hey what's up guys welcome back to
another video in my etsy print on demand
series for 2021 today we're looking at
etsy off-site ads which i'm just going
to say up front i am not a fan of i'm
going to tell you a story
of how etsy wasted man it was
at least 300 of my money i don't
remember how much it actually
ended up being but they wasted at least
300 of like my money my money
you know what i mean it's it's one thing
to think like oh he runs a business just
a business is money
but like i'm the only employee in my
business so it was like they dipped
their hands into my pocket took some of
my money
when they rolled out the off-site ads
and i'm gonna tell you everything you
need to know about it and i'm gonna give
you my recommendation about advertising
on etsy
in this video so let's get started
quick reminder check out my weekly print
on demand giveaway it's completely free
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link in the description to enter also in
the description you'll find a link to my
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mini course completely free and my print
on demand facebook community
also if you missed it part nine of the
video series showed you how to run a
sale on etsy i do recommend doing this
as it'll increase your click-through
rate and your conversion rate
i'll put a link to it in the youtube
cards right here in case you want to go
check that out
all right so we are going to look again
into etsy ads now
when you just launch your etsy shop they
hit you with this prompt
so that they can kind of teach you a
little bit about it and walk you through
setting it up
in about three or four clicks so we went
ahead and we set this up on our new etsy
shop really it's not my shop but
uh i was there when it happened and i
try to take screenshots of everything so
that i can do these videos
uh so i can show exactly how it works
but they say reach more buyers with etsy
ads now reaching more buyers is great
because of course you need to be
out there in front of buyers in order to
get customers right if nobody knows what
you're selling exists
you're going to make zero sales that's
not news to anybody but i just want to
say
advertising is typically a good thing as
long as you can
maintain it at a at a profitable level
and i'm going to elaborate on that
in the etsy scope in a second so go
ahead this is the first thing you see
you click get started
they say you're in control of your
growth
by the way you're not in control of your
growth because etsy does not really
allow you to control the main mechanisms
for operating ads at a profitable level
again i will elaborate on that in a
second but they say increase visits
expand your reach
of course both of those are true when it
comes to advertising
etsy makes it easy to start advertising
you can get started for at least
for just one dollar a day okay perfect
hit get started or start your campaign
and then here you see start etsy ads in
just a few steps etsy ads put your items
higher up in etsy search of course
you're buying your way there
and other high traffic placements on
etsy so you can reach millions of
interested buyers
first tell us your goals so i mean i
don't think this actually factors into
anything
but you can check reach new buyers bring
more traffic to my shop promote new
products drive more sales
sure that sounds good then you click
next set your budget
now you can set your budget for as low
as one dollar i've had people speculate
that if you set it to four dollars or
lower
that it did a better job the algorithm
of
optimizing the ad spend to basically not
just completely waste all your money as
quickly as possible because keep in mind
when i say waste
your money and my money what is that
really translating to that's translating
to
etsy getting paid per click which on the
internet what is a click
it's nothing but they're monetizing
potential customers clicks
at our expense and this is what really
gets me
here you're able to set a budget you
know what you're not able to do that you
used to be able to do
is set a bid max bid
per click you used to be able to do that
on etsy then they removed our ability to
do that because people like me
were bidding less than 10 cents and able
to advertise
at a profit and as soon as they removed
it
we basically got owned i'm going to tell
you i'm going to show you exactly what
happened to me actually
i don't like to just tell stories if i
can find screenshots that kind of
reiterate exactly what happened so i
found some screenshots give me a second
uh but here real quick it says we use
your daily budget to promote your
listings and deliver the best results
for your ad spend
set a budget between one dollar and 25
oh that's interesting i didn't realize
they kept it at 25 that would have been
useful
i used to have my budget at 65 a day
and uh they auto opted me into this i
will show you in a second
um all right keep in mind let's just
keep reading keep in mind a higher
budget means we can show your ads more
often in high visibility places on
etsy to drive the best results consider
keeping your budget the same for the
first
30 days by the way when you renew
listings which you can renew listings
early
it also increases your placement so you
can kind of think to yourself
like well if advertising doesn't give me
the ability to
to bid per click and etsy might charge
me 75 cents on a click
that used to cost me seven cents which
may sound ridiculous but i promise you
that stuff happened
you can just choose to like early renew
your products which also boosts your
organic rank so but it won't boost it
into the the promoted listings
first row and that's really where you
want to be all right so i set one dollar
and it says
success you're advertising zero listings
with a budget of one dollar a day so i
guess i did this like right after
opening the shop before we had any
listings set up
right after that though i ended up
disabling it because i did not want to
pay etsy a dime for advertising if i
didn't have to but
also i will elaborate on that in a
second as well so stick with me
so you can go to where is it other
options right there you see how it says
manage your budget
manage advertised listings other options
it's got a little carrot
click the little carrot it will expand
it'll say show graphs
share feedback you know if you want to
share feedback and be like let us
control our bids that would be great but
i doubt etsy listens
and uh you can at the bottom there it
says turn off ads so i went ahead and i
did that and they say you're no longer
advertising you can restart at any time
take a quick survey to help us improve
the ads again i doubt anybody's on the
receiving end of this though just
i sound like i'm being pessimistic but
like etsy has a track record all right
reach out to etsy support for anything
and see how long it takes you them to
respond
see what happens i mean there's a bunch
i don't want to go down this rabbit hole
in this video but yeah they're not the
best at responding
their motto is keeping commerce human
yet at the same time they're like
downsizing their staff and trying to
automate as much as possible
typically at the seller's expense so
that's just a quick uh
insight into my thoughts as far as like
etsy caring about their sellers
all right so it says your it says you're
missing out you can restart anytime okay
they put a big button on this page
after you cancel your advertising
campaign that says restart your campaign
so if you want to restart it it's one
click away
and they do that intentionally because
it's obviously in their best interest
for us to be advertising because they're
monetizing clicks which cost them
nothing
all right so now let's shift gears from
etsy ads to etsy off-site
ads now off-site ads are a little bit
different because you're auto-opted into
off-site ads and if
an off-site ad results in a sale you'll
get billed otherwise you don't get
billed
okay so here on our dashboard we saw
see traffic and sales driven by off-site
ads which is like oh that's interesting
because we're not even opted in
of course we didn't know we were it was
automatic and here underneath that it
says we're promoting your items on high
traffic sites including google instagram
facebook pinterest and bing to drive new
buyers straight to your shop
it's risk-free advertising we pay the
upfront cost to promote your items you
only pay when you make a sale so if you
think about this this is like etsy
bringing more people to their platform
and us kind of like
profit sharing with them because if it
doesn't result in a sale they still
brought somebody to etsy
and if it does hey we foot the bill
basically
so you can click see more info on your
off-site ads again we didn't even know
and then we saw this and we're like oh i
guess we're
paying for off-site ads so this is early
on in our shop
but it says shoppers clicked on your
offsite ads three times and placed one
order okay so etsy advertises your items
on high traffic sites we just saw that
you only pay when you make a sale from
these ads a 15
advertising fee which i believe ends up
being 15 percent of the sale cost
not 15 of what the click actually cost
them
uh to the ad network that they were
paying probably the google ad network or
something
so here you see offsite ads brought you
28.93
in sales because we made one sale that
totaled that much and then we paid etsy
four dollars and 34 cents out of our
profit margin
for that sale um the sale is right
behind me i'm actually blocking the um
the sale value but it's like it's right
underneath here be
directly behind me basically i can
actually i can hide myself if you want
to see
so there you go in the the bottom right
corner there sale value 28.93
add fee 434. then you see on the left
hand side there
something that was clicked but did not
generate a sale
so just so you guys know and let me tell
you a quick story about something super
messed up that etsy did to me that i
alluded to
a second ago so just so you guys know
all sellers are automatically enrolled
in offsite ads well that's not a big
problem it's not really the offsite ads
that screwed me over it was actually the
other ads but i just want to show you
this really quickly
so some sellers are able to opt out of
the program others are required to
participate based on the following
criteria
if your shop made ten thousand us
dollars or more in total sales
in any consecutive 365 day period after
february 20th 2019
you'll be required to participate and 10
000 in revenue is like not that much
guys
i know it seems like oh i won't get
there but like seriously everybody
hopefully will get there
and especially in a year you know um so
anyways just expect to be auto opted in
i wouldn't fight this at least they only
bill you when it results in a sale just
wanted to make that clear
all right etsy ads now here's the thing
they also rolled everybody from the old
etsy ads
which by the way functions the way
normal ad networks work
where you opt into advertising and you
structure
a maximum bid per click
right that's normal that's what you do
on amazon it's what you do on google
on ebay you kind of bid but ebay is cool
because ebay only makes you pay if it
results in a sale
so whereas here unlike with etsy offsite
ads you pay when it's a sale
with etsy ads normal etsy ads
you pay per click okay and they don't
let you set your bid so it's really
predatory in my opinion
here's how they screwed me over so let
me show you the next slide real quick so
here it says for each
etsy ad by the way i'll link to this in
the description if you want to read this
whole page on
etsy ads and whatnot it says for each
etsy ad etsy's bid management system
will automatically determine your bid
okay now that's not how it was
previously but then all of a sudden
they just auto opted you in to the new
system
where before i could say okay i'm gonna
have a budget of 65
a day for advertising but all of my bids
were capped at like under 10 cents
so if i'm able to spend 65 a day at low
price
per click perfect i'm going to be
profitable then all of a sudden
overnight
all of my bids are uncapped and if i was
paying like seven cents per
click in some cases i was paying 50
cents 60 cents even as high as like 70
cents
and by the way their reporting system
the ui they had was really awful
on a side note so it's really hard to
like tell per listing if you had a lot
of products advertised
like i did so anyways long story short
the only reason i even caught it
as early as i did is because somebody
messaged me on facebook and they're like
what are you doing about the new etsy
ads i was like
oh did that go live he's like yeah so
they got me for a couple hundred bucks
because i didn't even know
um and they didn't they didn't like
alert us they didn't send an email
saying hey this just went live
check your ads because if they did that
they probably would have made a lot less
money
because people like me would have
immediately opted out of all advertising
since if you can't control your bids
it can be very hard to operate at a
profit so anyways guys just wanted to
like
let you know that that did happen and
now it's just that just is what it is
you know there's no illusion of
being able to set bids just know that
that did used to exist and
etsy was a little bit predatory when
they turned it off again i'll put this
link
in the description so you can read their
advertising resource on etsy.com
all right that's it for this video guys
make sure you subscribe so that you
catch
the next one in the series part 11. i'm
going to show you how to use coupons
so that's going to be a good one a short
one but something that you can leverage
to implement some pretty advanced
strategies in your shop
thanks for watching this video till the
end guys drop me a like if you haven't
already
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there's a link in the description if you
have any questions you can email me or
message me on like facebook
or drop me a comment here alright guys
thank you again for watching and i will
see you at the next one
[Music]
you