lesleyhays

Four Google Analytics dashboards just for Etsy shop owners

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OUT OF DATE: These instructions were originally provided for Universal Analytics.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

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.

The built-in dashboard tool in the old 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OUT OF DATE: These instructions were originally provided for Universal Analytics.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 listings do better than others. Sometimes your best pieces fly off the shelves; other times people seem to love 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 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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lesleyhays

Understand your Etsy audience with Google Analytics Demographics

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OUT OF DATE: These instructions were originally provided for 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 bunch 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 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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