Proof is in the Analytics: Referring Sites and What That Means To You

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.

  4.  I am typing in EverythingEtsy.com 

~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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Advertising 101 -What Google Anayltics Helped Ira Mency Learn the Hard Way

Question: What is the best advertising campaign that you can launch for your Etsy Shop?  

Answer:  Yourself.

I learned this the hard way, so now I will share the results with you. For one month featuring my RetroChaletStudio upcycled "art store" on Craftopolis, here are the results. First you must understand how it worked.

Cost: $54 for 4 weeks.

Users: Are mostly Etsians wanting to make treasuries.  I figured, those who use Etsy sell on Etsy and often shop on Etsy.

Ease of Use: Excellent, upload a small banner and you are all set. In this case it was this one:

Note: I kept it basic, though I had some other ideas such as these, I didn't use them:

Both of these ideas were nixed, though I liked them a tad better I wanted to keep it simple. 

So, when you clicked on the small banner I had uploaded, you could go direct to the shop.  Additionally, a "Mouseover Feature" enabled people to go direct to see one of my "3 Etsy featured items" 

Both of these features run each day for 4 weeks.

Note: The banner only shows a percentage of the time, according to Craftopolis, you get "at least 100,000 impressions a week. Most of the time ads get around 110,000, but we guarantee 100,000. "

Now for the results:  

new views = 57
New Hearts = 12 (unsure how many from Craftopolis)
Sales = $40, only $20 of which I could attribute to Craftopolis.
Percent of total monthly visits to my store = 7.25%

Overall I must say Shannon & the staff there were definately helpful and easy to work with.  Though I didn't see a huge increase in sales, I'm not extremely dissapointed, as my art has it's own niche' - and I was hoping for at least a 10% increase in traffic.   Realistically, I ended up with almost 2 new visits per day. 

Now, I wonder how it would work if I was selling something highly desireable , like upcycled purses or vintage items instead (and not funky artwork?).

SELF PROMOTION
Now, let's backtrack as for the same month I decided to "promote" my own shop, but my other shop that sells Vintage, which is RetroChalet.

RetroChalet sells some of my art and jewelry, but mostly vintage goodies.

So, I decided to use these avenues: Facebook, My personal web, and FLICKR

Here are those results:

Facebook brought me 78 visits, Flickr 24 and My own site referral at 56.  Altogether that's 158 new visits from my self alone.  So it just proves that you are your own best advertising. 

I should add you have to do some work on each of your sites to do this.

FLICKR - Upload photos and make sure you are using tags , so that people all over FLICKR can find your items.  For instance I tagged a Vintage Cast Iron Mailbox as industrial, blue, cast iron mailbox, griswold, etc.  So, anyone on Flickr searching for cast iron griswold mailboxes woudl have found mine.  Ironically, it sold quickly.

FACEBOOK - I used my main account which is under my real name, Cindy Fahnestock-Schafer, which has almost 1800 friends.  That's a lot of friends (some I gained by playing a facebook game, then to put your items out to.  I also  use the free application with "MY ETSY" on it. 

I also use both the Ira Mency (for the Etsy Recyclers Guild Team page) and Cindy Fahnestock-Schafer account to link to sites who have 10,000 or more users, sometimes commenting on a photo and saying "I love this item, (or this fabric, or this idea, etc) my shop
http://www.retrochalet.etsy.com/ sells a lot of these. Thanks for sharing this photo!".

Now you have added a link to your own store onto a site or page that gets thousands of views.  Of course you can't do this twenty times on the same page, but just once in awhile.   Also if the user allows you to add photos you can do so, and put something like "this wonderful item available in my RetroChalet shop on Etsy."

USE OF PERSONAL SITE:  Whenever you have your own website, make sure you are using keywords so that googlebot can find you.  If you are using a web hosting service, make sure they are taking advantage of that.  On Verizon, they use a really easy web builder which gives you a space under "Page Properties" to describe keywords on each page for the search engines to find you.  Also make sure to use a tab and redirect.   For instance, I used to talk about my Etsy shop on my website, show pictures of recent items, blah blah blah, but now I have a tab that says BUY VINTAGE in the sidebar on http://www.iramency.com/ and just to click on it, you are redirected RIGHT to the shop.  I do think a redirection works better and these results are proof positive it does work better.

ADDITIONAL MARKETING TOOL:

Cherri Miele of http://www.cherspassion.etsy.com/ had also told me about using the same type comments  with your URL links on other websites and on direct blogs that get a lot of users. 

In other words, go to a site that gets a lot of hits, for instance, http://www.everythingetsy.com/  (a very cool site by the way and one of her faves)  where you can browse around and leave a comment about something you like.  It will ask for your name and URL link, there you can put a link to your shop, blog or personal web.  (keeping in mind all of these sites should direct people to your Etsy store!!!)  Do keep in mind, most of the comments must be approved by the moderators so you want to keep it really on the up and up and not spam out sales and all that jazz.   

I really never tried this before until Cherri mentioned it to me, because for some reason it never crossed my mind that all these blogs and personal sites DO INDEED have places for comments on their articles or posts.  I must admit I tried it and went to Poppytalk (a cool design site on Blogspot which gets  a ton of hits each month) .  I later tried the Everything Etsy also.   I left a comment, a nice message and my URL. 

RESULTS:

As of now, I have gotten 3 referrals from each of these to my store according to Google Analytics in the past month.

SO REALISTICALLY:

If I had the time to visit 50 blogs a month and do this, and could get 3 direct hits from all 50 blogs, that's another 150 hits to my store.  

 If I could then visit 25 websites and do this, and hope for 3 new referrals that's another 75 hits to my store. 

Add that to my already 150 FLICKR'd, DIRECT SITED, and FACEBOOKED driven visits, and that's  300-325 NEW hits I could be expecting a month! 

That's better than most PAID advertising out there.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS:

I urge you to use this, it's wonderful and over time you can learn what everything means.  It has really helped me a lot.  Go HERE to read more.