Analytics Foundations

What is Conversion Rate Optimization?

Getting traffic to your shop is not easy. 

If it were easy, everyone would be a success!

So the last thing you want is to waste time, effort or money on something that’s not giving you a return – and not even realize it!

That’s why we measure and monitor things like Conversation Rate, Cost per Acquisition and Profit. In fact, we want to optimize our marketing and our shop for these kinds of revenue-based numbers by doing Conversion Rate Optimization.

Optimization is the process of making something less wasteful while also providing better results. 

Instead of buying more and more ads, we optimize our shop to convert more of our visitors.

More revenue for the same ad spend.

Instead of pinning 100s of times a day, we optimize our pins to appeal to our target audience and get more clicks per pin.

The same traffic from Pinterest with much less effort.

I follow all the experts. Is my shop already optimized?

There’s a lot of great advice out there. 

There’s also a lot of “just OK” advice that works for some people, but doesn’t work for a whole lot of others.

Some of it is “best practice”.

Some is “throw it at a wall and see what sticks” practice.

Step one is to follow advice you trust, about building sustainable, targeted traffic and a shop that encourages people to buy.

Follow those best practices.

Step two is to make it work the best for you. This is where optimization comes in!

Optimization is about testing – again & again – and figuring out what works for YOU: your shop, your product, your audience.

Some “best practices” will fall by the wayside.

Some of those random tips will turn out to be gold.

And your shop will be even better!

But there’s a catch…

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 2018 2023. 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.

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!)

These days, the internet is constantly abuzz with talk about data privacy. From Facebook scandals, to updated Privacy Policies, to new laws: it’s everywhere!

So it’s perfect timing to get to know your obligations as a business owner, for the data you collect and store for your customers, contacts and website visitors.

The website had been live for a month and it was all going downhill.

It didn’t start out like this. There were hundreds of hours poured into making everything just right and carefully crafted campaigns sending visitors every day. The first reports showed good revenue and a frankly fantastic sales conversion rate of 3%.

But the next time I looked, it was 2%. Then 1.5%. What was going wrong?

Well, nothing. It was exactly what I expected. But to a stressed-out business owner, these numbers looked terrifying. The site is failing!

Why would two people interpret such obviously bad results so differently?

Love him or hate him, Josh Silverman is one of the big names of 2017. Not a politician or part of the Hollywood elite, but creating controversy nonetheless at a place that’s close to our hearts.

When Silverman stepped in as the new Etsy CEO earlier this year, his mandate was growth. That meant growth for shareholders, but also growth for sellers.

The past few years haven’t been easy, for Etsy or sellers. Despite their increasing Gross Merchandise Sales, 2014 through 2016 saw the average amount spent per buyer and per item fall. More buyers who buy cheaper things for less is not a good outcome for handmade businesses trying to crack a luxury market!

Despite this, sellers as a whole haven’t welcomed Silverman with open arms. They see him representing “big capitalism” and fear the changes he’ll bring will destroy the last vestiges of the Etsy they once knew.

A scary story, perhaps. Let’s take a break for a moment and think about ourselves…

The smell of your morning coffee still lingers in the air as your daily task list looms.

Gotta answer those customer questions…
Better update those old product descriptions…
What about that new Instagram photo challenge?

Oh and making some beautiful things. You know – the whole reason your shop exists.

Thank goodness for that coffee!

It’s hard work running a small business, especially when your online shop needs so much marketing and promotion to keep making sales. Sometimes it feels like you do more “business” than “making”.

So what I’m about to suggest might sound a little scary. We’re going to go even deeper into “business”.

The level of strategy and KPIs.

Key performance indicators? Really??!

Don’t worry, these aren’t the “awkward closed-door meetings with your boss” kind of KPI. These are the kind that focus how you measure your shop’s performance and tell you when to have a celebratory drink.

If you don’t know what success should look like, how will you know when you get there? How will you know when to crack that champagne?!

You need to figure out what your “success metrics” are, first.