An experiment in advertising

Last week, I decided to do a little experiment with advertising on Etsy. For $5.00 a week you can have some or all of your items sponsored to come up as featured in searches.

It's still early days for my Etsy shop, so I thought I'd give it a go to see what happened. With Valentine's day coming up, I thought I'd promote my three Valentine related pieces. It doesn't seem like much, but it means that the maximum amount of impressions is shared by three items, rather than split between many. The ads have been running since last Friday, due to stop on the 10th. The stats so far aren't inspiring.

The ads so far have generated 1672 impressions - 1672 people have seen my items in a search, which they might not otherwise have seen. Has it led to added interest? Well, no.

So far I've had one view followed through from an ad. That's right, one. That works out as a success rate of 0.059%.

However, it must be said that I'm running this largely in isolation. I haven't joined any Etsy teams so far - there are some Real Life commitments I need to get out of the way first. My blog and Facebook page are brand new. I haven't joined any forums yet, and I've only just submitted pieces to the readers' galleries of UK jewellery magazines. I'm putting the  word out here and there, but I can hardly be said to be doing a major push on promotion. This is more in the nature of a control group - what kind of help does advertising bring without pushes from other sources?

As we've seen, not much. Does it mean I won't advertise again? Actually, I probably will. I've amended the advert to finish its run promoting everything in my shop - since there are $3.33 left of impressions to run in two days, I might as well. Whether it will change anything remains to be seen but at worst it'll gain me some visibility and I've had a couple of people add me to their circle this week.

And I'll probably promote again, if there are events coming up or if I've just put a load of products in my shop. $5.00 a time won't break the bank if I do it every so often, and you can stop the ad at any time. Plus it would be interesting to see if the stats change once I've started being a bit more proactive.

You never know, I might even sell some stuff!