TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 11 Shop Stats

Welcome to our Etsy Newbie Bootcamp! If you want to take part in Bootcamp and get one-on-one mentoring, or answers to any of your questions, please drop us a line at TorontoEtsyST@gmail.com.  

If you want to open an Etsy shop, just follow this link!



 
Then, be sure to check out:

TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 1 How to Open an Etsy Shop
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 2 Branding & Shop Banners
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 3 Shop Profiles Bios and Photos
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 4 Make Listings Tempting
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 5 About Pages
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 6 Shop Policies
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 7 Communication
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 8 Shipping and Packaging
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 9 Social Media
TEST Etsy Newbie Bootcamp: Class 10 The Dark Art of Pricing

So far, we've covered opening your shop, making it look its best, making it easy to find, easy to interact with and practical skills like pricing your items appropriately and how to get them to customers. Today, we're covering the ways to measure your success in getting people in the virtual door of your online shop, and knowing how they found you. Shop Stats are a built-in tool provided by Etsy to let you measure traffic to your shop and whence it came.

Using Shop Stats: Nuts and Bolts

You can find your Shop Stats by navigating to Your Shop and using the pull-down menu to select Shop Stats. You can also see a summary of some of the most vital stats on your Dashboard (which is also found on the pull-down menu from Your Shop).

What you'll see is data, both numbers and plotted on (time series) graphs for views, favorites, orders, and revenue. Choose the tab which interests you to learn more. Select the date range with the pull-down menu.

•  View is all about visitors to your shop and listings in a given time period
•  Favorites is your collection of ♥'s - the numbers of people adding your shop or listings to their favorites lists
• Orders is the number of orders received - the number of individual customers not the number of listings. Multiple listings purchased by a single customer are lumped together.
• Revenue is the net revenue you've made from your sales (taxes and shipping are not included - this is one reason you may not wish to 'hide' shipping costs in your prices, but to list actual item and shipping costs separately - see Class 8 Shipping and Packaging)

You can track those ♥'s using stats
and wear your heart on your back with the
Black Bamboo Jersey Drop Waist Dress with
heart cut-out back by MaybeByCatalfo

See the little green triangles along the bottom? Those are events. If you move your cursor along any graph, when you pass a green triangle, events tracked on that day will be revealed. These include new or renewed listings posted,  and things you've shared on social media directly from Etsy. That way, you can see directly how these sorts of things correlate with changes (and spikes!) in views, favorites, orders, and revenue.

Below this you'll see three sorts of lists of traffic sources: Etsy's full list of traffic sources, a break down of sources from within Etsy (hover over the question mark for explanations) and keywords used to find your shop from within Etsy. 

Using Shop Stats to Better Promote Your Shop

• You can use the top traffic source data of course to measure what promotions are already working. Is your blog on the list? Great job! Is someone else's blog on the list? Write them a nice thank you email, and you can even ask these bloggers if you can add their contact information to your PR list, so you can gather an effective and engaged list of people to contact next time you launch something new! (See this Etsy blog post for more tips). If you see a lot of Direct Traffic, that means people know your actual URL and promotional material like business cards are working. If you don't see Direct Traffic, you might want to increase your efforts off-line. You want to see Google in your top traffic sources - if it isn't there, you need to work on SEO (see Class 4, Class 9 and stay tuned for future classes on Search Engine Optimization). 
   
• Your traffic sources within Etsy let you gauge how your Activity feed, Teams, Treasuries, Browse and things like Search are working for you (or maybe what can be improved). You can keep people moving within your shop by using links to other listings within listings - consider directing buyers to similar items! You can experiment to find out how participating in Teams and Treasuries can increase traffic. Class 4 should help you maximize your chances of being found in Search, as well as increase your chances of being featured in Treasuries and Favorites.   
• Your keywords can be revealing. Do the keywords you think make sense show up in the list? If your list matches what is actually happening then you've got a good handle on what is bringing people in. If you see keywords that had not occurred to you, you should consider changing tags and titles (see Class 4), to include these words! After all, those are keyworks which already work and this can improve your SEO. Are you using tags which do not appear in your keywords list? You might want to rethink these and replace them with the way buyers actually find you. Sometimes sellers use categories and tags which are really idiosyncratic. Choosing funny words or descriptions can be a fun way of setting the tone for your brand, but you want to choose your tags based on what is accurate and effective. Save the funny and idiosyncratic for the end of listings. Note that keywords, like tags, can be word phrases and that these are more effective, since they are more specific and buyers who use these to find something specific, rather than a general idea, are more likely to buy.

Remember to stay focused and centred,
and don't get too caught up. Fun yoga gear like this
Yoga Sheep: Cobra Pose - Mens T-shirt - Sand
by DesignedToLife might be just the thing.

Tip: Don't get too caught up! Watching for sales and ♥'s can be addictive, but it's better to stay focused on and centred on doing what you want to do and acheiving longer-term goals. Especially when you're just starting a business, every sale feels very important and it can be tempting to read too much into whether or not something sells, or a promotion appears to work. But, the thing about the statistics of small numbers is that they are not always representative. Your Shop Stats will become more meaningful over time. It will likely take months before you can really get a good sense of what works for you and your business. You want keep a eye on things, but remember that the larger the sample size the more meaningful.


Tip: On the other hand, if you are really interested in seeing everything that Etsy can track for you and offering your two cents' worth about what statistics would be most useful, you can join the Shop Stats Beta Team  which will allow you to participate in testing new features will may be rolled out to all Etsy sellers.

Google Analytics

Seeing maps of plotted visitor location can be irristable to map lovers,
like the License Plate Map of Canada by Route401

A third party app which is very popular and can be used for your shop (and other websites or blogs) is Google Analytics. Etsy has a tutorial for how to set up the web analytics for your shop, if you don't have an existing account, and a tutorial for adding analytics for your Etsy shop to an existing account. There is a lot of overlap in the sort of information you can glean from Google Analytics and Shop Stats (though you may see some differences because their sampling methods differ) about how people are finding your shop. Unsurprisingly, Shop Stats has more thorough information about how people move within Etsy and what they do. Google Analytics on the other hand, provides more flexibility in how data are plotted and more information on demographics. By adding Google analytics to your shop you can learn, for instance:

• what proportion of your visitors are new or returning visitors (which tells you about customer loyalty and whether you are successfully driving new traffic to your shop)
• how much time is spent and how many pages within your shop are visited on average (which gives you a hint as to whether you need to do more to engage casual visitors and link within listings to encourage them to explore your shop further)
• where geographically are your visitors located (which can help you plan your shipping policies and tells you something about how your promotion efforts are working)
• your visitors' browsers' default languages (which is most useful if you are posting listings in multiple languages)
• what sort of platform and browser they use (you may want to have a look at your shop in different browsers and follow advice to optimize your shop for mobile buyers)
• you can even set up custom variables to track or set goals and track your success at meeting various metrics
• specific data about how social media directs traffic to your site (see Class 9 on Social Media)

and more. Also, you can use a single dashboard to organize any tracking you might want to do for any of your sites - for instance, you can use Google Analytics for your shop and for your blog.

You can find the Google Analytics Help Center here.

So, are you using  Shop Stats (or GA) to track your progress with your new shop? Have you found something particularly revealing? Is it something you've integrated into the time you spend on your shop? Have any tips or questions? Let us know below!

Remember: If you already have a shop, or you open one today, please let us know how to find it! We will be featuring some of our favorite newbie items right here. 

 The Toronto Etsy Street Team loves Newbie shops! You can find some of our favorite listings from talented Newbie sellers, including those featured in this class in our new TEST ♥ Newbies section. Be sure to stop by often to see what's new in this evolving, curated treasury of amazing Newbie finds!