Advertising on Etsy Doesn’t Help Your Brand |
| Advertising on Etsy Doesn’t Help Your Brand Posted: 08 Oct 2011 04:16 PM PDT It’s a rare day for me to say anything negative about Etsy. I love Etsy and I love the creative culture it represents. But I also love good business. I love the entrepreneurial spirit in each one of you who sells your creativity online every day {or at least tries to}! So at the risk of sounding negative, I want to point out something that I totally didn’t think about in the early excitement of Etsy Search Ads. {mine did not perform well, btw}  Long time EverythingEtsy advertiser Wild Apple Designs makes great use of one of the world's biggest brands! Advertising on Etsy Doesn’t Help Your Brand If you’re paying for ad impressions, then you should be building your brand. In fact, brand building is the whole “value proposition” of most CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) ad networks. It’s that repeated exposure to a brand that burns an impression in the mind of viewers. Think about it. Can’t you think of brands you’ve seen over and over again even though you’ve never even clicked on their ads? What about right here on our blog? Some of our advertisers have been here for years and you may have seen them thousands of times on this site alone. That’s brand building. That’s why you have a pretty logo. That’s why you worked hard to create a great name. That’s part of why you blog, twitter, facebook, and pin stuff.  Fat Quarter Shop’s Ads have been seen more than two million times on this site alone.It’s more than just one of the things you do. It’s the KEY point of a long-term success online. Without a brand, you can forget ever having a shop on your own domain that actually gets sales. Without a brand, you can only maintain your business. You can’t build it into something magnificent. All Other Online Advertising Helps Your Brand I hate to say it, but I can’t think of another type of online ad that doesn’t give you branding even when you don’t get a click. Even Google AdWords ads, which you don’t even pay for unless you get a click, gives you free brand building every time that ad is read or even subsconciously scanned by human eyes. {In addition to giving you a little SEO boost you can bet.} Blog Ads, like the ones you see here on this site, are excellent for brand building because blogs have loyal readers. People come back over and over again and each time they do, they see your ad. Even if just a glance. They know your logo. They know your colors. You get a chance to stand out. A lot! If you had an ad on this site last month, it would have appeared about 340,000 times! Even our most expensive ad unit, the 200×200 at the top of the sidebar is $100 per month. So that’s a cost of less than .30 per 1000 impressions for a 200×200 banner ad! We should raise our prices but we don’t. You know why? We care about you and we can’t afford to lose advertisers. Which brings up my next point. Blog Ads Support Bloggers – Bloggers Support Advertisers Some of the absolute best brand building you can get is a feature on a well read blog. There are so many blogs out there that are run by individuals who are busting their tail to make a living from blogging. NOT an easy thing to do. When you buy an ad from them, you get real gratitude. You get individuals who are happy, like really happy when they get an email from PayPal saying you bought an ad. I know that there have been times when ad sales were literally an answered prayer. That kind of impact in a person’s life leads to gratitude. They truly and personally appreciate your business and are usually eager for a chance to tell their readers about you, your shop, and your brand. Usually with a huge picture and lots of smiley faces. Etsy Search Ads Should Be Totally Financially Driven This is very simple. If you are making worthwhile profit from the ads, do them. If not, don’t. When the Etsy Search Ads started, I eagerly ran ads in three of my shops. I spent $27.00 and I got one sale for $29.00 directly from the ads. The item I sold had a cost, of course, so I lost money. If I had been building my brand, maybe I would have kept it up. But I saw no benefit, so I cancelled my ads completely. I’ll stick with advertising that builds my brand. What about you? ~Kim
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