How Etsy Is Leveraging Google Shopping

Going forward, Etsy marketplace sellers will be able to run Google Shopping campaigns, care of a new advertising dashboard the handcrafted marketplace is rolling out.

The new service is intended to give artisans an edge by giving them clear access to digital marketing services — without having to necessarily allocate a major digital marketing budget and staff commitment that usually goes along with ramping up services.

“Google Shopping ads will give our sellers a complementary way to target shoppers off of the Etsy marketplace at key moments when they are searching for items on Google,” wrote Maxwell Tang, a product manager on Etsy’s seller services team, in a blog post. Etsy already allowed sellers to market their shops via Promoted Listings, the paid search advertising through which marketplace sellers can pay to have their products appear high up in search results on Etsy.com and within the Etsy mobile app.

To launch a Google Shopping campaign, users need log into the Etsy dashboard, set a daily ad budget and a target country. Etsy has noted that these are early capabilities and that it has plans to make the targeting functions more wide ranging. For the time being, Etsy is encouraging sellers to focus their ad efforts on their “country of highest success,” a spokeswoman said.

Ads will appear in product search results in Google Shopping. Ads will also appear with product ads when relevant against organic search results and in the broader Google constellation of properties, including YouTube and Images.

“Ease of use is crucial. We know that many Etsy sellers who would like to expand their advertising efforts have found the process to be daunting,” Tang wrote. “In order to be successful advertisers, sellers would not only need to learn about the digital advertising ecosystem and understand how the various ad products work, they would also need to invest a huge amount of time into setting up a campaign. Setup requires creating accounts, product feeds, ad groups, product targets and conversion tracking. And that’s just the beginning: Once the campaigns are live, inventory needs to be refreshed continually, bids need to be updated and budgets optimized.”

Sellers pay for the ads on a cost-per-click basis, and Etsy is not taking a commission.