Our latest series of Marketing Magic articles discusses how to analyze your Etsy Shop Stats to help increase your views and boost sales. Read the intro to the series here to get started. You can currently read about test #1, reviewing your keywords, and test #2, sorting your superstar listings from the duds.

We’re now moving on to test #3, reviewing the sources that lead traffic to your Etsy shop.

#3. Review Your Traffic Sources

The Thought Process

How are viewers and potential customers finding you? Are they searching for a keyword or phrase on Etsy or Google that eventually brings them to you? Are they clicking on a pin on Pinterest, or were they reading a blog article about your product? There are so many ways customers can find you; it’s essential to monitor how viewers are and are not finding your products. This is especially true if you are participating in any sort of marketing campaign, like using a Facebook business page, participating in a giveaway, or pinning your items. You want to know if you are using your time effectively or wasting energy.

 The Testing Procedure

Let’s take some time to check the traffic sources listed on our Etsy shop stats page to see how viewers are finding you. Once again, filter to a monthly or weekly view and check out the “traffic sources” box just below the graph. This box lists all the places that your views are coming from.

“Etsy.com” means traffic that came from “within” Etsy, via search or other internal Etsy links. Note that these views are further broken down in the box to the right, “Traffic Sources on Etsy”.

Direct traffic generally means someone who typed in your Etsy shop URL, clicked on a bookmark, or clicked on a link in an email or on their phone.

This box will include third party search engines (like Google or Yahoo), Pinterest, Facebook, blog URLS, and other social media sites as sources as well if they are applicable. You also might see traffic from Google Product Listing Ads that Etsy has placed on your shop’s behalf.

 Questions to Ask Yourself Now

While looking at your list of traffic sources, think about the following questions:

• Did I perform any marketing or promoting efforts this month to generate traffic to my shop? Do I see an increase in views from a previous month due to this?
• How much traffic do I see resulting from my social media sites (like from Facebook, Pinterest, your tweets, etc.)?
• What social media outlet seems to be working the best for me this month and bringing in the most traffic?
• Do I have any traffic coming from an unexpected source, like a blog or site I didn’t know about? You’ll want to be sure to check these sources out, if anything, to say thank you!
• How much direct traffic do I have? This is potentially from people with your business card or who have heard about you via word of mouth.
• Did I buy any online advertising space this month? If so, how much traffic am I seeing from this?
• What social media sites or other sources seem to be missing from my list this month?

Lessons Learned

This analysis helps you determine whether your marketing and promotion efforts are effective. It can also help you decide where to allocate your precious time. For example, is Pinterest bringing in twice as much traffic as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? then spend more time pinning.

This test is also helpful if you compare your results and traffic sources to past time periods. If you’ve ramped up your Facebook marketing efforts or started a new blog, you can see whether traffic from those sites are increasing over time.

This process can also be particularly educational if done following a specific marketing effort on your part. For instance…

• Did you just do a craft show and hand out lots of business cards? Monitor to see if handing out all those cards helped increase your direct traffic.
• Are you selling on a group deals site or participating in a giveaway on a blog? Monitor to see if you’re getting traffic from that source to make your participation worthwhile.
• Did you just write a blog article about your product or brand, or start a new blog recently? Keep an eye on your traffic to see if your new work is affecting traffic.

This analysis will tell you what’s working, and you can obviously capitalize on that. But don’t forget to look for what sources are missing from your list. Are you tweeting all the time and not seeing any incoming traffic from Twitter? Then you may need to reallocate your time or adjust your Twitter marketing plan to be more effective. Did you pay for ad space or participate in a giveaway and see hardly any incoming traffic from that? Now you’re armed with more info before participating in something similar next time.

How are your traffic numbers for Etsy.com and Google/Yahoo/Bing searches? Monitor these stats over time to see if you’re doing well with SEO/keyword tagging or if it’s time to adjust and boost your page rankings.

The general idea behind this test is two-fold: 1) You are learning how to use your time wisely. Spend your marketing time on the venues that are driving the most of your traffic. 2) You want people to find your shop and products from a healthy mix of searches and links around the interwebs. You need lots of both types of traffic to be truly successful. We recommend a site like IFTTT.com to set up automated processes on your social media outlets to help increase traffic from these sources.

Check back soon for our fourth test with your Etsy shop stats. We hope you’re enjoying this series! What questions do you have about reading and analyzing your Etsy shop stats?