If you’re ready to harness the power of numbers to improve your shop but haven’t installed Google Analytics yet, don’t wait any longer!
Here are my instructions for setting up your Account the right way, with up to date steps and screenshots.
Read moreDirect traffic in Google Analytics is one of the first big mysteries you discover. What does it mean? Why does it perform so well? Who are these people?
Every other traffic source seems so self-explanatory: Google, Pinterest, organic (search), email… But (direct) / (none). Direct. None. What do these even mean?
In this guide, you’ll get a thorough but easy to understand introduction to the mystery of Direct Traffic. You’ll learn:
You pay good money for your ads on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest! So don’t let all that valuable traffic get lumped in with your other visitors from social media, in the generic “Social” Channel.
It’s important to clearly separate social media traffic you’ve paid for (advertising) and organic traffic (from your own and others’ posts). In this guide, we’ll create a new Channel called “Paid Social” that will automagically capture all our social ad visitors, where they can be analyzed separately.
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 mysterious 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!
Before you start creating or testing things with Filters in Google Analytics, it’s important to take some steps to keep your data safe.
Whenever you make changes to your GA settings for things like Goals, Filters, Content Groupings etc. — all the things I describe in my articles — the changes to your data are permanent. You need a backup without any of these changes, just in case you get something wrong…
Like accidentally creating a filter that removes ALL your traffic and you don’t notice for a week… right during a big ad campaign!
Oops…
A Testing area takes it one step further to let you test out these settings first, then apply them to your main set of data only when you’re sure they’re working correctly. It’s up to you to decide how risky you think a change is and whether you should test it out first.
In Analytics, you can have multiple ways of viewing the same data. These are called, appropriately, Views.
In this guide, we’ll create a backup “Raw Data” view to preserve everything with the default settings, and a “Test” view for trialing more complicated Filters before applying them to your main View (normally called “All Web Site Data”).
Read moreYears 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. Organic reach on social media is a shadow of its former self. Advertising costs on the major networks (AdWords and Facebook) are doubling every year.
If your marketing strategy is getting more complicated and expensive every month, it’s time to re-discover the value of organic search traffic.
Read more
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Sound familiar? Yep, they’re the bleating calls of a million businesses rushing to ask you to consent (again) to their email marketing.
Whether you all it re-consent, re-subscribe or re-permission, it’s all the same: an attempt to get your consent to their marketing in a form they didn’t already have.
This is related to the GDPR, which is making consent more strictly defined. Businesses who bundled marketing consent into other services or that didn’t give enough granular information on their sign up form might decide that the consent they have now won’t be good enough on May 26th.
It also reminds us that we need a good “audit trail” for our consent. Businesses that have moved contacts between systems might have lost their original consent records – even though they know they got them – and might choose to re-permission, just to be safe.
Finally, it’s a good idea to ask for re-consent from inactive or old contacts, regardless. You might run re-consent campaigns regularly, or even have them automatically go out when a contact is a certain “age”.
The definitions and requirements for consent is a legal topic. I’m not a lawyer and none of the information in this article should be interpreted as legal advice. Please do your own due diligence to determine if or how much of this information is relevant to your circumstances, and whether you should seek professional legal advice.
For the last few months, the internet has been 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.
Read moreThe 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?
Read moreLove 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…
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