Promoted Listings: Improve your Click Ratio

Etsy's promoted listings provide benefits beyond the ads. The extra statistical data provided can be a powerful tool to improve your listings. Do not be intimidated. It is not difficult.

What is your overall click ratio?

Pull up your promoted listings dashboard. Select a time period longer than a week. Here is a view of my stats:

133810/968=138

Compare your impression with your clicks. That is your overall click ratio. The lower that is the better.

Mine as shown was 138. That means that for every 138 times someone was presented with one of my items, they clicked on it once to view the item.

Is this good or bad? I don't know. However, I can track this number over time.  I will take steps to reduce it.

Individual listings click ratio

Now that I have a number, I can use that as a baseline. Open your ad states and settings table. Select the Impressions column and click it. That will put this column into order from most to least. (If that did not happen, try clicking it again to reverse it and once more to order it.)

Now that you have your very most impressions, compare that number against the number of clicks for each advertised item going down the chart. For starters, just note how widely click rates vary. Some items are much better than others. Here are mine visible from the above chart:

1326 impressions, 12 clicks

1095 impressions, 16 clicks

931 impressions, 8 clicks

868 impressions, 10 clicks

861 impressions, 1 click

Does one of these ratios stick out to you? Yes, the last one. It was visible 861 times with only one click. It is way higher than my shop average of 138. Why is that?

Investigating listing issues

Some detective work is necessary. But you will be rewarded if you can determine what is going on. Here are some questions to ask about the listing:

1. Is the first photo of high quality? The first photo needs to grab peoples' attention. 

2. Does it have a powerful title? Be sure it has keywords and phrases that buyers will use when searching. Keep the best search terms at the beginning of the listing to maximize their importance in search.

3. Are you making the most of your tags? Use all 13 tag slots. Employ a blend of multiple-word phrases repeated from your title and description. Use terms that buyers will use to search for this item.

4. Is there market demand for the item? Are similar items selling online?

5. How is your pricing compared to similar available items?

6. Is your item in the best category?

Actions to take

After you have analyzed your listing in view of the above six points, take action. Retake photos. Tweak titles and tags. Adjust the price and category. Perhaps yard sale the item and move on.

In my example item the issue was tags; I had published the item without changing the tags. That is a serious mistake which I have fixed. However, I only found it after doing a statistical analysis using the data obtained from Promoted Listings.

Here is another example of why an item has a low click rate. Take a look at the data from this listing:

The top performing search term for this listing is "hall tree." These hooks can be used for a hall tree. This is not a hall tree, but rather just the vintage hooks for one.

I checked to make sure my item is in the fixtures category and not furniture. That's good.

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the tag stays. It will drag down my overall click rate. I know why and am good with it the way it is.

Clicks per order

In a recent time period I had 14 orders and 1229 clicks. When you do the math, 1229 clicks/14 orders = 88 clicks/order. That is another ratio to track over time. I don't have enough data to reach any conclusions yet.

My non-ad rate was 134 clicks/order for the same time period. Now that I have baselines, my next goal is to improve the ratios.

Low overall impressions

If an item gets ridiculously low impressions, the issue could be SEO. This is often the case if an item gets almost all of its clicks from ads hardly any from regular searches.

Etsy uses the same relevancy information for ads that it does to determine how your items show up in general in searches. In that case it is necessary to tweak titles and tags.

More information from Etsy.
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What is your click ratio? How many clicks per order does your shop average? How can you improve your numbers?

Thanks for joining me in looking at the extra statistical data you receive as a part of Etsy's Promoted Listings!