Thursday, October 22, 2009

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/products, 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.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

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.