Researching Etsy Traffic Sources

I knew something had caused a wave of traffic to my Etsy shop... its never easy to know why. But its possible to find out!

So I checked out this website called CraftCult and found out why. It was an email from Etsy! One tiny little picture in their email newsletter, one small wave of traffic. Excellent.

This website CraftCult is pretty darn useful! You can see all sorts of information concerning your shop, like if you've been on the front page, if you're in a treasury, if you've receive new hearts, theres even some graphs. I like it a lot. The stats Etsy finally gives us on the site itself are pretty slim and not so interesting. CraftCult seems to be picking up the slack. They even have a "vault" of screen captures of front pages. How wonderful!

Fun with Flickr Stats

My friend Amanda tweeted recently about how she was having fun with Flickr Stats. I'm sleepy and feeling unproductive, so I went and peeked into my own Flickr Stats (love me some stats, and I especially like how Flickr presents ours...)

I was surprised to find the picture above has crept its way up to #1 viewed image in my flickr account.

Uploaded about a year ago, I was playing around with printed backgrounds. I titled this one "Green Background 1" and explained how I made the background in the description. Other testers that had the same exact title but neglected to explain my process have about 1/3 the views of this particle flickr file.

Its not really the most interesting or great image, but its process oriented and details are provided, the title is very straight-forward.

The stats say almost 90% of the views on this image come from search engines, ie people typing in "green background" and getting this image.

For a long time now the #1 viewed picture (which is now #2) is this sweet image: (most of the views of this image were direct traffic from websites as this was a promotional image I created for a show)


I really enjoy using Flickr and I love the stats. Fun times with statistics always gets my brain humming.

.

Translating Etsy Google Analytics

I noticed in my Google Analytics that my Etsy shop had a sudden burst of activity the other day... see the graph in the picture above... see the peak circled in red...

So I started wondering, what caused the flurry? Here is how to figured it out:

First I reduced the information to a couple of days by clicking on the dates on the upper right and selecting a small range around the peak (peak was March 4th so I highlighted March 2nd thru the 5th)

Now that the information was more relevant, I clicked on "CONTENT" on the left side menu.

By clicking on the "Top Landing Pages" I could then see where my crazy site action was coming from... the cryptic "/view_listing.php?ref=fp_feat_4&listing_id=21634564" was my answer (see the image above, you can click and zoom in, I circled the cryptic info in red on the bottom of the image) now the question is translating this.

The code is Etsy source information, the "ref=fp_feat" basically means that this product of mine (#21634564) was featured on the front page of Etsy.

The mystery is solved! I was on the front page of Etsy last Wednesday, and this was really fun to discover! Yeah for Google Analytics making my business statistics sort of accessible! And yeah for Front Page action!

• If you are an Etsy seller and would like to decode your Etsy Google Statistics, heres a list of a bunch of the cryptic code that is used to record internal traffic information on Etsy.
• for more great info on utilizing Google Analytics with your Etsy site, check out this amazing blog: http://bloghandmade.blogspot.com/