Search Results

I know not every Etsy seller belives in Etsy ads. You can go down that Youtube Rabbit hole on your own time. I’m not here to convince you that Etsy ads are great or bad. What I do know is advertising is important and it should be a budget line for every business. So if you are trying to sell 3d printed products on Etsy and are going to advertise logically I think Etsy Ads is the best place to start. So if that is the boat you are in, stick around as I get into everything I’ve learned about Etsy Ads as a top 1% Etsy seller. 1. What listings to advertise? I advertise every new listing I create, and I also only advertise 20% of my listings at a time. Did I get you? lol, I know that doesn’t make sense, does it? Here is what I mean. The question that is hard to answer is which Listing is going to be in that 20%. Unfortunately, there seems to not be a lot of logic behind what listing does well and which one doesn’t. If you aren't familiar with the 80/20 rule it states: 20% of your listings are going to generate 80% of your revenue. I’ve listed the same product with the same pictures, the same description, with the same keywords, everything is the same but I’ll change one word in the title. 1 listing goes on to be an Etsy Best Seller and the other does squat. This is why I advertise every new listing I create. I want to find out as soon as possible which listings are going to be best sellers and which aren’t going to be big piles of garbage. I’ve found that you can usually determine after 30-60 days so all my listings get advertised for at least 30 days. 2. Etsy Ads ROAS (return on advertising spend) This brings us to the next consideration when determining what listings to advertise and that is the ROI of the ads spent for the listing. After the 30 days does the listing have an ROAS of at least 3x? If it doesn’t Ads get turned off and it's not a top 20% listing for me. Why 3x? It’s simple math, your “x” number might be different but the logic behind it holds and can be applied to any industry. I run my shop on about 60% profit margin. Meaning that if I sell something for $10, I’m keeping $6. If I'm paying ads for that $10 sale and was running an ROI of 3x it means I spent $3.33 to get that sale bringing my profit down to $2.67 or 26% profit margin. You can see it eats away at your profit quickly. For me, if I’m not keeping at least 25% of revenue it isn’t worth it. Using that same scenario above if my ROAS was 2x then it would have cost me $5 to get that $10 sale bringing my profit margin to $1 or 10%. It's going to be very hard to operate any business on margins like that including one that sells 3d prints. So if your ROAS on your ads are 2x or every 1.5x I think your best case scenario is breaking evening on those sales or worse case losing money….not good. Just know though that every rule has exceptions and to always keep the big picture in mind. It's possible that a listing might take longer to get going than 30-60 days. So if you see a listing that is performing well that isn’t being advertised because you turned it off it might be worth turning back on and giving it another chance. 3. Etsy Ads Budget Once I’ve found the 20% of my listings that are my best sellers. I’m slamming the ads button on them and I’m spending as much in ads as Etsy will charge me. Etsy won’t always spend your budget. Ad views are based on demand if people aren't searching for your stuff you won’t pay ads. In the beginning, the total Etsy will let you spend is probably something around $5-10 a day. I max out the spend. You'll notice as you do this Etsy will increase the maximum budget available to you I will continue to increase my budget to that new maximum amount. The goal here is that my budget is high enough that Etsy isn't spending my whole budget every day. If it spends my whole budget that means some people searched and didn’t see my product that day. Me no likely that. 4. When people buy on Etsy I talk to a lot of new Etsy Sellers and a story I hear constantly is that they turn on ads with a very small budget and that budget results in no sales or very little sales. They then are too afraid to increase their budget because their first budget didn't do anything so why would they spend more. What we need to look at is when people check out and spend money on Etsy. Over half of my sales in a day sometimes come after 7 pm. When your ad budget is only $5 and Etsy starts showing your advertised listings at 12:01 am guess whose whole ad budget has been completely spent by 7 pm? You need to have a big enough budget to last until the buying hours. This is why I said above that I never want to actaully spend my full budget. If my full budget is spent it means I potential missed out on buyers that didn't see my ad. Another option that takes a bit takes a bit more work and time. You can turn your ads on and off daily so they are only running during peak buying hours. I’m too lazy for that and would forget to turn them back on but could be a good option for someone just starting out. 5. Total ad spend in relation to Total revenue. The last metric I look at monthly is how much did I spend on ads in relation to my total revenue? Not everyone buys after seeing an ad, but might remember you and come back later. So it’s not always fair to apply your ad spend to only the revenue that came directly from ads. So once a month I divide my total ad spend by my total shop Revenue (ads rev and normal rev). I want that number to be 15%. Assuming you are only advertising on Etsy ads what this 15% represents is you business wide advertising budget. I read some where that most small business spend 15% of total revenue on Advertisements. So I kinda just ran with that. 6. Sell Thing People want For any of the above to work and work well you need to be selling products that people 1 will buy and 2 will search for. If you are selling products with keywords that only get a couple hundred views a month it’s going to be tough to have ads do anything for you. My top five listings get over 40,00 views each month and my best 1 month for 1 listing was 165,000 views. People tend to try to sell stuff they are interested in or they think is cool and often overestimate the number of people who also like those things too and will spend money on it. At the end of the day, you have to sell things people want.

I've been selling 3d printed products on Etsy for the last 4 years and its my full time gig. Over the coarse of that journey, I've experimented a ton with different strategies to create Esty Bestseller listings. Thought I'd share the 4 things that have had the biggest impact. #1: Is there demand for your product? As 3D modelers, we tend to create products that we like and then try to sell them. This isn’t a bad strategy, but it should really be your starting point. Before you even create the listing, take pictures, and do all that exciting stuff, you need to rationally look to see if there is any demand for your product. If there is ever a time you need to be honest with yourself, it's now. It won’t do you any good to ignore this step if it means you do all the work to create a great listing for a product that no one actually wants. Nothing causes burnout faster than putting in a ton of work over and over again for no results. Set yourself up for success and do your research ahead of time. There a bunch of good tools to determine if the demand for your product is there. #2: Give Etsy What It Wants When creating your listing, keep the idea of “gifts” in mind. In case you missed it, Etsy is leaning hard into the idea of being the place for gifts. They developed a whole new search system all centered around gifts, so I believe it's in your best interest to lean into this. If your product makes for a good gift, let Etsy know. If your product makes a good Child's birthday gift, in the title add “Unique Child Birthday Gift”. Follow it up by reserving a few of your keywords to focus on the idea of it being a gift. I have a few rules I follow with my Etsy Shop, and this one is pretty simple. "If Etsy is into it, I’m into it." Etsy wants to be the place for gifts, so although I don’t know this for sure, I don’t think it's a stretch that if your listings communicate that they make great gifts, by default, you could see some increase in listing rank. #3: Don't Waste Your Honeymoon When Etsy is “ranking” your new listing, there are several factors that go into it. However, the biggest thing is just sales. Etsy is in the fee business, and they only get that fee when a sale is made. So, it’s in their best interest to promote and push listings that sell. New listings are being created every day and the 3d printing space is become more and more competitive. So, Etsy needs to make an early determination on if these new listings are going to be best sellers. It's been widely reported that to help aid in this, they give all new listings a “Honeymoon” or “Halo” period. Essentially, they give new listings a boost for a certain period of time to see if they convert shoppers to sales. So, as Etsy sellers, we have a unique opportunity to capitalize on this window and use it to our advantage in an effort to show Etsy that our product will sell. I do this in two ways. I run a very hefty sale on the new listing. There is a term in retail called the “loss leader.” The idea is that you sell a product at a loss in order to attract customers and stimulate other profitable sales. What we are doing isn’t quite that, but it’s close. For the first few weeks of posting, I calculate a discount rate where I’m not losing money but nearly breaking even on the sale. The idea is to price it so attractively that people purchase it shortly after listing it, which communicates to Etsy that it is a listing that converts. You need to advertise along side these discounts. I know there are a lot of opinions about Etsy Ads. However, for this “discount” price strategy to work, running ads is a must. There is so much noise on Etsy, and our “Honeymoon” period only lasts so long. So, we have to cut through that noise and get our listing shown. If you just list and wait, it can take weeks or even months for your listing to rank or even be indexed by Etsy and Google. By the time they do that, your honeymoon period could be over, and you could have missed your window. There is one more benefit to running this discount stragey that you get besides just ranking with Etsy. People love buying products other people are buying. This is why getting the Etsy “Best Seller” badge or the “12 people bought this in the last 24 hours” is so important. What’s great about those badges is that you can earn them when you are offering your product at a discount. You keep them even after you remove the discount. So, the series of events play out like this: List the product and offer a large discount (while advertising). Get sales at the discounted rate, you make little to no money. Earn a “12 people have bought in the last 24 hours” or “Bestseller” tag. Turn off the sale and list at full price. New buyers see the listing, see the full price, see the “12 people have bought” or bestseller tag, and it instantly communicates to them that your product is worth the price and increases buyer confidence. Which is a must to generate consistent sales. They don’t know and don’t need to know that all the previous sales happened at a large discount. One thing I want to make clear, though. I’m not encouraging you to price gouge your customers. Your non-discounted rate should be a fair price for your product. When you put it on discount, it should be an exceptionally good deal to encourage buyers. This strategy isn’t going to be of any benefit if you increase your price so that you still make your full profit even when you run the early "sale". The play here is short-term sacrifice for long-term benefit. #4: Duplicate New Listings Every time I list a new product, I take that new listing and I make 2 more identical versions of it. Now, why would I do that? I’ve learned something on my journey to a top 3D Printing Etsy Seller. We can do all the things, optimize keywords, create great titles, write catchy descriptions, and spend a bunch of time on our pictures. We can and we should do all those things; it would be foolish not to put our best foot forward. At the end of the day, though, Etsy is a numbers game, and there is an element of luck as to which listing Etsy chooses to promote and rank in their search. So, by duplicating the listing and only changing the thumbnail image for each duplicate listing, I’m essentially running A/B/C test on 3 different listings. What I noticed is that when I did this, almost every time one of the 3 listings would rank with Etsy and perform well, while the other 2 would do nothing. We need to look at Etsy like a funnel. We drop all of our listings into the wide top, but then only a couple make it out the bottom as our Etsy Best Sellers. So, by duplicating every listing, you are essentially tripling the number of listings you are dropping into the funnel and 3xing the potential of best sellers coming out. While also getting the knowledge of what thumbnails work better for future listings. Here is an example that I recently did. I designed and released these wall planters. I created 3 identical listings, with only the thumbnail being different. We can see here in the last 30 days, one of the listings has $0 in sales. While the second one has $67.48 in sales. However, the third listing has over $1,000 in sales just in the last 30 days from that one listing. You are already making the one listing; how hard is it to duplicate it and change the thumbnail? Give it a try and let me know if it works. I honestly do all the things I just laid out on all my new 3d printed products that I decide to list on Etsy. It’s been a game-changer for my Etsy Shop.