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 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.

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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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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 this an Engagement Rate!

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

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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 that 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 person 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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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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