One of the things that can make TpT sellers crazy is trying to discern exactly how to get your products high up in the search results. We know the most important factor is to use the right keywords, but there is much more to TpT’s algorithm that they don’t tell us.
Lately, I’ve had some suspicions about the role that conversion rate plays in those results. To explain, I’m going to tell you a little story.
At the beginning of October, I had just finished a new Halloween product that I expected to do quite well, but I was having a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what keywords to focus on as it was a fairly unique activity. To get some help, I posted a link to it in a FB group for TpT sellers and asked for advice.
As would be expected, a bunch of sellers from that group clicked on it to take a look. (None of these people were likely to buy the product, because they were sellers looking at it for the purpose of providing some advice.)
The advice was great, and it really did help with my keyword strategy.
HOWEVER.
Doing this had an accidental result I wasn’t planning on or thinking about.
I just got close to 100 hits to that product, none of whom were interested in purchasing.
Now, in my TpT stats, this brand new product has over 100 views, most of whom were not customers. And it was also BURIED in the search results for the keyword I was focusing on.
It was as optimized as it could be… but still relatively buried.
Over the next two weeks, the product did start to sell a little bit – mostly through my own promotion and emails to my mailing list. And almost every time it sold, the conversion rate recovered a little bit more… and so did my ranking in the TpT search results.
To be clear, even though nothing else changed – I still didn’t have ANY reviews on the product, and I didn’t make any other changes to the listing. But the product’s rankings continued to increase as the conversion rate increased.
Why am I telling you this story?
For two reasons:
- We all need some feedback on our products from time to time. But if you want feedback on a listing, keep in mind that the additional traffic from those who are helping you out can dilute your conversion rate. If your someone who makes a lot of data-driven decisions, this can be a big issue.
- Diluted conversion rates COULD also have an impact on your rankings. Consider posting a screenshot or whatever other info people would need instead of sending them to the live listing to prevent the extra traffic from messing with your stats – especially on a product that is new.
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