This past week I’ve been managing an ad campaign for my wife’s Etsy shop. Even though her pillows generate a lot of action through our limited social network, they’ve only been getting a few hits a week of organic traffic. My goal with these campaigns was to learn more about our buying audience at large and better expose them to her new line of pillows.
Her pillows are geared towards the luxury market. Each has a linen-blend cover, down insert, and a 100% wool felt applique designed after an art deco room separator pulled from a long demolished hotel on Chicago’s Sheridan avenue. Not counting initial design time, these pillows took a painstaking 3-5 hours of cutting and sewing a piece.
We decided that the asking price for the pillows would be $84.95 — the high-end of pillows on Etsy. After browsing luxury home furnishing stores though, I think that these pillows could still be competitive around $125; however, we thought it more important to take this opportunity to get Amy’s store some online credibility and learn a little bit more about her potential buyers. Given that materials were around $65 per pillow, we wanted to keep marketing expenditures to a max of $10 a pillow, giving us a budget of some $60 total.
My first step was to setup an Etsy search campaign. Getting one going was surprisingly easy: I verified keywords generated from my ad copy, set a maximum weekly budget and selected a timeframe for my campaign. While the process was remarkably simple, I suspected it would also be remarkably ineffective (given that Etsy doesn’t expose its RTB mechanism or any of the ad display options).
By the end of the week my suspicions were confirmed. The campaign only achieved a CTR (click-through rate) of 0.33% and no sales; however, I did learn some interesting things about the ad:
- Based on CTR, her most popular pillow was the 20” fern green.
- Based on keyword hits, her viewers are seeking products that had felt appliques in interesting patterns and had to do with major metropolitan cities (like Chicago and London).
- Geographically, most of the views came from Illinois or California.
- Through Etsy’s bidding mechanism, the ad ran at a CPM (cost-per-thousand) of $0.59.
The next step is for me to run a few Facebook campaigns to help me better discover Amy’s target audience. Given the information bought from Etsy (for a wee $3.53), I’ve decided to create six ad campaigns both running against some of the info gathered. Each ad:
- Includes a picture of her popular 20” fern pillow,
- Is demographically targeted at men/women in California and Illinois,
- And is psychographically targeted at people interested in architecture, DIY and interior design.
Each of the ads has copy that focuses on a different aspect of the pillow: feel, quality of manufacture, and Chicago backstory. All three of these bylines achieved hits on the the original Etsy ad and I wanted to see which was the most compelling. Since I know little about Facebook’s optimization mechanism (and how this might affect the campaign) I also setup the ads two different ways: one for maximum exposure (with a $0.59 CPM) and one for click-through (with a $0.19 CPC). I’m not entirely sure if this CPC value is competitive, as Facebook recommends a cost-per-click in the $0.30 range; but, this should be a good starting point.
In the next week I should be able to start to play around with the demographics that I casually assumed when creating this new round of ads and post back on how they affected overall conversion. Until then, take a look at the items in her Etsy store at http://madebymeter.etsy.com.
