Roll Your Own Etsy Tracking Code

Yesterday I explained how to interpret Etsy's internal reference codes on your google analytics reports to see where your internal etsy traffic is coming from (you can see if one of your items was on the front page, for example, or how much traffic you get from Etsy searches or category browsing.)

Now here's the cool thing: You can create your own custom ref-codes and use them to track visits to your pages from anywhere you can enter a URL. Just replace the Etsy ref code with your own:

etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=MYOWNCODE&listing_id=XXXXX

(the ID number being the number of your item listing)

Where would you use this? A few ideas:

Maybe you use the promos topic and you want to see how many visits a link there generates. Insert something like ref=promo into the URL and you'll be able to see exactly how many clicks it gets in your google report.

Or maybe you have more than one shop and you post links to them in your shop announcements. You can insert ref codes there, too, to see how many people are finding your shop through your other shops.

Or maybe you put links to related items in your item descriptions. Put a little ref code in the link to tell you if people are following them.

But how do you keep all those codes straight? Google will do it for you. I'll show you how later.