Learn how to use the Marketplace Optimization Report to track your promotion efforts

a screenshot showing the movement in position of marketplace products tracked over a number of saved reports
generated csv file loaded into a spreadsheet and showing movement in marketplace positions over a number of saved reports (no promoting done)

Note that the dates in the report above are in UK dd/mm/yyyy format.

How effective are your promotion efforts for your Zazzle products? Now you can find out, even if they don’t result in sales right away.

Here’s a vid to show you how

Summary

  • Use a report search that gets the products you’re going to promote
  • Save the report as a baseline (no need to optimize anything)
  • Do your promoting
  • Every two or three days re-run and save the report
  • Once you have 3 or more saved reports, generate a full search history csv using the button provided
  • Download the csv (comma separated values) file that gets created
  • Load it into your favourite spreadsheet program

This does rely on Zazzle reindexing things, so it may take a while for results to come through.

Observations from the position history tracking spreadsheet in the screenshot above

Without doing any promoting that attracts views(?) or sales, products slowly lose position in the marketplace.

It’s not proved conclusively yet whether views on their own will improve marketplace position, or at least slow down a product’s loss of position. That proof will be availbale in a few days and this article will be updated then.

From the screenshot at the top:

Row 5 shows a product that sold during the period covered by the report (from backend stats, sold on April 3rd)

Row 6 was optimized on Apr 12th and shows a dramatic improvement in marketplace position.

Those are the only two that show any improvement in marketplace position, all others have dropped, some a lot, some not so much.

Products are like helium balloons…

Products in the marketplace are like perfectly-weighted-so-they-hover helium balloons. Unfortunately they all have a slow leak. Over time they will sink and keep sinking 🙁

BUT, if they make a sale, it’s like getting a boost of helium into them – they will rise. It’s likely that a view will also give a boost of helium but much smaller – enough to slow their sinking.

Without getting any helium boosts, they will shrink and shrink and sink and sink, eventually to disappear from view. When that’s gone on long enough, Zazzle will hide them from the public entirely and mark them as needing optimization.