Earlier this week Etsy introduced new “browse pages” which
have taken the spot of the Discover pages & the listing categories on the
Etsy home page.
You can read the announcements here:
& there is a basic help file here on how it all works:
Despite the admin announcements, there are still a lot of
questions, & a lot of confused sellers. Here are some basic pointers that
address some of the most common concerns:
How are those Browse pages created? How do I show up there?
To fill the browsing pages, Etsy does many smaller
searches for related words, & then combines them & sorts the listings by
relevancy.
“our system looks across the entire marketplace for items
that are relevant to the themes of the particular browse section, and then it
displays those items sorted by relevancy.”
For example, for the browsing page Jewelry -> Earrings -> Eco
Friendly
Etsy does smaller searches including "eco friendly" & “upcycled”, then
combines the results. This is why the browsing pages looks very different than
if you searched “eco friendly earrings” – they contain different searches,
& the browse page does not need to match the exact phrase as the relevancy
search does. Some of the listings do not even have the words “eco friendly”
anywhere, but they do have words that fit the “eco friendly” theme.
Listing Categories & Browse Categories are different.
A lot of people are upset that the browsing pages do not
match the listing categories, but that should not affect your placement, since
the listing categories have little impact on where you show up in the browsing
pages. So I can list a new necklace in Geekery -> Science -> Jewelry
& it could show up on the browsing page for Jewelry -> Men -> Necklace,
since it has the words “men” & ”necklace” in the title. It doesn’t matter
that the categories we use to list new items do not include “men” under Jewelry;
the most important part is that you tag & title using the words Etsy is using
to search to fill that browsing page. (Unfortunately,
Etsy is not going to tell you what those words are, so you will need to look through
the pages & figure each one out for yourself. But if you tag & title
using a diversity of strong keywords, you should eventually show up in these
pages)
Playing favorites?
There have been a lot of complaints that too many
listings from the same shops are showing up, & Etsy appears to be looking
into that. They have also already made a few changes to which browse page some
items show up on. It will likely take a few weeks for this to be ironed out,
& expect it to change periodically, just as the relevancy search does.
Recency still matters & shoppers behaviour influences the ranking.
Just like the regular relevancy search on Etsy, ranking
on the browsing pages gives some weight to the most recently listed items, as
well as to “aggregate shopping and browsing behaviour”. This means that what
people do with your listing when they see it on Etsy matters to your ranking.
I hope this clears up some questions! Please ask more in the
comments if you have them.
Guest Post by Cindy, SASsy Team Co-Captain
