Now that you’re confident using the Source/Medium report, you can start asking – and answering – questions about your shop traffic.
Here’s one to start with:
What are your two best traffic sources? How does their performance compare with the effort you put into them?
Consider the impact
Hold up! Just because you’ve seen an interesting trend and you’re pretty sure it’s “real” (not just chance), that doesn’t mean you should DO something about it!
What?!?
Consider this example: Etsy search gets 5% Engagement Rate and Google search gets 10%.
If that average was gathered with 10,000 visits from Etsy search and 2,000 visits from Google search, we might decide that it’s likely that Google search really does get you better visitors.
So do we stop optimizing our listings to show up in Etsy searches and start focusing solely on Google?
No! We still get five times as many visits from Etsy search and I doubt it’d be possible to swap those numbers around.
The effect of the difference in Engagement Rate is actually quite small. The result of taking that action could be negative as you could lose more Etsy search visits than you gain from Google searches.
I like to call this step, “Consider the impact”. Just because something performs better or worse, doesn’t mean it’s worth spending time or money on.