Etsy Rolls Out Ad Groups, Tests Higher Budgets Tied To Sales Goals
Etsy has added groups to Etsy Ads, giving sellers a new way to organize advertised listings, while separately asking some sellers if they would be willing to let the platform unlock additional ad budget when revenue hits a set goal.
The new Ad Groups option allows sellers to organize advertised listings into up to 20 groups. Listings can move between groups at any time, but each can only belong to one group at once.
Etsy suggests creating groups around things like best-sellers or new listings and allows sellers to filter by group and view a summary of each group’s advertising performance. Performance totals can only be viewed for one group at a time, so sellers have to switch between groups to compare results.
Seller and YouTuber Pam Duthie highlighted the change in a recent video, saying groups could also be useful for separating seasonal products, different types of listings or items being used for specific advertising tests.
The other change is still much more preliminary. Etsy is showing some sellers a message asking if they would be interested in a feature to “Unlock extra ad budget - only when your sales hit your goal.”
According to the message, sellers would set a revenue goal and choose how much extra they were willing to spend once that goal was reached. Etsy says it would check performance daily, make the additional budget available on high-performing days and return to the normal daily limit when the goal was not met.
There does not appear to be an actual feature behind the prompt yet. Duthie said clicking “I’m interested” simply made the message disappear, while choosing “No thanks” brought up a survey asking why she wasn’t interested.
The idea could be useful on days when sellers are already seeing unusually strong demand and burn through their regular Etsy Ads budget early. But Etsy’s description leaves out a fairly important detail: whether the revenue goal would be based only on sales attributed to Etsy Ads or on total shop sales.
A product going viral on social media, an outside marketing campaign or a strong day of organic Etsy sales could potentially push a shop past the threshold even if advertising had little to do with the increase.
Duthie raised a similar concern in the video, pointing out that sellers can bring buyers to Etsy themselves only to have those shoppers encounter Etsy Ads for the seller’s own products as they continue browsing. A buyer who was already interested in that shop may end up clicking an ad for something they might have found organically anyway, turning seller-generated traffic into paid advertising spend.
If total shop revenue is what unlocks the extra budget, a spike in sales generated without Etsy Ads could also unlock additional advertising spend.
Etsy has been expanding the controls available inside its onsite advertising program, beta testing new Etsy Ads Strategies last year that let sellers optimize campaigns toward increasing orders, balancing orders and return, or increasing return, though sellers had to raise their daily budget to at least $25 to access the new options.
Liz Morton
This year, Etsy expanded those strategy controls with listing-level options, allowing qualifying sellers to choose Greater Visibility, Lower Click Cost or Efficient Spending for individual listings rather than applying one strategy across the entire campaign.
Etsy currently treats the daily budget as a hard spending limit, telling sellers ads stop running once that amount has been used for the day. That's different from the approach eBay has taken with some of its cost-per-click advertising products, where a “target daily budget” can be exceeded on individual days as spending is paced against a monthly limit.
Liz Morton
Based on the message being shown now, Etsy’s proposed system would instead require sellers to choose both the revenue goal and how much additional spending they were willing to authorize.
Etsy reported a 25.9% take rate in Q2 and said Etsy Ads was the primary driver of year-over-year Etsy marketplace take rate expansion, with machine learning improvements continuing to enhance ad relevance and support more effective seller budget pacing. Etsy Ads also led marketplace take rate expansion in Q1.
For now, Etsy has not said whether sales generated organically or through sellers’ own marketing could also trigger the extra ad budget. Etsy also does not appear to have publicly documented the test, and its current Help Center still describes a seller's daily budget as the maximum they will spend per day.
