Reading and understanding the numbers around your shop’s traffic is super important. If you can do this, you can better understand where you should focus your marketing, what parts of your shop could be improved, and make sure you’re seeing real benefits from all your promoting efforts.
(And we know promotion needs A LOT of effort!!)
There are two sources for this information: Etsy’s built-in Stats and Google Analytics (“Analytics” or just “GA”). They both have their pros and cons, so you’ll most likely continue to use both hand-in-hand to gauge your performance. But when should you use each one?
This article references GA Universal Analytics, which is going away in July 2023. Etsy does not currently support Google Analytics 4, so we might be left with only Shop Stats after all!
Two reasons to use Etsy Stats:
The default Stats are built by Etsy, for Etsy sellers. Even with the 2017 updates, the numbers you get are basic and very limited in how you can analyse them, but they are useful for three things:
1. In-Etsy traffic sources & search terms
Out of the box, Etsy Stats will give you the most reliable information about visits from within Etsy (search, ads, other pages, the app etc). This includes what search terms your visitors use to find you.
By default, Google Analytics shows you how visitors got to Etsy as a whole, not just your shop. But it’s fixable!
In particular, Shop Stats gives you a really good breakdown of visitors arriving from somewhere else inside Etsy. Nowadays, even Stats in-Etsy breakdown is fairly basic: Search, Ads, Etsy Marketing & SEO, and “Other Etsy”. There’s no way to see the difference between App visits and visits from Favorites, for example.
2. Showing sales & revenue
Nope, Etsy doesn’t send your sales over to Google Analytics 🙁
So if you want to see a nice graph of orders or revenue, or understand how much revenue you’ve made on Etsy paid listings or Offsite Ads, you need to use Stats or the advertising managers inside Shop Manager.
And you should: you should be watching your ROI like a hawk!
3. Showing favourites you’ve received
Etsy Stats no longer includes information about when your listings are Favorited. Their research indicated that Faves didn’t correlate with sales, so this info could be more distracting than useful.
Many reasons to use Google Analytics!
Analytics is great for… everything else! Like:
- Separating out individual visits (especially buyers).
- Tracking down the results of your marketing efforts, beyond just “visits”.
- Seeing how long people stay in your store and view each product for, and how they move from item to item.
- Seeing where they get stuck or decide to exit your store.
- Where they’re from (often down to the City!) and sometimes demographics like age or gender.
- Which search terms work the best (are you optimising for the right ones, even if you get lots of views from them?)
- Avoiding a bunch of BOT visits that Etsy still tracks (showing up as “Direct” visit inside Stats).
Most importantly, Google Analytics can connect all this information:
eg. Which product is viewed most by visitors from Pinterest in Canada?
Comments (2)
Excellent article. It would be great if you could elaborate more on how to understand the linkage of Google Analytics and Etys better. Trying to drill down into the Google Analytics and understand them would be great.
Thanks,
Robin
Hi Robin,
I have a bunch of Analytics-focused posts planned for this year and just recently posted my first one. Check it out if you get a minute! I’m going to start with some hands-on technical stuff to get your account set up properly then move to how to analyse the data once it’s cleaned up and accurate.