etsy ads... are they worth it? (2 month results)

Recently I started focusing more on my Etsy shop. If you haven’t seen, I’ve had quite the struggle with Shopify this year and all it did was make me want to work on my Etsy shop, which was already doing better than my website without me touching it. I thought, well if I put a little effort into it maybe I can make this really take off and be a bigger income source.

So, I started making new products and uploading those. I started listing old SVG bundles, and other designs that I had been needing to upload. I started doing lots of market research, looking up tags to use, and watching lots of videos.

And one day, I decided why not try out doing ads for 2 months? What’s the worst that will happen, I break even on sales? So in May I turned on Etsy ads at $1 a day. I only had ads on for either brand new products, or products that I thought could use more sales – and most importantly I only had ads on for products over $3.

the results

If I take a look at the entire year though, I see an increase in views, orders, conversion, AND revenue for May and June. So while I lost money in just the ad listings, the orders I got from other products made up for it.

Throughout the two months, I was adding new listings and re-evaluating each product that ads were turned on for. If I saw a product was getting sales consistently without coming from an ad, I’d turn the ad off.

If I saw a product was getting a lot of clicks but not any orders, I’d also turn the ads off for that.

The ads themselves may not have been super effective, but it did give my shop a boost.

I do believe there were a few orders where I could see that someone came from an ad, and then purchased a few other items too which was cool to see.

Will I keep ads on forever, no probably not. But I am turning them back on for the holidays, to hopefully help get some momentum on listings. I will likely experiment with this again next year, maybe for longer, to see if it gets better results if you keep it up longer than 2 months.

If you have any experience with Etsy Ads, I’d love to know your results!