Tag Archives: traffic

How are Customers Finding You on Etsy? – Interpreting & Utilizing Your Etsy Shop Stats, part 5

etsy statsHi there! Welcome to our fifth and final article in this Marketing Magic series on effective ways to use and interpret your Etsy shop stats. I hope you’ve found this helpful thus far! Here are the links to the previous articles for a recap:

In Test #3, we discussed analyzing the various sources that generate traffic to your Etsy shop. On a similar note, today we’ll discuss traffic sources from within Etsy.com that lead viewers to your shop. So we’re not talking about people doing a Google search, we’re talking about people that are either already browsing Etsy.com or already somewhere in your Etsy shop.

#4. Review Your Traffic Sources FROM ETSY

The Thought Process 

Once a viewer finds your shop or listing, however they found it, you want to keep them there (by “there” I mean within your shop) as long as possible. Think about if you owned a brick & mortar shop. Customers would come in and browse, see an item they like, possibly add it to their cart, move on and see another item they liked, and keep browsing on and on. Your internet shop is different. They might land on a listing page from a Google or Etsy search and never see the rest of your shop other than that one listing. It’s up to you to help them browse.

The longer a viewer spends browsing your listings, the likelier you will be to make a sale, or at least get some items favorited. There are several things you can do to keep a viewer browsing within your shop, and you can use your Etsy shop stats to monitor your progress.

The Testing Procedure 

Once again, filter to a weekly or monthly view of your stats. Check out the other box below your graph, titled “traffic sources on Etsy”. This is basically giving you a drilldown of the “etsy.com” number listed under the “traffic sources” box to the left. Examine where your inner-Etsy views are coming from. Possible traffic sources from within Etsy can include the following:

    • Your Shop – when a viewer clicks on a listing from the home page of your shop
    • Your Listings – when a viewer clicks on a link (to another listing, to your shop home page, to a category section, etc.) from a link within another one of your listings
      etsy titanium earrings

      turquoise rosette titanium studs in my shop – see how etsy automatically adds some links to other listings in my shop

      traffic to etsy shop

      • Search – a viewer searches for something from the Etsy.com home page
      • Search within your shop – a viewer searches for something from the search bar on your Etsy shop page
      • Other possible traffic sources include the Etsy home page (score!), treasuries, favorites, convos, Etsy’s browse sections, teams, or another shop’s listing.

Questions to Ask Yourself Now 

      • Where is most of my inner-Etsy traffic coming from?
      • Do I have a substantial amount of views coming from within my shop, like from listings and shop sections?
      • Are there steps I can take to increase the links and connectivity within my shop to increase a viewer’s browse time?
      • Are there steps I can take to increase my page ranking in Etsy search results?
      • Have treasuries and my participation in Etsy teams or forums been a good way to drive traffic to my shop?
      • What can I do to increase my chances of being featured in treasuries and on the Etsy front page?

Lessons Learned

Unless you were featured on the front page, you want most of your traffic to be coming from Your Shop and Your Listings. Yes, search traffic from Etsy.com is great, that means your tags are doing their job. However, lots of views from your shop, listings, and section pages means that people are sticking around after they found you via search or whatever other method. It means they like your shop!

To boost these views, make sure your listings have helpful links included in them. You can link to other relevant listings or categories. Here are some examples of effective listing linking:

      • “If you like this style of ____ check out my other _____ here.”
      • “Check out my entire line of _______s or my shop section of _____ here.”
      • “If you’d like this _____ but in another color/size, see my _______ here.”
      • “Back to our shop here _______”
      • “Check out the _______ that matches this listing.”
etsy links

another example from my turquoise rose studs listing – see all the links to other places in my shop that I have sloppily circled

The idea is to think like your target customer and provide them little links and breadcrumbs to other parts of your shop that will make their lives easier and increase your chances of making a sale. The good news is that these days, Etsy does a pretty good job of adding a lot of links for you already. On each listing page, they will automatically add links to other listings in that same section, a link to convo you, and a link to your about page.

Don’t forget to monitor your progress after you’ve tweaked your listing links and any other keyword or tagging work. Check your traffic stats on at least a monthly basis to see if your views from Etsy searches or inner-shop browsing has paid off!

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We hope you’ve enjoyed our series on how to analyze and interpret your Etsy shop stats! We’ve discussed just some of the many processes you can perform to effectively utilize and analyze your Etsy Shop Stats. After running through these tests, remember to continue checking your stats to see if your efforts have improved your traffic. Our goal is to get more people to your shop and increase your sales. Happy selling!

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Where’s Your Traffic Coming From? – Interpreting & Utilizing Your Etsy Shop Stats, part 4

how to use your etsy statsOur 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.

lazy owl boutique

“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?

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