Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The Search Ad

What a nice day I had yesterday. Specifically, what a nice sales day. Spiders were flying out of the shop and I started teh day with an order for a mask that needs to be made. This means two things, one, I am still busy working on that and two I had no time to do anything else interesting enough to talk about.

So I suppose I'll use this opportunity to document my latest etsy experiment with their in house search ad system. It's only the first week so it's still hard to draw any real conclusions about it's value, but I thought I'd share the numbers I got with it in case any one else was curious. I went for the lowest cost which is $5 a week for about 5000 impressions. Each keyword has its own value so I suppose this moves about a bit. I figured $5 wasn't too much to spend to try something out. So, what did I get out of it? Well, I got 6,058 impressions which is how many times my ad items were seen. For the record I chose to show my mask section. For those impressions I got 52 views, which is the number of times my ad was clicked on and 9 favorites. That's it. That's one click for every 112.5 views and one favorite for every 5 clicks. There were no sales. For comparison I got 6,666 clicks in the shop from other sources in the same time frame and 322 favorites. With this information, it's pretty clear that these search ads didn't do much for me at all. I'll let them run one more week, but I think that perhaps they are just not a good fit for me.

I shouldn't be shocked, they are based on keywords that don't necessarily have anything to do with the search at hand. I did a few searches for the wunderkammer and saw plenty of ads that didn't relate at all and thus were useless. Of course, I am also not the biggest of ad clickers in the world and I'm certainly not alone in that regard. Since I have not been the best advertiser of my own business I thought I should at least try it since it was so simple and built in. I suppose it just proves that the easy way is most often not the best way.

Today, it's back to the mask order and I need to make even more spiders and there are a couple of other things that need remaking. You can look forward to another boring post tomorrow then...sorry. Oh, but since yesterday's pleas for something interesting to happen brought so many sales, I think I would like to ask for that again today. May the universe rain down good and unexpected things today as well!

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