Years ago, almost all of my clients also partnered with a Search Engine Optimization agency.
Google was king and SEO was strategy #1.
Then social media marketing took over as businesses discovered the value of free exposure on Facebook and Twitter. The results were faster and it was no harder than SEO.
Now it’s 20182023. Organic reach on social media is still a shadow of its former self. Advertising costs on the major networks (AdWords and Facebook) are doubling every year. And AI chatbots are loudly heralding the return of the king: search is back – and this time, it’s smarter!
If your marketing strategy is getting more complicated and expensive every month, it’s time to re-discover the value of organic search traffic.
Google Analytics 4 is a brand new version of this powerful tool. When I say “brand new”, I mean it is completely different! There are some exciting, really powerful features. And some missing features. There’s also the important question of whether it works with Etsy!
So let’s get a quick overview of what GA4 means for boutique ecommerce sellers.
👋👋 Universal Analytics is going away in late 2023
DEFINITION: “Universal Analytics” is the name of the old version of Google Analytics that we used for many years. From here, I’ll refer to it as “UA“.
On March 16, 2022, Google announced that Universal Analytics (UA) will stop processing new data on 1 July, 2023 and reports on historical data will only be accessible until 1 July 2024.
And even if you decide you need to “get your bounce rate down”, you first need to have a deeper understanding of what causes bounces than just “bounce = bad”.
Let’s have a look at what a bounce rate really is and what a “bounce” means for different parts of your online shop.
One of the more frustrating parts of using Google Analytics with Etsy is that we cannot see ecommerce metrics.
That’s right: Etsy does not tell GA when a sale occurs, so we get big fat zeros for everything from Transactions to Average Order Value to Ecommerce Conversion Rate, no matter how many actual sales you’re making in Etsy. It’s not just a matter of enabling Ecommerce Tracking in your GA settings; Etsy simply doesn’t send the data to be tracked.
Luckily, all is not lost!
If you make regular sales on Etsy and have had GA connected for at least a few months, you can use an Advanced Segment to identify a slice of your buyers in your GA reports. The most useful thing this lets you see is general trends around the traffic sources that send you buyers.
⚠️ IMPORTANT! These instructions are for GA Universal Analytics and are no longer applicable.Etsy now supports GA4.
The out-of-date article below is available to read if interested. If the topic is still relevant in GA4, it might be updated in the future.
Google Analytics 4 has similar segment capabilities as those used in this technique. You should be able to use this technique in GA4 once you have a few months’ of data.
A few years ago, Etsy started showing products from other shops on our own listings. It went over about as well as you can imagine, but they’ve stuck with it and Etsy shop owners have learned to live with it.
Here’s how they looked in 2020:
(That is a very eye-catching background behind those other listings, Etsy!!)
Update from 2025: Related listings are still shown – including ads – both above and below Etsy listings. And yes, the technique in this article STILL WORKS!
There is a solution!
By making a small change to the links you share, you can send visitors to product listings that focus on YOUR product, not other Etsy shops.
⚠️ IMPORTANT! These instructions are for GA Universal Analytics and are no longer applicable.Etsy now supports GA4.
The out-of-date article below is available to read if interested. If the topic is still relevant in GA4, it might be updated in the future.
POP QUIZ: Can Google Analytics answer this question?
“How do people find my Etsy store?”
At first, Google Analytics looks like it has all the answers! There in your reports, you see: direct traffic, referrals, a few from Facebook and other social media… Isn’t that how they got there?
ANSWER: Nope! Not unless you follow the instructions in this guide.
Well, that means that any of the traffic sources you see in Google Analytics could show how that person found the Etsy home page or an entirely different shop before they navigated to yours within Etsy. Half your so-called social media traffic could be from other people’s marketing! (And not in a good way…)
Even worse, Google Analytics doesn’t show you how people found your shop within Etsy, which makes up the bulk of your traffic. Etsy search, clicks from favorites or recently viewed, promoted listings: all hidden.
That kinda sucks.
Where’s all the Etsy traffic? Probably in “(direct) / (none)”…
A long time ago, when I worked in retail, I envied the prim, organised merchandisers whose sole responsibility was (as far as I could tell from behind the counter) to fluff around with enticing displays of gifts and stationery.
I know I’m not the only one!
Now as Etsy sellers, we get to “merchandise” our own online shops every day.
Check how our listing thumbnails look all together in the catalogue.
Pour over a new product page to make sure every detail is perfect.
Go through our shop policies with a fine tooth comb to make sure we aren’t accidentally committing to replacing unwanted items with a lifetime supply of Starbucks…
And I know—because I’ve spent my fair share of time there—that we do a lot of this “fluffing around” in our public shop front. You know – the exact same view that our buyers see.
The pages of our shop where our Google Analytics code runs. Those pages.
Direct traffic in Google Analytics is one of the first big mysteries you discover. What is direct traffic? Why does it perform so well? Who are these people?
What is this?
Every other traffic source seems so self-explanatory: Google, Pinterest, organic (search), email… But (direct) / (none). Direct from where? None of what?
No seriously. What IS this? What does it mean and why is there so much of it?
In this guide, you’ll get a thorough but easy to understand introduction to the mystery of Direct Traffic. You’ll learn:
Why “Direct” is fundamentally different from all your other traffic sources
What kinds of visits it actually includes
How to keep it “clean”
How to analyze it
This article has been updated for Google Analytics 4.
If you’ve hung around here for a while, you’ll have heard a little about UTM Campaign Tags. They are the magic ingredient for making sure that visits from Instagram, Pinterest and anywhere else show up in your Google Analytics reports correctly.
Why doesn’t this happen right in the first place??
To know where a visitor came from, Google Analytics has to listen in to the conversation happening between the visitor’s browser and your website. Often this conversation includes information about the last page the visitor looked at (their traffic source).
This is called “referral” information.
But sometimes, for a whole bunch of technical reasons, it doesn’t have this information or it’s wrong. In many of these cases, the visit will be attributed as “direct” traffic (the catch-all black hole bucket of mystery visits!)and you’ll never know if your marketing actually worked.
Campaign tags let us control all the information about the source of the visit and leave nothing to chance.
See? Magic!
Keep reading to find out how and where to use campaign tags for marketing your handmade shop!
This article has been updated for Google Analytics 4. (You don’t need to change your tagged links!)
