Etsy Insights

I spoke a little about Etsy Insights in my last post. Insights is a tool to help you to test interest in products old and new, by showing you the keywords people are typing into the Etsy Marketplace search. This in turn suggests the keywords you might use to attract visitors to your product page.

As a free subscriber you're limited to 15 searches, each of which renew 7 days after you used them. A search reveals how many people used that term to search Etsy in the last 7 days, and how many results they got. You can save a search, but - ambush! - revisiting that saved search counts as one of your 15.

To avoid the restriction on revisiting my old searches, I started a spreadsheet. I read that a good ratio of 'search/search results' was at least 100 searches to 10k results or less. So I logged my Etsy insights, colour coding them green (good), black (ok) and red (poor).

I struck out completely with a few terms, zero for both searches and results; but Insights shows you some other terms beneath your search stats which are sometimes useful. There are multiple pages of terms but - ambush! - try to access page two Free Subscriber, and you're invited to pay for the privilege. I call these bonus terms "other" rather than "related" because it seems that obviously related terms aren't served up, at least not on Page 1. For example, you might try "football player gift", but the similar "gifts for football players" isn't offered up, and its results might be quite different.

For the first ten weeks I maintained my spreadsheet and tried to maximise my searches, using the 15 as soon as they renewed. A few weeks in - ambush! - your saved searches are limited in number, you must delete some to make space. I'm glad I started that spreadsheet.

Things didn't go well; views were barely a trickle, my promotion skills are poor, and my keywords... well more on that in a second. Demoralised, I skulked back to Zazzle to try and alter my fortunes there.

I returned to Etsy today to find that they've updated Insights with colour coded ratings, rather like my spreadsheet. Revelation: it appears that there's no golden ratio of searches to results. Apparently a search term can yield tens of thousands of results, but still rate "typical" for conversion to sales.

I burned through my 15 searches trying out the new improved Insights, and then thought about my old data, which might be wrongly categorised; good keywords actually bad and vice versa. I clicked on an old saved search to see how Etsy rates those terms - ambush! - of course, I'd used my 15 searches, access denied.

Please stop ambushing me, Etsy. I've paid to join. I've paid to list products. I've paid for samples. If I could sell some mugs, we'd both benefit, and maybe then I could afford to subscribe.