Early in July, I decided to embark on a crazy experiment to see if reneweing/listing hourly made any difference to my Etsy shop. After a few hiccups, I think I have some real results.
Note: As each shop is different and may have other factors affecting it (outside advertising), please take these experiements and results with a grain of salt
Here are some intro facts:
- I did a mix of renewing stil-current items, re-listing expired items and listing new items
- I did one item approximately every hour from 8am to midnight (EST - I'm in Toronto, Canada)
- I always ran the experiments for 2 days, and always on a Wednesday-Thursday
Experiment 1 - July 8-9
What happened: This was my starting, uncontrolled experiment as I did it on a whim and didn't really think it through, but it was fun. The numbers are skewed because I had also posted that I was doing this experiment on the Etsy forums and my blog so there was extra traffic generated by this (and also by some nice Etsians who Tweeted about my experiment). Anyhow, I relisted/renewed/listed one item approximately every hour
Results:
- 526 new item views
- 15 new shop hearts
- 1 sale during the 2-day period
Experiment 2 - July 22-23
What happened: I relisted/renewed/listed one item approximately every hour, but this time I didn't tell anyone on the Etsy forums, blogs, twitter or anywhere that I was doing it.
Results:
- 329 new item views
- 10 new shop hearts
Experiment 3 - July 29-30
What happened: I didn't relist/renew/list any items for the 2-day period. I also didn't mention anything in my blog or Etsy forums.
Results:
- 134 new item views
- 4 new shop hearts
So....what do you think? Obviously, there are a million other factors that can contribute to a shop's views and hearts, and this doesn't factor in the sales I got after each experiment since I can't say if they were a direct result or not, but in terms of exposure, it certainly looks like I drew more traffic into my shop during the days that I put more items into it.
Some of the comments I got when I first started doing this was that it was going to be expensive, but I don't think it is. I don't pay for advertising anywhere, so $0.20 a listing is really part of "doing business" and the cost never entered into my mind at all. My items don't cost very much so no one can say that I can afford it easily, but it's definitely part of my marketing strategy. All the other promotion I do is free, so this seems a small price to pay to bring more browsers (and potential shoppers) to pandacub.
Comments? Opinons?
8 comments:
Really interesting experiment! Thanks for sharing your results!
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing the results!
hmmm, interesting results
Thanks so much for sharing your results!
Interesting research!
Interesting experiment! You're right, it is a little hard to gauge the full story when you can't quantify all the other contributing factors.
Don't know if I could handle the renewing fee...maybe only if views and hearts = sales!
I did something similar a few weeks back but listed five items at a time, a couple times a day. My views jumped dramatically but it was hard to keep up with the effort and I hate the idea of my shop getting cluttered with repeat listings, so it takes some planning to do it without that clutter.
There are sellers on Etsy who re-list things multiple times throughout the day, have thousands of sales, and thousands of items in their shops. It is cheaper to re-list 20 items per day than it is to buy a showcase and it is much more effective for driving people to your shop.
I appreciate the effort here and the comments, b/c I am trying to decide myself if renewing is worthwhile.
Thanks!
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