lesleyhays

Google Analytics vs Etsy Stats: Which is Better?

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Reading and understanding the numbers around your shop’s traffic is super important. If you can do this, you can better understand where you should focus your marketing, what parts of your shop could be improved, and make sure you’re seeing real benefits from all your promoting efforts.

(And we know promotion needs A LOT of effort!!)

There are two sources for this information: Etsy’s built-in Stats and Google Analytics (“Analytics” or just “GA”). They both have their pros and cons, so you’ll most likely continue to use both hand-in-hand to gauge your performance. But when should you use each one?

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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

The Secret of Professional Analysts is Segmentation (and it’s easy!)

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I think I’m lucky. I get to talk to people about digital analytics almost every day. (Hey, it’s fun for me, ok?)

But over the years I’ve noticed something a bit silly.

Everyone’s always talking about how to measure more stuff and see more reports.

They need to capture every movement of every visitor.
They want to dip their fingers into a swirling ocean of numbers.
They’re desperate for a veritable avalanche of interactive charts straight off the set of Minority Report.

And it’s all a complete waste of time if you don’t know how to take the next step.

The most important work you will do in Analytics isn’t setting up traffic attribution or installing dashboards. It’s actually analysing your data.

And wow, can that be a daunting prospect! Where on earth do you start? What should you look at first? How do you know when something is important and what can you even do about it??

Luckily, there’s a simple place to start and it’s called segmentation. It’s the bread and butter of analysis, is super easy to learn and will make finding those important insights so much easier.

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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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