Enhancement Adverts - Do They Work?

[TaraSimone Sixpence]

I am interested in any and all comments from Merchants or Purchasers who have had experience with enhancement & advertising in MP. Do they work? Did you find sales increased on a statistical basis? Do you use them constantly or only once every so often or not at all? Any comments on this subject would be welcome. Thank you.

[Ry0ta Exonar]

Maybe that depends on which sector you are in and where you put the enhancements.

From what  i read on the forum, homepage featured one doesn't seem to have much effect in general.

Currently I have 5 enhancements running on category landing pages and they get 140 - 160 average impressions, 1 - 3 click-throughs a day. I have no idea if these figures are great or not, but apparently they don't look like they have much effect on sales. Anyways I use them constantly mainly to get exposure.

[Ziggy21 Slade]

I run quite a few enhancements, about 25 this month, but I will reduce this to about 15 after christmas. they defintely make a difference for me, although I think some products do better on the Homepage and others are better on the category landing page, I haven't figured out a pattern to this, it's probably most heavily affected by the product's main image. I have also had a good hit rate occassionaly from the Checkout Receipt page.

No doubt you will see plenty of posts here from people who say that enhancements don't work, my guess is that many of these people will have never run enhancements or will have only run one for a small amount of time. In my experience the results are not always instant, and often seem to affect other products as well as the one being advertised.

[TaraSimone Sixpence]

I am getting the strong feeling that a lot of people work on "gut" here and not stats. For instance Ziggy, how do you know if you took down your enahancements that your sales would go down? Click-Thru from an advert is not a sale as we all know. The problem with the system, is there is obviously no way to tell if it works like Google Ads. People may click thru, or they may be on search or just happen to see your product. The notation about "exposure" and "branding" makes a lot more sense to me as that seems to be the most one can hope from an enhancement. 

I agree, that instant results are for dreams, and one should never hope for instant results. The clothing and texture sector though is replete with enhancements, and in the Fashion Forum where I also posted, those who answered said they rarely look at the adverts, and mostly do not pay attention to them. Now this is a very small number of people who answered I grant you, but I find the inablity to judge based on stats, and pure stats, very frustrating. 

Indeed there is such a wide variance of people who will and will not even buy at the MP, or like me, go to the MP then usually TP to the in-world store. And of course there is no way to track that. 25 enhancements is expensive, no matter how one looks at it, so I assume the MP in your sector is much different than in the clothing sector. 

But I thank you for your honest and straightforward answer, just not sure how to judge the final conclusion.

[Ziggy21 Slade]

Yeah, I have to admit - gut feeling is definitely a large part of it, as you say it's difficult to accurately track the results, although until Google came along all advertising was like this, you stuck your ad in the local paper or wherever and hoped the phone rang more times. Having said that I do vary the products I enhance from time to time and the places the enhancements run and I do see fluctuations in sales which seem to relate to this.

IMHO anyone who says they dont look at adverts, or does't pay attention to them, is simply mistaken. For a start the Marketplace is a collection of 1.7 million adverts, so just by using it you are being advertised to . If a user goes to the homepage and sees a homepage enhanced item that they like the look of they will check it out and may well buy it, I find it very difficult to believe that they are never ever at least curious about the odd item they spot on the homepage. Similarly with category landing pages, we would have to assume that the user drills down to the required category and then, unlike ever other person on the planet, starts reading the page from the bottom or flicks forward several pages in order to avoid anything that has been enhanced. Granted it may well be that each user is not checking out enhanced items on every visit, but they don't need to because there are tens of thousands of users all of  whom ARE going to be influenced   at one time or another.

Although you posted in the Fashion Forum, which is not just creators, I would expect there to be quite a lot of creators reading and responding there, which begs the question why aren't they checking out those adverts? and how do they plan to compete if they don't know what the competition is up to. 

 

[Claireschen Hesten]

i'm not really convinced by listing enhancements i have tried them in the past when i've released a new product but only did a single week per product i used the L$0 check out enhancements as they were the cheapest i found in the week i could get 2000 plus impressions and only 1 click through 2 if i included my own after re-freshing the L$0 checkout page enough times after buying a freebie to find my enhancement. i can't really say i noticed increased sales because of the enhancement but it did provide my brand extra exposure and on using a listing enhancement for just a single week i think paying out L$300 on the cheapest enhancement is worth a punt for a new product

[Sybil Hallison]

Speaking as a customer, I often click on ads in homepage that just catch my eye,but  I never buy any of the products immediately.

My way of thinking is this:

I go to marketplace because I wanted to find something specific, an outfit for an event, shoes to match my outfit, a holiday costume, a decoration for my home etc. So homepage is the first page I land in, if any of the 3 ads that are being shown at the moment catches my eye (you need a first good impression here), I open the product in another tab and keep looking for the product I originally intended to.

Now while I keep shopping I take a closer look to  the advertised product. It may be a disappointment, so I close the tab and continue. BUT its very common to say "Hey, thats very good! how come I ve never seen that creator before, lets visit store to see more". So if I have a good impression of the store in total I sometimes make a favorite out of it, or just note (in my memory) the creator. So the next time I m looking for that kind of stuff, I know there is a store for that. In one word, exposure.

But I never get to see the ads in Apparel section, or Apparel->Women's etc. I spent more time in more specific sections, for example Avatar Accessories->Jewelry and Watches.

I keep all the above in mind when it comes to marketing my own store too.