Tracking your "Social Traffic" on Etsy: Part One

Etsy's new Activity Feed and Circles take several of the "social sharing" features of the site and put them in one place, while adding a new feature that allows users to follow one another's activity using the "Circles" function.

This new feature has moved user profiles into new prominence, as the shop name links and avatars that appear in the Activity Feed and Circles point to a user's profile page rather than shop pages.

The new profile pages now include information boxes along the right side of the page that show a user's item listings (if the profile is for a seller), and the user's favorite items and favorite shops.

Unfortunately, Etsy has not tagged links from the Activity Feed so Etsy sellers can track the traffic they receive. There is a way to get an idea of how much traffic we are getting from these new features by looking at the sources for our profile traffic.

Because traffic from Etsy pages outside of our shops show up as direct traffic, we can look for how many times we get a "direct" hit on our profile page. Since the Activity Feed is currently the only place that links directly to our profile page without a reference code attached, direct visits are likely to be from the Activity Feed.

To find your direct profile traffic:

1. Open your Google Analytics account and click on the Content section in the menu on the left sidebar.
2. Under the Content section, select Content Drilldown.
3. In the list of results, click on the link that reads /people/
4. In the list of results, find the link for your profile page. It will be in the form /shopname without a slash at the end. Click it.
5. The next page will show you the number of times your profile was viewed. To find the number of direct visits, click the Navigation Summary link on the right side of the page.

This report will show you the paths your visitors took to your profile page. At the top will be the percentage of Entrances. These are direct visits that are likely to be visits from Activity Feeds. In the example below, you can see that just over 7% of the views of the profile page were direct visits. This number is rough, but it is a good indication of the traffic that is coming into the profile page from the Activity Feed.



In Part Two, we'll look at how to follow your "social" visitors into your shop!