Guide
How long can an Etsy title be?
140 characters. That is far more room than most listings use well, and filling all of it with keywords is the most common way to write a title that ranks for nothing and reads like spam.
| Limit | Value |
|---|---|
| Title length | 140 characters |
| Counts toward it | letters, spaces, punctuation, all of it |
| Safe to use | commas, dashes, the pipe character |
Nobody reads 140 characters
A title gets truncated almost everywhere it appears. In a grid of search results, on a phone, in a browser tab, in the email Etsy sends when somebody favourites the item. What survives every one of those is the beginning, so the beginning is where the words that matter go.
This is the whole game. Not how many keywords you can fit, but which three or four words come first.
The shape that works
Lead with what the thing actually is, in the words a buyer would use. Then the details that distinguish it. Then, if you still have room, the occasion or the recipient.
| Title | |
|---|---|
| weak | Handmade Gift Idea Unique Present Custom Personalized Mug Coffee Tea Cup Ceramic Pottery Kitchen Home Decor Housewarming |
| better | Hand Thrown Ceramic Mug, Speckled Stoneware, 12oz Coffee Cup, Housewarming Gift |
The first one is 120 characters of nouns with no sentence in them. It opens with Handmade Gift Idea, which describes roughly half of Etsy. Truncated after the first few words, it tells a buyer nothing.
The second is 79 characters, opens with the actual object, and still carries stoneware, the size and the gift angle. It also survives being cut off, because the first four words already say what it is.
Repeating a word does not help twice
Mug, coffee mug and ceramic mug in one title is the word mug three times and two wasted phrases. Say it once, well, and use the space you saved on something the title does not cover yet. Your 13 tags are the place for the alternate phrasings, and there is a page on fitting those into 20 characters each.
Write it for a person
A title with commas in it that a human can read aloud will do better than a keyword pile, because somebody has to want to click it after they find it. Ranking for a search you then lose on the click is not a win.
What this means in a spreadsheet
Titles are where the 140-character limit gets breached quietly. A description accidentally pasted into the title column, or a title assembled by joining three cells together, sails past it and the listing is refused at import. Checking the length before you upload is faster than finding out one row at a time.
Commas in a title are fine for Etsy and a problem for a CSV, since an unquoted comma shifts every column after it. That and five other ways a product CSV goes wrong are worth reading before you build a feed.
Related
The columns listWright reads are on the help page. If you are planning to send the finished file to Etsy directly, Etsy has no CSV import for creating listings, which is worth knowing first. And if a model is writing these titles for you, the things it invents are worth being able to spot.
Etsy changes its tooling from time to time. This page describes how things stood when it was written. If a limit has moved since, Etsy's own help pages will say so before ours do.