⚠️ These instructions are for GA Universal Analytics and are no longer applicable. Etsy now supports GA4.
Dashboards are like snapshots of your shop’s performance. They let you get a quick, birds eye view of how things are going and what might need a deeper look.
Google Analytics lets you create dashboards that show you all sorts of things, but it’s tricky to know how to put them together if you haven’t learnt all the important metrics and dimensions yet. It’s also really important to think about what you want to see on a day-to-day basis before you start building one, to make sure your dashboard is genuinely useful.
So I’ve put together four Google Analytics dashboards that are tailored JUST for Etsy shops. Keep reading to find out what they show and how to install them in just a few clicks!
Before you start (read these instructions first)
1. Before you use these dashboards, make sure you’ve ticked off every “preparation” step.
(It’s ok to install the dashboards straight away! You just might see errors or no data until you finish the preparation.)
2. To install the dashboards, just the “install” links below. This will open up Google Analytics where you can choose which View to apply them to. For now, select the “Test View” for your Etsy shop.
3. Once you’ve installed each one into your Test View, you can access them in the left-hand menu like this:
If you need to apply them to your main View, just come back to this post and re-install each one again, selecting “All Web Site Data” instead.
Dashboard One: Audience Analysis
Who’s visiting your shop? Enjoy a quick overview of age, gender, location and interests.
What can you see?
- Total visitors
- Engagement of new vs returning visitors
- Gender & age comparisons
- City & country comparisons
- Top visitor interests
Preparation
- Turn on Demographics reporting
- Create your custom Engagement Rate (including the “calculated metric”!)
Dashboard Two: Traffic Sources
Get an overview of where people are coming from, inside and outside of Etsy, and how engaged they are. This dashboard also lists your top 10 search phrases for Etsy search and paid listings, and how they perform (which is important!).
What can you see?
- Most common traffic Channels
- Visits & engagement rate across your top 10 traffic sources
- Engagement rate of sources “within Etsy”
- Top-used keywords in Etsy search and their Engagement Rate – including for paid listings.
Preparation
- Create your custom Engagement Rate (including the “calculated metric”!)
- Set up (or double-check) the settings to measure real traffic sources.
Dashboard Three: Social Media Marketing
This dashboard shows you which social networks & campaigns are bringing you traffic, how that traffic performs and what pages they land on. It also breaks it down into organic and paid traffic, which is useful as social advertising becomes more & more important.
What can you see?
- Total visits from social media
- Which networks perform better, for organic and paid social marketing
- Performance of individual campaigns
- Performance of individual landing pages (both organic and paid)
Preparation
- Create your custom Engagement Rate (including the “calculated metric”!)
- Learn to use Campaign Tags in on all your social media posts, especially advertising.
- Get started by “tagging” your Instagram bio link…
Choose the right “medium” to put your social traffic in the dashboard!
Use the medium of “sm” for any social advertising.
Example: https://www.etsy.com/shop/littlebonecollector?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=sm&utm_campign=Winter+Sale
Use the medium of “referral” or “social” for any organic social posts or links.
Example: https://www.etsy.com/shop/littlebonecollector?utm_source=pinterest.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campign=Own+Pins
Dashboard Four: Listings
Get insight into what visitors think of your listings based on engagement rate, time on the page, bounce rate and pageviews. Combined, you can start to see what’s doing well and what needs improvement.
What can you see?
- Average bounce rate and time spent on listings.
- The traffic sources that sent visits directly to listings.
- Top 10 listings as “landing pages” and their Engagement Rate.
- Top 5 listings with…
- Most views
- Longest views
- Highest bounce rates
Preparation
- Configure your Product Pages Content Grouping.
- Create your custom Engagement Rate (including the “calculated metric”!)
Oh no, my dashboards are missing stuff!
These four dashboards are tailored for Etsy shops that use the measurement techniques I’ve taught so far. So if you don’t have all of these set up, you might see errors or big fat zeros. Here’s what you might see and how to fix it:
The Audience dashboard is missing age, gender & interests?
Turn on Demographics reporting! (Or choose a longer timeframe – you might not have enough visitors to show this sensitive information.)
Some widgets are showing an “invalid definition” error?
Set up some Engagement goals and create the custom Engagement Rate calculated metric.
There are no listings in the Listings Analysis (it’s all “not set”)?
Configure your Product Pages Content Grouping or wait a little longer for new visits to your listings to be grouped (it won’t work retroactively).
There are no search terms in the Traffic Sources Analysis?
Set up (or double-check) the settings to measure real traffic sources.
If you’re seeing any of these problems and think you’ve already done what I suggest, then check your date range. Remember – all of these things only start from when you first set them up, so you can’t use these dashboards to report on dates before that time.
Comments (7)
Hi Lesley,
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have discovered your site and blog! You were referred in a recent Etsy Forum post and I thought I would check it out. While I’ve had Google Analytics connected to my Etsy Shop, ThePreciousPast and a couple of other websites I own, I’ve never really been able to get my head around much of the data. Well, it’s looks those days are over!
Thanks so much for the fabulous help with the Google Analytics!
Steve
Hi Steve, welcome! It’s great to hear you’re learning a bunch & please don’t hesitate to ask any questions.
Hi Lesley,
Brilliant site and really interesting. I can’t find the link to the dashboards in this article though. Am I overlooking something?
Peter
Hi Peter, it looks like they’d dropped off this article (or I had a bad proofreading day!!). I’ve now added them in under the name of each dashboard, in big letters. Sorry for the mixup!
Very kind of you and thanks for the instructive posts, great blog.
Hi Lesley!
I am new to using GA with my Etsy Shop, and I found your website. It’s absolutely amazing. Sincerely, it’s awesome and easy to understand. Can’t wait to see those datas in action.
Now that may be a really stupid question, but once I am convinced by my test view that everything is working fine, is there an easy way to copy ALL the configs that I did (everything listed under “preparation” for the four dashboard) from the test view to my main view ? Call it lazyness, but I would so love a good ol’ copy&paste haha.
Hi Alexe, great to have you here!
There are a few options for moving your settings over to your main view.
1. Grab a free trial of Analytics Toolkit to use their Copy/Paste tool: https://www.analytics-toolkit.com/analytics-copy-paste/
2. Use the built-in options (you might also need to do this for anything the tool above doesn’t move):
a) Go to ADMIN > Test view > Share Assets (right down the bottom).
This list cover segments, custom reports, goals & dashboards. Tick the ones you want to share > [Share] > Share template link. Just visit the URL it gives you and select your main view to apply the assets.
b) Filters can be added very easily. When you click to add a filter to your main view, “Apply existing filter” is an option at the top. You can then just move over all the filters you have in your Test view.
c) Everything else, including settings, calculated metrics and changes to the Default Channel Grouping need to be re-done manually. But will be so much quicker than the first time, trust me!