I don't know about you, but anything I can do to get the odds in my favor I am willing to do. There is a lot of fierce competition on Etsy and it's tough to stay ahead of the pack sometimes.

How do you set your budget for promoted listings? Well, this is an incredibly personal decision, I wasn't willing to spend more than about 30.00 a month on Ety's ads, which is why my daily MAXIMUM budget is at 1.00. What you decide to pay per click really depends on your market, your budget, and what it is worth to you. 

I hope this at least sheds some light on the subject and helps more people on Etsy understand how promoted listings work.