04 Apr Ravelry Advertising Update
It has been a while since we last featured Ravelry Advertising as a way to market your creative business and there have been several new features added to their menu of options. Let’s take a look at a few of the most recent changes.
Creative Comparison
Ravelry now includes a great snapshot of how your ads perform in any given month. The Creative Comparison section, located on your Active and Completed ad pages, provides you with a new dashboard filled with statistics on how well your ads are performing. Of note are two new easily visible statistics at your fingertips: click-through rate and age of creative.
Ravelry previously provided information to you about how many impressions and clicks you received so you could calculate your click-through rate, but this new dashboard lets you know at a quick glance how well your ads are performing. This is particularly useful if you’re interested in testing new ads to see which one captures the most attention. If you provide more than one ad image in any given month (A/B/etc.), you can make immediate and future decisions based on how well each of those ads performs. As you can see from the image included above, we have a clear winner among the three ads we ran in December of 2017.
The second new feature is the age of creative statistic which will tell you how long it has been since you uploaded your image. This, in combination with your click-through rate, can enable you to make the best decisions about when to refresh your ad content.
New Featured Categories
Ravelry has recently added some new featured categories to its advertising options. Previously you could purchase Featured Knitting Pattern, Featured Yarn, and Featured Crochet Pattern slots. Ravelry has now added Featured Source and Featured Product to the mix.
Featured Source enables you to promote a source rather than a specific pattern, allowing you to reach a wider audience on Ravelry’s Pattern page while tapping into the potential to allocate marketing costs across a variety of categories within the source (for example, allocating marketing costs against all patterns in an issue or all issues of a publication).
Featured Product now gives makers of fiber-related products a prominent place to advertise their products, featured on Ravelry’s Yarn page. Previously makers of yarn, fiber and pattern adjacent products could only advertise in Notebook ads or in Forum Banners or individual Forums. This category now allows makers of other related products to reach a wider audience on a highly viewed page.
The costs for both the Featured Source and Featured Product placements are competitive with the previously offered Featured categories.
Ad Space Reservation and Cost
Previously, advertising spots on Ravelry were usually snapped up within seconds of being released, making it imperative to watch the release calendar closely. As more opportunities to advertise on Ravelry become available, it appears that you have a bit more time to reserve ad space these days, particularly for the slightly higher-cost Featured categories.
Ravelry has also begun offering pro-rated advertising spots, meaning if you decide to start running an ad mid-month (for example, let’s say you pick up an unused Featured Knitting Pattern ad spot that comes available after the first or 16th of the month), you will no longer be charged for days that your ad doesn’t run.
In any case, if you wish to start using Ravelry advertising for your products, you should check out the Ravelry Ad Brochure which includes information, instructions, FAQs, and the entire 2018 advertising calendar.
If you have additional questions or are interested in working with us to create more compelling ad campaigns using Ravelry Ads, please contact Leanne@stitchcraftmarketing.com to learn how we can help you grow your craft business.
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