What happens when you publish a new gig? A Pro seller's guide!

[frank_d]

18 minutes ago, rabihumakhan said:

This is a great post, I would opine. 

@frank_d, someone two days back approached me through one of my gigs (that deals in drafting business contracts) and asked me if I could help them. 

However, I sent them  a custom offer using another gig that I wanted to rank. Is that something may be counted against me? 

I see what you mean. So buyer came for gig A but when you reached an agreement, you sent over a custom offer for gig B, because you want that gig to gain some traction.

From a technical standpoint I don’t see Fiverr considering this as a bad thing.

You need to be upfront with your buyer though in order to avoid any confusion and as long as you drafted the custom offer correctly to cover the entire scope and terms, then it should be OK.

[rabihumakhan]

2 hours ago, frank_d said:

I see what you mean. So buyer came for gig A but when you reached an agreement, you sent over a custom offer for gig B, because you want that gig to gain some traction.

From a technical standpoint I don’t see Fiverr considering this as a bad thing.

You need to be upfront with your buyer though in order to avoid any confusion and as long as you drafted the custom offer correctly to cover the entire scope and terms, then it should be OK.

Yes. I do that on regular basis and think it isn't against any ToS or something. Also, I drafted the custom offer clearly and the order hadn't have any confusion or something. What actually I wanted to ask that :as per the knowledge I gained from your post, can fiverr algorithm 'think' that a potential client approached me through a gig but I wasn't able to secure the order on that 'gig' and may drop some points of me?:

[frank_d]

2 minutes ago, rabihumakhan said:

Yes. I do that on regular basis and think it isn't against any ToS or something. Also, I drafted the custom offer clearly and the order hadn't have any confusion or something. What actually I wanted to ask that :as per the knowledge I gained from your post, can fiverr algorithm 'think' that a potential client approached me through a gig but I wasn't able to secure the order on that 'gig' and may drop some points of me?:

I don’t think it matters as much as you still got the sale.

So a different gig’s stats got better.

Here’s the catch though: if said gig never caught on and is always sort of underperforming, no matter how many custom offers you create, it will never get any boost out of those sales.

And that’s because the conversion rate will always suck on that gig.

Send custom offers for that gig, but at the same time diagnose what is wrong with it so that things pick up organically.

[rabihumakhan]

21 hours ago, frank_d said:

Here’s the catch though: if said gig never caught on and is always sort of underperforming, no matter how many custom offers you create, it will never get any boost out of those sales

Thanks for the reply, Frank. That's not the case fortunately. 

I got two clicks/two people approached me through that gig which is a plus point. 

And today the gig secured an order. I believe my strategy worked out. 

Before this event, my gig was on the second page whenever I searched for the relevant keywords in incognito mode, it was on first page today, though in the bottom. 

[toorzan]

wow, such an amazing post I've ever read on the forum. Thanks for sharing it 🙂
Going to save it and will read it before creating my next gig. 

[toorzan]

Hi @frank_d I have a question, can you please help in clarifying it.
One of my gig (I created last year) was good in beginning but now a days it's not not performing well not gets good impressions even, and have zero clicks. Gig have few 5 stars reviews too. Would you suggest me to edit the gig (from a-z) or delete it and create a new one, while following your guidelines mentioned in the post?

[frank_d]

10 minutes ago, toorzan said:

Hi @frank_d I have a question, can you please help in clarifying it.
One of my gig (I created last year) was good in beginning but now a days it's not not performing well not gets good impressions even, and have zero clicks. Gig have few 5 stars reviews too. Would you suggest me to edit the gig (from a-z) or delete it and create a new one, while following your guidelines mentioned in the post?

Since you did manage to get a few reviews in, assuming they were organic ones, it would be a better option to edit it.

If initially you got some traction but then your gig started underperforming, then it may be just a matter of making it relevant again.

You can still follow my guide.

[toorzan]

16 minutes ago, frank_d said:

it would be a better option to edit it

should I edit the title too?

[frank_d]

6 minutes ago, toorzan said:

should I edit the title too?

Yes, if you research the marketplace and find out that there’s a better potential key phrase for your title.

[toorzan]

19 minutes ago, frank_d said:

Yes

Much thanks frank, sorry to bother but it's a last question  😬
The gig link will remain the old (same as old title) after editing the gig title.  Is that okay? This will not effect the gig performance?

[frank_d]

8 minutes ago, toorzan said:

Much thanks frank, sorry to bother but it's a last question  😬
The gig link will remain the old (same as old title) after editing the gig title.  Is that okay? This will not effect the gig performance?

It’s unavoidable so it’s OK. You can still update the SEO title though, it’s hard to miss as you have to click on it in order to appear.

It’s underneath the gig’s title field and to the left.

[toorzan]

2 minutes ago, frank_d said:

It’s unavoidable so it’s OK. You can still update the SEO title though, it’s hard to miss as you have to click on it in order to appear.

It’s underneath the gig’s title field and to the left.

Alright, thanks for replying to all my questions. I am sure following your instructions will help make my gig stand out in the market.

[fiveroptic1]

Excellent stuff @frank_d& thanks for sharing. A great follow up to your live gig creation webinar!. 

[seo_surgeon]

This is a lot of information to take in, and I really appreciate you creating this collection. Will save it for later and *** bless you!

[leadgenhub]

On 1/21/2022 at 12:48 AM, frank_d said:

IF I have a higher average price than my competitor, I will out-perform them and therefore appear higher up in the search results page.

So if my competitor is selling their gig at an average of $55 and I am making $65 a pop, then I win.

Just to clarify: this is NOT the actual price of the gig, but the average sales price, either via packages+extras or custom offers.

That explains a lot. You're a champ, Frank 🙂

[furkanhassan]

I am working on Fiverr for 1.5 years still I found so many helpful tips in this post. Luckily, I stumbled upon this post and now I learned some new tricks.
Thanks for sharing it with us.

[dupsy4]

On 1/20/2022 at 7:48 PM, frank_d said:

Meaning if you have several gigs that all of them are extremely similar (a big No-No) or have been reported or break ToS, no new gig will ever perform well as your account is shadow-banned, for lack of a better term

Thank you for the knowledged. May you be richly blessed

If a seller (like myself) finds herself In this condition, what do you advice?

Thanks once again

[wp_exp_meheraz]

Glad to learn many things from you. As a new seller it was necessary for me. I uploaded my six gigs, impressions are sound but clicks are very low. I think as a new seller my gigs rates are high. Can i edit my rate now?

[real_abrar]

I was thinking about the matter and I was confused. Thank You for clearing my confusions. I don't know why do people compare Fiverr algorithm  with Google Search . They just start putting keywords in gig description, tags, and almost everywhere  as much as they can. Does it make any sense?

Also does fiverr even count on image and video's mata description and tags?

[frank_d]

5 hours ago, real_abrar said:

Also does fiverr even count on image and video's mata description and tags?

Tes Fiverr can read those and does take them into account. The weight is different.

[Guest nenadmanojlovic]

On 1/20/2022 at 7:48 PM, frank_d said:

Hey everyone!

So after my latest Thread and Live Stream which can be found here:

I realized that it had been a while since I published a new gig.

Putting myself through the process all over again, plus a series of insightful questions by fellow members really showed me that things are a little different nowadays.

Fiverr treats new gigs a bit differently and it is now clear to me that we should approach gig creation with a few core principles in mind.

So I thought it would be helpful to create a sort of checklist before starting the gig creation process, to make sure you give your brand new gig a fighting chance on this saturated and highly competitive marketplace.

This is not going to be a top-10 list of generic "tricks", this is actionable advice, plus some good old insider information. 😉

Let's begin.

Preface

I am repeating myself on this forum, and I will keep doing so until it takes:

We should abolish the term "rank" when we talk about our gigs.

Ranking is no more. Fiverr is now indexing gigs when they are published and then it only serves them to buyers based on relevancy and performance.

A quick recap of what my "Fiver 3.0" thesis was about can be found here:

Do not be fooled by the publishing date, it is still current and for the most part it still stands true.

What happens when you hit "publish"?

When we publish a new gig, there's a brief window in time, where a lot of things happen in the background.

Your gig gets indexed essentially and then unless it gets taken down for breaking ToS, Fiverr needs to calculate how well your gig will perform, POTENTIALLY.

This is the tricky part: in order for Fiverr to do so, it needs to guesstimate the result, based on a highly complicated formula.

(👆Me when I check my brand new gig's analytics the next day☝️)

So what does that formula even look like?

No one outside Fiverr knows the answer to that 100%.

But any experienced seller can actually piece some of the pieces together, which is what I have been closely doing since 2019, when my research began.

So here's what I theorised so far:

• Fiverr checks to see how well the gig is completed on your end. (remember the "use all the features" advice? 😉 )

• It also checks the gig Title, Gig Tags and meta data. (in that order)

• Then it checks your gig's description. (simple crawl)

• Finally, it checks a bunch of things on your profile. (there's lots of speculation regarding this, but it will make sense in am minute)

That's phase 1.

For every one of those checks, your gig gets an individual value assigned to each attribute. Let's call it a "grade".

So if you want your gig to have a fighting chance, you must focus on the following:

1. Gig title 

A gig's title is like 90% of the SEO, belive it or not. It is the thing that impacts your gig's chances of appearing as a result, regardless of what is in the tags or description. You need to focus all your efforts into researching your market.

Use Fiverr as a buyer (just click the "switch to buying" link next to your profile image on the top right of your screen) and start searching for what you offer.

So for example:

Let's say you are looking to create an NFT gig. Search for the word "NFT". (no quotes)

 

Something interesting happens: Fiverr tries to guess what you (presumably a buyer) is looking for.

How does it guess? It has a database of past searches that is constantly updated.

So there is a good chance that whatever terms are auto-generated by Fiverr, those are actually trending ones.

But please be mindful of the fact that they are probably not refined, as these are probably being presented as they were fed to the system.

Not what you were looking to make? Was it an "NFT animation"? Just keep typing, see what comes up.

Or switch it up, look for "animated NFT". Hopefully you get the idea.

Here's another example:

What if I wanted to create a "minimal logo" design gig?

Here's what happens when I type in minimal: 

So these are some great suggestions, to help you guess what buyers are looking for, and create a gig that's specifically designed to catch a percentage of said searches.

Another tool at your disposal, if you are a Seller Plus member, is the "top keywords" tool, under your "analytics" tab.

So if you already have a similar gig published, or an already successful gig in the same vertical, you can actually look into under what keywords your gig appeared in search results, and which one of those got you clicks and sales.

So using this tool to guess even more accurately what keywords interest your target audience.

You can use an adjective to describe your offering, as I see many sellers do. But take note that the longer that word is, the more characters you are essentially throwing in the trash, as the adjective itself will not help your gig at all. It's only there to appeal to your audience, plus make the sentence a bit more tolerable to humans. So yes, you can say "I will create a professional/amazing/wonderful logo" but leaving that out when you have a long key phrase you want to focus on, may be a better approach.

2. Tags/keywords

These need to be complimentary ones, and not reusing the same keywords/phrase as in your title.

So here's where you want to niche down.

Say you created an "animated video ad" gig. Here's where you can add several complimentaty keywords that help capture more leads.

Words like "facebook" or "Instagram", or "promotional" and "commercial". Here's where you are looking for words -much like a guessing game- that would still work when used in the same sentence as your gig title's main key phrase. You are upping your chances by also guessing correctly about different things that buyers would be looking for. So once again, researching trends and what the global marketplace is doing, is key.

3. Description

This is not the place to use keywords. Using them organically in sentences that make sense, is OK, but Fiverr has already decided your relevance from steps 1+2. Adding keywords here won't change its mind.

This is the place where you need to present your buyer with a sound positioning. 

They need to understand what you are offering, peek into what working with you might look like and what they can expect.

Anyone who talks about SEO and cramming keywords on the description, should just stop as this is not how this works.

4. Gig completion

I have covered this extensively here, no need to expand any further:

 

Performance Review

Phase 2, is performance review.

So essentially Fiverr needs to understand as soon as possible, if your shiny new gig is a diamond in the rough or a hot pile of garbage. 

How does it do that?

Simple.

If it serves your gig to relevant search results, it measures impressions plus the infamous Click Through Rate. (CTR)

That means that every time your gig shows up on a buyer's screen, via the search function, your impressions number goes up.

I see a lot of sellers coming here and asking "how to ge their impressions numbers up".

Which as a question it makes very little sense. Here's some advice if you are in that group of sellers:

Impressions will only go up, if your gig's title and tags are relevant to what buyers are looking for.

Write that on a post-it and stick it on your desk or computer monitor for daily reference.

Some people may ask: "But Frank, not all buyers search for gigs, many buyers visit the gig vertical and click on their preferred subcategory. What happens then?" 

Well, that is a different subject as it involves a lot more performance indicators when calculating dynamic positions, so I will leave this for another post.

Now, back to this guide.

If the buyer clicks on your gig, you can track that click via your analytics, but most importantly, Fiverr perceives that interaction as a positive one. That's your clicks in your gig's analytics.

So at this point, you get a new grade based on that metric.

Here's the important part:

Getting impressions, means your gig's titles and tags are somewhat working. (yaaay!)

Not getting clicks, while getting impressions, indicates that one of the following is not:

• gig image

• pricing

• trust signals, .a.k.a. reviews

So to all the sellers who come here and ask why while they get impressions, they get few clicks, if any, the answer is: look into the gig's thumbnail/video, your pricing when compared to other sellers and what you offer plus your reviews.

In case of a brand new gig, just ignore the "reviews" part.

If your clicks are decreasing or non-existent, then that tells Fiverr that your gig is an under-performer.

Very few gigs can survive that without editing and tweaking. It's just how this works.

But if it does gets clicks and does not get sales, that's even worse. 

It tells Fiverr that something is seriously wrong with your gig.

So here comes Pro tip #1:

So hopefully by now, you have a fairly basic guide of how to diagnose your gig, after it is published.

 

The Good Stuff

Now I know I mentioned some spicy insider's information, so here it comes.

All of the above performance indicators, are taken into consideration for a very brief window in time.

Which is why if your initially published gig, is failing any of the above check points, it will soon either stop being served as a result, or get de-indexed (is that a word?) altogether.

So this si why people see their gigs analytics reaching 0 at some point. That gig spanned its wings, hopped in the air for a hot minute and then crashed and burned.

My advice is as follows: don't be afraid. The current Fiverr engine is waaaaay more responsive than what we were working 2-3 years ago. Editing your gig, and trial and error will not hurt you in any way.

The only time you may need to dread editing your gig and failing, is when your gig is getting you lots fo sales or if you got one of Fiverr's special badges, like "Fiverr's choice". 

You don't change a winning team. So that's the only instance when you want to think twice about editing your stuff.

And here's where it gets "spicy":

If your gig gets an order, from a buyer who saw your gig, clicked on it, liked what they saw and bought it, your gig gets a brand new type of rating, because that series of actions will spike your conversion rate.

And before people start getting the wrong idea: you can't trick Fiverr by having your friends/family/alter ego click on or even worse, order your gig.

Fiverr knows when this is organic, or when it is suspicious in any way.

So some sellers on here, were met with success right off the bat, not because of a trick or hack.

Their gig was relevant, their positioning was sound and they were priced reasonably in regards to their value proposition/market.

So any organic orders and a high conversion rate, is one of those heavily weighted attributes on your gig's performance calculation formula.

And I recently discovered another one. But before I get into that...

Here comes Pro tip #2:

The "Even Better" Stuff

There's a metric that follows your average price. (again remeber how most of my findings on Fiverr 3.0 was me just checking what numbers Fiverr shares with us?)

So here's how that attribute works.

If a buyer looks for a "logo design" gig, and I am just as relevant as another seller, we both get presented to the buyer as search results.

Let's say for argument's sake, that our reviews are fairly similar. Or better yet, the other seller has 2,000 reviews more than me. (crazy, right?)

IF I have a higher average price than my competitor, I will out-perform them and therefore appear higher up in the search results page.

So if my competitor is selling their gig at an average of $55 and I am making $65 a pop, then I win.

Just to clarify: this is NOT the actual price of the gig, but the average sales price, either via packages+extras or custom offers.

So it doesn't matter what the price tag is. Someone might be selling at $5/$10/$15 packages, but for whatever reason their average price goes up to $100 via extras and custom offers. That's one more thing you don't know about other sellers but you know for yourself.

Conclusion

I need to wrap this up, as it started as a mini-article, and I think I need to look an epub  publisher for this. 🙂 

The first half of this post was meant to be a guide to all the sellers who come here on a daily basis, asking about their impressions and clicks. I also hope this sheds some light into what that checklist should be before you even consider to publish a new gig.

The second half of the post is just to briefly touch upon how dynamic and complex this whole "performance" thing is.

I havent's even mentioned profile performance indicators, buyer behaviour, promoted gigs and Business profiles, and already this post became too complicated and too long to read and digest in one sitting.

 

So let's keep the conversation going, and share this post to any sellers who ask questions about "ranking" and impressions, etc.

Feel free to share your experience, questions and success or failures with your gigs when you first published them.

Maybe we can help each other by exchanging points of view.

Edit 1: Not 5 seconds passed and I already got a private message about someone’s gigs being “deranked” and how I can help them with “SERP”. Which reminded me something important I forgot to include: the above post treats this one gig creation as if in a vacuum. Meaning if you have several gigs that all of them are extremely similar (a big No-No) or have been reported or break ToS, no new gig will ever perform well as your account is shadow-banned, for lack of a better term.

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for such a lovely insight and a lot of new information learned!

We appreciate the time you took for this story which I'm sure it was not short. Thank you colleague and all the best

[frank_d]

Glad to hear people find this content useful.

Please don’t be afraid to apply things and post your results/experience.

[rosebarlow]

Great post. Lots to think about here, even for Fiverr sellers that have been around for a while. Thank you!

[dev_redwan]

I think new sellers like us should understand these helpful posts well so that we do not make these mistakes later.
Thank you so much frank_d

[catwriter]

@frank_d, I remember you mentioning somewhere that not all the tags you entered were added to your new gig when you published it, so I thought I'd add something I've discovered recently.

It seems that Fiverr checks gigs periodically and removes some tags (for relevancy sake, I guess).

Yesterday I've checked one of my gigs, and I clearly remember it having five tags when I created it, but now it only has one.

I checked someone else's gig offering the same type of service, one with the Fiverr's Choice badge, and that one only has two tags (so I guess that mine having less than five doesn't hurt its performance, which is a relief).

Have you noticed something similar with any of your gigs?