100 listings is better and cheaper!! Search ads are a minimum of $5/week. Listings last for 4 months, so in 4 months 17 weeks pass, which means if you had search ads that whole time you'd spend $85. To spend that much in listings for that same 4 month period, you'd have to list 425 items. That is 425 titles that people can find you with and 5,525 tags for people to search for. Way better than having 8-10 listings featured at the top of the page for some obscure search term (you cannot pick your own terms, though they are similar to your own, often they end up being very general and your items aren't what people are looking for).
If you spread that many listings out over the 4 month period, you'd be listing 3-5 items a day, which would keep you very relevant in all the search terms for all your items and you would actually have more choices of things for people to buy which would make them more likely to actually buy. There's nothing worse than an almost empty shop. Imagine if you walked into a local store and they literally had 5 items on the shelf, even if it was a small shop, you'd probably do a quick eye sweep, assume they weren't actually open to the public yet, and walk out.
I have over 230 items now, and I am hoping to get to 300 in 2 months, and I will keep going from there. Yes some shops do really well with small amounts, but most of the big names that sell a lot have over a thousand items. Not saying you need that many, but there is something to having more items and if you can only spend your money in one spot, more items is probably a better choice then Etsy ads which truly are hit or miss for people.
Cheers!
Rachel
