Is ETSY offering my services in ads with searches like "prostitution" because I'm a woman?

[PsychicLeticiaMedium]

Last September 8th I saw that the ROI of my ads went from 500% to 1% without any explanation.

After verifying the search terms in which my services were offered, I was able to verify that ETSY was offering my services to searches related to pornography and prostitution.

I immediately contacted ETSY's first level support, who gave me a dumb textbook answer: check the title, description, and tags of your listing because after checking your listing, the description, tags, and title are related to those search terms.

I had to copy the title, description, and tags to tech support, so they could tell me what correlation there is between my listing and those search terms.

Obviously they found no correlation and told me they were going to escalate the case.

A few weeks later I received an email advising me to remove the tag “love” since that word could induce the AI system to believe that I was offering sexual and pornographic services. I wonder if it's that bad the ad system.

I removed the tag “love” with no result. Everything remained the same. Since day 8th September when I asked ETSY, in each of the emails and chat conversations, not to offer my services in anything related to adult, sexual, pornographic or prostitution content. I have found any solution.

Their response was that they would look into the case. I asked them what solution I had to avoid this problem. They told me to go one by one in those search terms and deactivate them manually.

My ad before September 8th had 40 search terms related to my niche market. From September 8th onwards, more than 3000 sexual search terms appeared, and I had to deactivate them one by one. Once all of them were deactivated, which took me hours and I could not focus on my business, I saw that every day more than 100 new search terms related to sex, pornography, and prostitution appeared.

Every day I had to spend more than an hour to search among the 3000 terms, new terms that were draining my budget.

Until two weeks ago, I saw that ETSY no longer allows to disable search terms when there are more than 1000 search terms for a listing.

With no browser you can do it.

The only logical explanation about this to happen is that in my listings my picture appears as a woman doing her psychic and spiritual work. And that has induced the listing system to offer me in pornographic services and prostitution. Which other explanation exists?

After more than 2 months waiting for a solution, the current situation is:

1) for two months hundreds of dollars have been misspent in clicks on my ads that have been offered to people looking for pornography and prostitution services.

2) The SEO of my listings has been affected by this.

3) Etsy not only has not offered me a solution but additionally another “bug” has appeared in the system that does not allow deactivating the search terms when they exceed 1000.

It is not only the unnecessary damage to my store and services, but the moral and psychological damage of every day to be looking for active search terms related to perversions and pornography of this type:
“spread p*ssy”
"c*mshot"
“prostitute”
"p*ssey spreader"
"bl*wjobs"
"sex with sister
"p*ssey penetrated"
and so on, I have 3000 search terms in English, Spanish, German and some other languages related to this that I had to check manually every day.

If I look at ETSY's adult content policy, it states:
"Pornography of any sort is prohibited on Etsy, whereas mature content is restricted. Although pornography can be difficult to define, an item generally qualifies as pornography when it contains printed or visual material that explicitly describes or displays sex acts, sex organs, or other erotic behavior for the purpose of sexual arousal or stimulation."

These search terms in which ETSY offers my services, are they cataloged as prohibited ?, are they pornography?, are they not related to sexual acts?, are they not related to sexual organs?

The moral damage to my family, that in my children's school they are told to my kids that their mother appears in ETSY when someone is looking for sex.

I think a simple solution to the ads on ETSY is to have a button where you can select whether you want the ads to appear in adult content searches or not.

After two months I think enough has happened for ETSY to give a definitive solution to this problem and stop making money in clicks from my services offered in pornography and prostitution searches.

This forum is for technical issues. Can you please take good care of this and provide me a solution ?

[CraftyCornishMaids]

This forum is for other sellers to help, if we can, it's not an etsy technical help forum,
tho sometimes moderators do step in and log a call, but it won't be any different from you logging a call yourself.

only etsy can change what you are seeing, we can't .... you need to log a call through - help - contact us

....

from a search/etsy perspective...

The SEO is AI, it has learnt that people click on your things, when certain search terms are used, so it will continue to show them, even if you removed the words that triggered it in the first place.

not sure how etsy can get AI to "unlearn" or get the AI to "relearn"

The only way would probably be to create a new listing from scratch, with no copying, and set it up from new.

If you are spending a lot of money on etsy ads for items that are not being purchased, I would also remove them from etsy ads

............................

when I type "love" into your search shop, 30 items come up, so you have not removed the word 
I also checked 4 listings, it was in tags for all 4

......

In your main shop banner, you have a card with a naked man and woman on it

In your pictures, there are cards with naked men and women on them

etsy search includes pictures, so I would re-do those

[PsychicLeticiaMedium]

Thank you for your answer.

I wanted to know if there are other sellers who also have similar problems to mine with search terms. And how they managed with technical support.

I don't know if I suffered an external bot attack.

What kind of solution or workaround has Etsy offered to other sellers with cases similar to mine?

And if I am the only seller who cannot disable the search terms when they exceed 1000 terms.

[PillowDetails]

It's a tarot card.  The Seller is not to blame for those search terms she's seeing.

[CraftyCornishMaids]

I have not said whose fault anything is,

I have said log a call with etsy, as they are the only people who can do anything about it technically,

and I have just given some insight as to maybe why and what can be done about it as a work round

.......

I am sure etsy's search AI doesn't care whether the naked pictures are on tarot cards, paintings, or anything else.

[Vintorious]

Turn off your ads. If nothing else has helped, perhaps denying them your ad revenue will.

[TDKJdesign]

Might sound silly but DEEP might be your problem. Love deep in the same sentence. I would change it to in depth readings beautiful sight might be by soon for a reading myself. Good luck. 

[TDKJdesign]

Only saying this because ai no longer recognises words like in, the, of, an so 1 of your listing would pick up as love deep. 

[PsychicLeticiaMedium]

Thank you so much for your proposal.

I already changed. Let's see if this alleviates the problem.

But I have another listing without "deep" word and I suffer the same problem, like this title:

"Same Hour 1 Question + Advise 12 cards Psychic Reading by Real Medium Clairvoyant Leticia Predictions Tarot Reading | Tarot Cards 98% PDF"

[CraftyCornishMaids]

@PsychicLeticiaMedium 

the above listing still has

"love reading" as a tag

I would try removing the word "love" too, if you are doing a test

[PillowDetails]

Wow, this makes me sick.  Maybe Etsy's AI should be flagging those accounts that search using some of those terms.

@PsychicLeticiaMedium   I'm so sorry this is happening, it's very disturbing.

[Vintorious]

Much as I like the idea of flagging and removing creeps @PillowDetails, I'm going to guess that many of them don't have accounts and are "shopping" as guests.

[PillowDetails]

@cindylouwho2  Sorry to summon you, but there is no excuse for this type of thing on Etsy - why should the OP need to change her keywords?  Many common terms could be sexualized.

Does she have any recourse since her ads are being affected?

[PillowDetails]

Oh, you're right @Vintorious  - I forgot about guests.

*sigh*

[PsychicLeticiaMedium]

I agree that there may be many people who search without identifying themselves on Etsy as a guest.

But it is also true that when I tried to put the literal words that I have to see every day in the search terms in this post, Etsy told me that those terms are not allowed, so I had to use "*".

I mean, they have a system that detects those pornographic terms, but they only apply it to a part of their system like in this forum. But not in the searches.

If the Adult policies don't allow these terms, why I have to see them daily in my ads ?

[ThePurplePuppy]

@PsychicLeticiaMedium 

Several months ago I came in here with a somewhat similar problem. After much trial and error "we" here in the forum discovered that the word "panties" ALONG WITH my picture of a "Stuffie" dog wearing one of my DOG diapers was the problem. After I removed the word "panties" and it not helping we discovered that it was ALSO the image. Since then I have excluded the word panties in new listings and have hopefully removed it fro all of the existing listings.

This is actually getting pretty ridiculous. Pretty soon there will be no words left to describe what we are selling and even the photos are suspect.

[MetroRetroVintage]

That's pretty awful.  I don't know if this matters, but could the card with nudity on the banner be tripping up the bot as well?

Also, you'll want to be careful with using the word Cuba and saying 'here in Cuba', in your descriptions.  Also, I doubt that the bots (or most people for that matter) know what Palo is, and it could be interpreting it differently.

Good luck with resolving this, and agree that you may want to suspend your ads, at least until this is worked out.

[PlatypusDream]

There are certain terms that are programmed to return ZERO results in the search engine, even if there are thousands of listings that actually contain those words.

"Pornography" is one of them. So is "porn" and "porno".

But NOT "prostitute" or "prostitution". Or "bl0wjob", "spread p*ssy", "c*mshot", "sex with sister", and "p*ssy penetrator".

Note that "sex with sister" returns 842 exact matches (with Ads).

This includes a psychic reading for an In-Depth 18+ Sexual Erotic Love Reading.  This means that there are definitely people in your category selling these readings, and you are being roped into that realm because of all of the similar keywords you are using. Remember that Etsy is more of a "browsing" engine that an "exact match" engine now. They will show all sorts of SIMILAR things to what a person searches in hopes that something will catch their eye, and they will buy.

That's why this is happening to you, and most likely will CONTINUE to happen.

[PsychicLeticiaMedium]

Thanks for the explanations. But this does not answer why for 12 months of advertising my listing has not suffered any problem of this type and on the 8th of September, 3000 searches of this type suddenly appeared and continue to appear.

[nineteen27]

@PsychicLeticiaMedium 

probably because etsy changes stuff and does not tell us.

like shadow-banning certain words.

changing the search algorithm.

etc.

[BagmakerSupply]

@PsychicLeticiaMedium: "But this does not answer why ..." Unfortunately no one will ever be able to answer your question definitively. Etsy is constantly tweaking their search algorithms and changing the relative weight of the many factors that are considered. In your case, some change on or about September 8th resulted in the search inclusions you experience.

[PlatypusDream]

@PsychicLeticiaMedium 

Stop wasting money on Ads.  Most sellers consider them a vast waste of money, as you are finding yourself.

If you want to advertise, do so OFF OF ETSY, where you have finer control of who your items are marketed to.

[CraftyCornishMaids]

The AI found you, probably as stated here, as someone searched for something, and yours were under the "similar", as a lot of other tags matched.

if they then clicked on your item,

AI learns that the search term works for your items too.

.....and more find you, then it just grows

[DragonflyDreams1]

I think this is the true issue. Etsy relates your listing to another seller's listing. I had a similar issue with ads that related to another seller's listing (not pornographic in nature). A listing on Etsy took off and sold well, it was a brass plant stake reseller item. It must have gone viral on a website in some manner because it was a very specific long-tail search. Needless to say, while my item shared a few keywords it was nothing like the other seller's listing. My ad revenue was rapidly consumed by this search for months. Etsy told me the clicks were valid and would not help. What I did was disable ads for each item I saw this search term show up for. It is sad the solution is turning off ads for listings that Etsy wrongly associates search phrases for.

[cindylouwho2]

@PlatypusDream lots of sellers do very well with ads; we just don't see many of them in this forum. A 500% ROI is acceptable for onsite ads, IMO, especially in a field where happy customers are repeat customers, and there are low overhead costs.

The OP shouldn't have to turn off ads just because Etsy can't code them properly all of the sudden. I can understand their reluctance.