A little over a year ago, Etsy launched search ads. This week, the company announced some new features to the offering, and dropped some numbers about the product.
Over the past year, the company says, Etsy’s search ads have generated $12 million in sales and 3.6 million “favorites” for 145,000 sellers who have used them to advertise their products.
As far as the new stuff, Etsy has added holiday keywords, flexible timing, support for all English-language listings, and real-time setup and management.
“We periodically add and remove keywords from the Search Ads system depending on whether people are searching for them,” Etsy says in a blog post. “We’re starting to see a lot of traffic around Halloween and holiday-related searches, so we’ve added some new keywords to the mix…if you have holiday inventory in your shop, go to the Search Ads console to start running holiday Search Ads or to add keywords to your existing ads!”
“Sellers will now also be able to start and end ads at any time without setting a duration or the auto renew feature,” Etsy says. “You will simply select a weekly budget, which we will stick to, and we’ll keep promoting your items until you come back and turn them off. We will send you a weekly email with performance stats and a reminder that your ads are still running.”
Etsy has expanded the number of shops that can use the ads, and has removed the restriction on the shop’s primary language. Staring on October 9th, all listings in English (even if this isn’t the seller’s primary language) are eligible for search ads. Etsy says this will make the ads available to thousands of more sellers.
Finally, changes to ads don’t go into effect until the next day at this time, but next week, that will change, and set-up and modification will be “almost instantaneous” according to the company.