Think back to your last marketing effort… Did it work?
You saw your visits increase, ok. But really – did it work?
What I’m asking is, “Were those visits valuable?” Was the effort to get them worthwhile?
If you’re not sure if they were valuable or not, you aren’t alone!
You first need to know how to define “valuable”, which is normally based on what actions those visitors took. You know… whether they bought something, or at least faved your store or product. But that’s not always (or possible) to track in Google Analytics – especially in a marketplace like Etsy.
So instead, we can use a “proxy”. Behaviour that suggests a visitor might be interested in buying something or adding you to their favourites.
We need to track “engagement” with your store: how long they spent there and how many pages they viewed. From this, we’ll build an “engagement rate” so you can compare engagement between traffic sources, landing pages and audience segments.
What does “engagement” really mean?
We can’t always be sure that a high engagement rate indicates “likelihood to buy”. You should build up a picture over time of whether you think they correlate or not, based on the information you do know about your buyers. If you can turn on ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics (more on that later), then you have a huge advantage here!
Here are some things to keep in mind:
- Spending a long time on your site, with many page views, could indicate that the visitor is struggling to find what they’re after. But most people give up much sooner than this.
- ON ETSY: People who “impulse buy” after landing on a listing will go straight into the checkout system and BOUNCE out of your store. They will have a 0% engagement rate. If your items are real “impulse buys”, you might have less correlation between purchases and engagement rate (but try it anyway).
Do It: Set up your engagement rate
Follow these instructions to start measuring an Engagement Rate for your shop:
