lesleyhays

Are You Still Confused About 2017’s New Etsy Shop Stats?

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A few weeks ago, I visited the Etsy forums.

Did the hair stand up on the back of your neck?

Ok, so it’s not quite that scary in there. It’s just a lot of very passionate sellers who are trying to run a successful shop and are worried about changes to their platform that might make that harder.

And rightly so! It’s never nice to have the rug pulled out from under your feet.

So it didn’t surprise me one little bit to see the plethora of threads, discussions and yes – complaints – about the new Etsy Shop Stats that were released earlier this year. Sellers were talking about why the changes were made, the things they couldn’t find anymore, and the new numbers that didn’t make sense.

So what do I think? Should you be throwing in the Etsy-Shop-Stats towel or running back to it with open arms?

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lesleyhays

How to Measure Ecommerce Success like a CEO (Even after One Sale)

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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 donā€™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.

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lesleyhays

Create useful & understandable Etsy Listings reports by importing your own data (it’s easy!)

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Have you ever asked the question, “What type of listings do my visitors spend longer on?“

It’s a great question! If I sold children’s toys and toy patterns, I’d want to know what general type of products are more popular with visitors, regardless of what actually sells more.

But if you’ve spent much time in the Behavior reports in Google Analytics (which is where you’ll find all your listings), you’ll know that you can’t just group them by their Section. That info just isn’t in there at all!

You know what I’m going to say… we can totally fix that!

listing-performance-reporting_bad-vs-good

You can take your Listings reports to the next level by putting inĀ whatever information you want about every listing. So keep reading to find out how…

āš ļø 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.

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lesleyhays

Find individual Etsy buyers in Google Analytics

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āš ļø 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 also has a User Explorer and the method below is broadly the same to narrow it down to a single buyer, using segments. However, the GA4 version does not clearly show a flow of pages viewed or even the session traffic source, so the info you find on the buyer is ultimately not that useful.

Try the advanced Buyers Sample for GA4 instead
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lesleyhays

Four Google Analytics dashboards just for Etsy shop owners

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This article was originally about four custom dashboards for Universal Analytics, a version of Google Analytics that is no longer available. It has been updated to reflect the improved method of using Looker Studio to build dashboards for Google Analytics 4.

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.

This built-in dashboard capability of Universal Analytics was never very full-featured, but it was an easy introduction to “dashboarding”.

In GA4, you can customise the “native” reports a bit more, to highlight the metrics that are important to your shop. The reporting capabilities are also much more powerful.

But to really create a visual dashboard like we’re used to, you need to learn a new tool.

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lesleyhays

Compare your Etsy listings easily with Content Groupings

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OUT OF DATE:Ā These instructions were originally provided forĀ Universal Analytics. This version of Google Analytics is no longer available.

Content Groupings also exist in Google Analytics 4 but cannot be controlled in the admin section. You need access to the actual tracking code, which we do not have with Etsy. This ability might be added later as Google continues work on GA4 functionality!

It’s a fact of shop-ownership-life that some listingsĀ do better than others. Sometimes your best pieces fly off the shelves; other times peopleĀ seem to loveĀ that one listing with a terrible photo (so you think). And of course there are items you’re super proud of that get no traction.

So you want to find out why. You want to see how long people stay on particular listings, where they go to next, whether certain traffic sources send more interested visitors than others.

Those are questions for Google Analytics to answer, but if you head over to your All Pages report, you’ll find something frustrating. You can’t just compare a list of all your products.

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lesleyhays

Do they love me? How to measure visitor engagement with your shop

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Not all traffic is equal. It’s incredibly important to be able to identify valuable visitors.

Visits that lead to sales.

Unfortunately, you can’t track Etsy sales in Google Analytics right now, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have conversion rates. I’m not talking purchase conversions here (sales) but goals that imply something good: engagement, getting-close-to-the-sale-ness. Then you can say what percentage of your visits met this criteria, and whether some traffic sources, products etc. performed better than others.

Let’s call thisĀ an Engagement Rate!

IMPORTANT:Ā These instructions are for Universal Analytics.Ā Google Analytics 4Ā comes with built-in Engagement and Engagement Rate metrics that measure roughly the same visitor behaviour – yay!

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lesleyhays

Understand your Etsy audience with Google Analytics Demographics

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OUT OF DATE:Ā These instructions were originally provided forĀ Universal Analytics. This version of Google Analytics is no longer available.

The equivalent feature in Google Analytics 4 is now Google Signals. Learn more about enabling and using Google Signals in GA4 (InfoTrust).

Google Analytics lets us see all sorts of interesting things about our visitors, like where they came from, what city they’re in, or what search term they used. But there’s a whole bunchĀ of information that you’ve probably never seen!

Demographics.

Yep, that’s gender, age & interests straight into your Analytics reports!

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lesleyhays

How to Measure your Shop Visitors from Instagram

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If you have a boutique ecommerce shop, you probably use Instagram.

But if you look in Google Analytics, you’ll see close to no traffic from this supposedly wonderful handmade-marketing-engine. What’s going on?

Is it a failure? Or are your Instagram visitors just hidden?

When somebody taps the link in your profile and it opens your shop, Instagram doesn’t pass on any “referral” information to your shop. It doesn’t tell it thatĀ Instagram opened that link. As far as your shop is concerned, and therefore your Google Analytics tracking code and even Etsy Shop Stats (for Etsy sellers), that personĀ may as well have opened up their mobile web browser and manually typed your shop address in.

In other words, Google Analytics and Shop Stats track that as a Direct visit.

And you have no idea which of all your Direct visits came from Instagram. You can guess by looking at which ones came from mobiles or tablets, but it’s not reliable.

This is where campaign (or UTM) tagging comes in.

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lesleyhays

How to banish “referral spam” in Google Analytics (for Etsy)

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These instructions are for Universal Analytics only. Referral spam is less of a problem these days (2022 onwards) and in Google Analytics 4, which Etsy now supports.

If you’re here, you’ve probably noticed something weird going on in your Google Analytics reports. And if you haven’t noticed anything weird, follow along and you might get a surprise.

Analytics can usually tell you, very precisely, where your visitors came from, both geographically and on the web. As you’ll find out in future posts, that’s tricky to get right when you run an Etsy shop, but there’s one problem that almost every site has these days: referral spam.

“Referral spam” is when useless, fake or malicious websites show up as having sent traffic to your site. They haven’t. At least not real people visitors.

This article might be useful to you when analysing historical data from your Universal Analytics account, after you back it up.

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