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!

Unofficial Guide to Etsy Analytics Updated!

The unofficial guide to getting the most out of your Etsy Analytics has been updated to reflect the recent changes at Etsy and Google. I have lowered the price, as well!

The Unofficial Guide to Etsy Analytics

A Brief History of Etsy Search

Since the first version of the History of Etsy Search much has changed at the site. The search function, which many rightfully consider the heart of the Etsy site, has undergone several changes.

As the site grew rapidly in its early days, the search function was unfortunately one of the most visible victims of the increasing demand on Etsy's infrastructure. After some changes in leadership and new hardware and software, Etsy has been tweaking its search function continuously to add new features. Here's a timeline of how Etsy's search function has changed over the years.

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June, 2005 - The Beginning! Etsy goes online with a few sellers and a few items and a simple one-box, one-button search function. Results are listed by most recent first - a default setting that remains to this day - and users have the option to sort results by date, price, quantity, number of views and item title. Categories can also be searched.

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July, 2005 - Advanced Search is introduced. Users can search title only, description only, or both. Special search fields are added to search by material, tag, seller, item number and price range.

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October, 2005 - Geolocater, a way to search for shops by location is added.

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November, 2006 - Etsy v.2 - In a major overhaul of the site, Etsy eliminates a separate advanced search function. Some of the advanced search fields are moved to a drop-down menu in the main search function and others are eliminated. Search types include: items: tags, titles; items: tags, titles, descriptions; sellers: usernames; items: materials; and materials. Eliminated are title-only, description-only, item number and price range searches. Search results can be sorted by price and date. Quantities are removed from search results. Views are included, but are no longer a sort option. Notably, it is no longer possible to search within categories.

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October, 2007 - Etsy adds some search tips to the main search page in response to user confusion about search results

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December, 2007 - Some advanced operators are refined, including phrase matching for tags/titles searching and the NOT operator used to exclude terms

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January, 2008 - Etsy reinstates search capability within categories. An Etsy search plug-in for web browsers is introduced.

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February, 2008 - The price-range filter returns as an advanced function. Search capability is added to the color picker feature.

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May, 2008 - A major change is made to the search function when Etsy splits items into three major sections: Handmade Items, Vintage and Supplies. Description search functionality is removed from vintage and supplies sections.

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September, 2008 - Under the direction of new CTO Chad Dickerson, Etsy adds new hardware to handle search traffic and makes some elemental changes to reduce the search load. Some simple searches are redirected to categories. A limit is placed on the number of search terms, and items are now added to the search and category databases in batches rather than in "real" time. The minus sign is added as an alternative for NOT.

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November, 2008 - New Etsy CEO Maria Thomas announces that improving the search function is an "immediate and urgent project," and informs the Etsy community that the long standing most-recent-first search results will be replaced in 2009 by search results that are ranked by relevance.

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January, 2009 - Etsy begins using Solr, an open source search engine platform, in preparation for future development.

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April, 2009 - Etsy brings back an Advanced Search function. A link is placed to the right of the Search button.



The dropdown menu is shortened to include Handmade, Vintage, Supplies and Sellers, with an option to search all items at once

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May, 2009 - A "Ships To" filter option is added to find items that will ship to a specific country. Etsy rolls out the option to sort results by relevancy.

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July, 2009 - Etsy adds related search suggestion links to search results.

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September, 2009 - Etsy adds category filters to search results, similar to eBay's category filters.

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January 2010 - The Search Suggestions links are moved from the top to the bottom of the results page and now also appear as dropdown suggestions in the search box.

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March, 2010 - As part of a site-wide move to a wider format, Etsy simplifies the Search Box to emphasize the dropdown menu.



Search results are formatted for the wider site and include 40 items per page.
The Advanced Search link is removed from the front page and search results page, but the page remains active.

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November, 2010 - A "Local Items" filter is added to the search results based on the user's saved location and the location indicated by sellers in their shop profiles.

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December, 2010 - Etsy capital investor Fred Wilson remarks in an Etsy forum that "...we've hired a ton of engineers this year and search is one area we are investing heavily in. Fixing search is not a simple task. But the company is committed to it and spending heavily on it."

In a follow up, Etsy founder and CEO writes:

We have spent an enormous amount of time on search this year. The entire infrastructure was rewritten, giving us the framework we need to make our next big round of improvements.

We've made speed improvements, drastically reduced the # of servers required to run search, launched location search etc. etc.

There will be bigger changes next year, starting with the listing process. We need better data when items are listed, in order to make a lot of the improvements in search.

We've also spent a lot of time this year building our our personalization infrastructure. The default for sorting search results needs to be personalized relevance, not the rather brutish "most recent" that we have now. This is one the most important changes we need to make.

Keep in mind that search is a tool for buyers to find items they like. We need to do our best job targeting items to people, based on what we know about the people.

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/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.

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.