I get a lot of people asking me about this and so I'm going to put this out there. Many of you are analytics whizzes and can text in your sleep, but some of us are still working on social networking our lives and trying to operate our ipods. So if you already know this, ignore it. If you don't, here it is, simple, easy, and I want to hear that you are doing it if you are serious about selling and finding out your best sources and outlets of referring sites.
Not only should you be using Google Analytics because it's FREE, but because it gives you a bunch of useful information to help you sell. For those cringing at the thought of learning something new, I have to say, the name itself scared me as I'm no technical guru and at first I didn't know what I was looking at. However, watching a few "how to" videos, and reading up on it, I was a GOOGLE ANALYTIC PRO in no time. I promise you it's easy, and tells you so much that you need to know.
The big things I look for are REFERRING SITES. This tells me what traffic is coming in and from where. Currently, as you know, we're doing a promo with Everything Etsy--so today I'm going to show you how to find out if you are getting views in your store in direct correlation with this promotion. ((Now remember, the promotion leads people to the TEAM TAG -- so whomever listed last, will be on page one and more visible. If you are a shop that lists a few items every day, or relists a few here and there, your chances of being spotted are better than someone who lists once per week. This is the way to find out whose referring you and how many times, so you may use this for other things as well.))
1. FIRST, Sign into your analytics, and make sure your Etsy shop is showing in the Dashboard. Below you will see reports for your top traffic sources and keywords used. This is not what we need. So, move on.
2. LOOK FOR THE REFERRING SITES LINK as I have arrowed above. Normally it's the "green piece of the pie" and once you mouse over the blue words "REFERRING SITES" you will be able to click directly on them which will take you to the next page.
3. Once you click on the "hyperlink" for referring sites, you should then be able to see a bunch of referring sites (below). Now it becomes a "hide and seek" mission so to speak. You must look for the site in question, in this case, it's EverythingEtsy.com (note I did not put the www. in front of everythingetsy.com) As you can see in this photo below there is no EverythingEtsy listed in the top 10 or so referring sites. So, since my report says I have 139 different sources (in the header it says I have 247 visits from 139 sources So, going to the bottom and "view full report" is out of the question for me. Much easier, is just to type in what you are looking for where I have the red arrow.
~POOF~
it appears!
TA DA!
5. Review your analytics. In this case I only had one referral, but that's okay, my store was closed for awhile on vacation mode, so I'm not complaining. The first bubble tells me how many visits = 1. The second bubble tells me how many pages per visit that visitor spent (and compares it to the average time on my site in teeny print beneath it.) The next bubble is the average time on my site (only twenty seconds to see two pages, that sort of sucks, maybe they didn't like the item after all....not sure) , and the bounce rate is 0%. More on bounce rate HERE, but the bottom line is high bounce rates are no good, and low bounce rates are better. In this case you can't get lower than 0 can you? So maybe, just maybe, this customer was referred, saw the item, and bought it......I don't know how to get this far without asking my customers.
6. Bonus tips. I want to back up a minute. In case you did or didn't notice I have yellow stars on my top 10 Referring Sites page. I wanted to show you these are 4 of 10 of my own sources for driving traffic. Look again:
Here are my 4 suggestions to you based on my stars:
FACEBOOK:
This just goes to prove I'm busy driving people to my store. Facebook: I ask my friends to share treasuries on my personal and professional facebook pages. They share and ask their friends to share, and before you know it people are bookmarking your shop.
MY SITE AT VERIZON: These are nothing more than landing pages the web carrier gives you, I used to have a website on Verizon, but took it down, and use blogger for everything, so now when you go there it's a page that says SHOP NOW and points you to my Etsy shop. See, it's working....so if you get those free web templates, use 'em what can it hurt? You'll be in cyberspace somewhere....
FLICKR: Gotta warn you about this YOU WILL GET BOOTED OFF FLICKR IF YOU PUT LINKS TO YOUR ETSY STORES OR ARE DIRECT SELLING. However, there are coy ways to do this. My user name on Flickr is the same as my vintage shop, and so you get a profiile area and can tag your FLICKR photos. I've often found items this way too . I looked for Russel Wright Melmac, found it on FLICKR, googled the user name and found them on Etsy, and bought the set. Voila. Open a free FLICKR account under your shop name and in your profile talk about how much you LOVE ETSY.
COMMUNITY AT ETSY: Treasuries, or forums where you particpate and people view your shop. Those who sell on Etsy often buy, don't you?
As for the other top traffic, like Google or TheFind, I do investigate to find out how they got here, which you can do by going more in depth and looking up how they are searching for you. As for my Recyclers Guild Blog, it's hard for me to tell if this was direct sale traffic or if they are just using the link to convo me to join the team, so I disregard that, but if it's in yours then people are checking out your shop! You really have to learn and use your analytics, and sadly, LEARN that just because you put an item on Etsy, selling it may require a little outside client building to drive traffic to shop on your part.
For those of you using Analytics, please comment how much EverythingEtsy traffic you are getting. Would like to compare this and keep tabs, thanks!
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