New Guide to Etsy Analytics

I have been consolidating and updating the various blog posts I've made over the years about Google Analytics for your Etsy shop, and have placed them all in one guide, which I have decided to offer for sale on Etsy. I'll continue to help out where I can and offer GA tips here on the blog.

I wanted to put everything together in one easily updated collection so people could have a full reference. As Google and Etsy change their own features, no doubt the GA techniques will change, and I'll be able to update everyone at once when these changes are made.

Unofficial Guide to Etsy Analytics

Etsy Starts Product Feed Testing

This week Etsy will begin beta testing its product feed to Google's Product Search database. At the beginning of September, Google announced it would no longer accept feeds from individual sellers who maintained shops on venue sites like Etsy and would require such sites to submit products on behalf of their users if they wanted their items in Google's database of products.

Etsy has been working with Google and will be one of three pilot venue sites that have worked with Google to ensure the quality of the data feed and that the sites will be able to field questions from their users - part of the new Google policies is that the site will now offer support to its users on Google Product Search questions, not Google directly.

Since Google is making this move, it says, to prevent duplicate listings of the same item, there are still questions about whether sellers who have products being fed from more than one venue site will have their items considered duplicates. Early indications seem to suggest that if the titles and descriptions are identical, Google may flag them as duplicates and remove them.

As a result, Etsy is recommending that sellers choose just one site for handling their feed. One major advantage Etsy's feed will have over other similar sites is that it will retain the individual shop's name with each item listed in Google, not replace it with the venue site's name.

Tracking your traffic from Google Base

Google now requires venue sites like 1KM and Etsy to submit all their merchants' product feeds to Google product listings together rather than allowing individual merchants to submit their own directly. As a result, merchants have lost the ability to track their visits from the Google product search by logging in to their Google Merchant Center account.

But it is still possible to track the incoming traffic from these links using Google Analytics. Here's how:

Google Analytics lets you filter incoming traffic based on the referring source and "re-write" it so it shows up separately in your reports. By default, your Google Products traffic will be lumped in with your organic Google Search traffic. But, where Google searches come in from google.com, Google product searches come from google.com/products. You can filter all the traffic that comes from google.com/traffics, extract it from your regular Google search traffic, and output it to its own line in your Traffic Sources reports.

First, find the profile for the shop you want to apply the filter to and click the Edit link on the right side of the table.

Find the Filter box (the third one from the top) and click the + Add Filter link at the right.

At the top of the page, select Add new Filter for Profile

In the box called Enter Filter Information refer to the screenshot below:

Filter Name Give the filter a name that will let you recognize what it does, like Google Products

Filter Type Select Custom filter and the rest of the information fields will be displayed. Select Advanced

Field A -> Extract A From the dropdown menu, select Referral and in the text box, type in google\.com/products (note the backslash before the dot in the address. This is important)

Field B -> Extract B From the dropdown menu select Campaign Medium and in the text box enter organic

Output To -> Constructor From the dropdown menu select Campaign Source and in the text box enter google products (or any other source name that will allow you to recognize the traffic source)

Field A Required Yes

Field B Required Yes

Override Output Field Yes

Case Sensitive No

Save changes

To see your traffic from the Google product search, look in your Traffic Sources report in Google Analytics - it will now show up as google products / organic for the medium and source:

You can click on this line to see the keywords people have used to find your items in the Google Product search.

Note: you can use this filter on all your venue sites. Follow the first few steps of these instructions to get to the Filter page of the site you want to track, but instead of selecting Apply a new filter select Apply an existing filter. A list of your filters will be displayed under the names you gave them. You can select your filter from the list and add it to your shop profile.

More Vintage than Art on Etsy

Vintage is now the third largest category of listings on Etsy, after Jewelry and Supplies - and both of those top two categories lost share in September.

Jewelry is still overwhelmingly the largest single Etsy category, with over 1.12 million listings as of October 14. Supplies is a distant second, with just over 595,000 listings as of October 14. In the past 60 days, Jewelry has dropped from 25.37% of the total listings to 24.72%, while Supplies has dropped from 13.41% of the total listings to 13.09%

Vintage, with 437,058 items listed as of October 14, grew from 9.04% of the total listings to 9.61%. Art, with 432,522 as of October 14, dropped from 9.91% of the total listings to 9.51% over the past 60 days.

Create Custom Sections in your Etsy Shop

Etsy limits you to ten sections in your shop, and items can only beling in one section. However, you can "roll your own" sections - as many as you like - if you get creative with Etsy's search capabilities.

The trick is to use tags or title words to indicate the section, then create a link to all the items in your shop with that tag or title word. Etsy has a search type that will limit the search to items within one shop. This is a tags and titles search.

So, for example, here's a link to all of the items in Mannequin Reject's shop that have "pendant" in the title or tags:


www.etsy.com/search_results_shop.php?
search_type=user_shop_ttt_id_5512963&search_query=pendant

To make your own links, put your own user ID where it says user_shop_ttt_id_XXXXXX and put the tags or words you want to use after where it says search_query= (if you want to use more than one word in the search, connect them with plus signs. search_query=pendant+purple will list all items with both "purple" and "pendant" in the tags and/or titles) To include an item in one of these collections, you just need to include the search word or words in the title and/or tags.

You could then list your "sections" somewhere in your shop. Because they are inter-etsy links, they'll be live and visitors can click them to go directly to the section.

You might put them in your profile, as a list, like:

Pendants: www.etsy.com/search_results_shop.php?
search_type=user_shop_ttt_id_5512963&search_query=pendant

Buttons: www.etsy.com/search_results_shop.php?
search_type=user_shop_ttt_id_5512963&search_query=buttons

Steampunk: www.etsy.com/search_results_shop.php?
search_type=user_shop_ttt_id_5512963&search_query=steampunk

Then, in your shop announcement, you could put a line with something like Browse all my sections: www.etsy.com/profile.php?user_id=5512963

Or you could just list the sections in the shop announcement directly.

One drawback is that the link to these kinds of sections don't appear in the sidebar with the other sections. You might want to include a link within the item listing itself, at the bottom, so people could continue to browse through the section. Something like:

More Pendants: www.etsy.com/search_results_shop.php?
search_type=user_shop_ttt_id_5512963&search_query=pendant

It isn't a pretty solution, but it is very flexible. By using tags and title words, you can include an item in as many of these "sections" as you like.

Campaign Tracking with GA

I try to encourage merchants to use GA as a tool to measure their own efforts rather than just a way to view the behavior of people who "happen" to view their shops.

Here's one way to take charge - use Google's ad campaign tracking tools.

You have probably noticed how 1KM and Etsy add information to the URLs of your products that show where people found them from within the site. You can add similar information to the URLs you use when you create links to your shop that you place on your blog or website, in e-mail newsletters, Project Wonderful ads, etc.

If you use Google's specific method for adding information to your URLs, Google Analytics will pull the information from your ad campaigns and organize it so you can focus on it, make adjustments, and measure the results.

I've put together a Google Presentation that explains more about how to put together an ad campaign that will give you hard data you can use to improve your efforts.

Tracking your 1KM Appearances on the Home Page

1KM inserts a little bit of code into the link of products that are shown on the home page. When someone clicks on a product, that information is passed along to Google Analytics, making it possible to see if you have received any traffic from products of yours that were on the front page.

Here's the simplest way to check - look at the URL in your Content report. Home page items will include the code site_medium=homepage. Like this:

http://www.1000markets.com/products/84467?site_source=1000markets&site_medium=homepage

You can search through your content reports using the little search box at the bottom of the report. To use it to search your report for page views from the home page, first go to your Top Content report, under the Content tab in the menu on the left sidebar.



Then look at the bottom of the list of URLs for the Filter Page box.



Enter the word homepage into the box and click Go.

Google will search your content URLs and return any that have the word homepage in them.

If you find that one of your products has been linked from the home page, you can drill down even further by clicking on the URL. This will tell you the day on which the link was clicked, how long people who found you on the home page spent looking at your site, and so on.

Note 1KM currently only puts the homepage code in the links to individual products that appear on the home page, not in the links to featured shops or markets.