I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I love analytics. Yup, sounds completely cheesy but I do. I love checking to see how many people have visited my Etsy shop and what they were searching for that got them there – also known as Etsy Shop Stats. I know this isn’t the case for everyone and it can get a little maddening to constantly look at number of visits in a week, but there are a few very important things you can learn about your Etsy shop by paying attention to the stats.

If you’re not used to looking at analytics, the Etsy shop stats can seem overwhelming and not very helpful. I mean what do you do with all that information? Let’s break it down and maybe you’ll learn to have a new appreciation of your shop analytics.

Graphs

The Graphs section has a few options – views, favorites, orders, revenue. Views are handy because you can see how many people are actually looking at your items. This give you the opportunity to compare this month to last month and see if you need to promote a little more or if some new promotional method you’re trying it working. If you’re going to take the time to promote your shop you want to make sure it’s working by watching the shop views.

Favorites give you an idea of what month or season is active for your shop. Of course, orders and revenue are pretty self explanatory, but they also help you gauge how well your shop is doing. Do you make the bulk of your orders in the winter months? Do orders come in steadily all year round? Are people spending more than they used to? All of these questions give you insight on how to keep promoting your items. If you see that people are spending more than they used to, maybe it’s time to start promoting some of your more expensive items on your Facebook page or blog.

 

Traffic Sources

Your traffic sources are a whole lot of fun. These lists tell you where from the internet people are finding your shop and also where from within Etsy they are finding it. I like looking here for any websites that I don’t know and are sending me a  large amount of traffic. If it’s another blogger, I like to try and find that post and leave a comment with a thank you. Who knows, maybe they have more of your items that they would like to feature and just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

The traffic sources on Etsy are helpful too because they show you your strengths and weaknesses on Etsy. If you’re not getting as much traffic as you’d like from the browse sections, it might be time to rethink how you use your keywords.

 

Keywords

 

Etsy keywords are probably the most helpful part of my shop stats because I can act directly based on what I find and improve my shop right away. Keywords are the words that people were searching for when they landed in your shop.  As you can see “fall coat” is one of my top keywords of the year. This tells me that I need to get more coats in the shop this fall. It also tells me that if I already have some fall coats in the shop without that tag I need to add it ASAP. You’ll be surprised how quickly something will get more views just by adding your most searched keyword into the tags and the description of that product.

 

Page Views and Listing Favorites

Page views and listing favorites give you the chance to see what’s hot in your Etsy shop! You make think those flower earring are perfect for this time of year but really everyone is looking for your classic wire ring. Here you can see what’s getting the most views and what’s getting the most favorites and use that to your advantage. If something that sold a long time ago is still getting tons of views, maybe it’s time to make another one or relist it. I’ve also found that featuring items that get a lot of favorites on my blog or my Facebook page helps in getting that item sold faster.

So that’s how you can make sense of Etsy stats and even use them to your advantage. If you ever forget which section tells you what, there are handy little question marks next to each section header and when you hover over them an explanation pops up.

How have you used your Etsy stats in the past?