Curious Numbers

It's has been a week now since Etsy launched Google Analytics for sellers and though I imagine this data will be much more useful once there is a whole lot more of it, some interesting things have already begun to emerge. First interesting piece of information, is that since each store is part of a much larger whole, the GA data track what sites and search words led visitors to etsy in general and gives you that information if said visitor lands in your shop at anytime. This make the data a bit odd at times. For instance the search phrase, 'she rides a lion' eventually landed someone at my storefront. I also have tons of referring links that clearly landed in my store after visiting the actual linked store first. I have found myself checking these referring sites a lot and interestingly finding a lot of interesting places that I'm surprised I haven't visited already.

A few other odd things I've discovered, I've had visitors for 45 countries. Most unsurprisingly from the U.S. and Canada, but third is Italy, which I would not have guessed. In the last week, I've had 1266 visits and 658 absolute unique visitors. What that seems to say is that a lot of people have visited more than once and I average 180 visits a day. I don't have any idea if those numbers are good or not as I have no one else's numbers to compare with. A gigantic portion of those visits were either direct or through google search, next was from Twitter, then Tribe.com, which is odd since I haven't been there in like a year. I got a lot of hits this week from the feature on The Coveted and quite a few from my blog, though most of those were experiment related.

What this seems to be telling me about my blog, is that it is not in fact sending many people shopping. I can't say that I'm surprised. I figure that most of my readers are my contemporaries, my friends and a few family members. What is interesting though, is that after the major traffic senders most of the referring links are from blogs, tons of different blogs, mostly by other creative types. It seems that people tend to click through to etsy from blogs and then they spend a lot of time looking around.

After a month or so I think I'll take another comprehensive look at the number to see what they can tell me then. Feel free to share your numbers with me too. I've love to have something to compare mine with. You can email them to me if you don't want to post them, there's a contact me link just below the link exchange, but I won't be surprised if no one shares. I was a little apprehensive about it too. I mean what if my numbers are embarrassingly low or I've made people feel bad because they're high? Unfortunately I have no idea so there you go.

In other news, look at the great skirt I got in the mail yesterday. I got it from Damselinthisdress over a the etsy. I was coveting the short version of the skirt, but I really wanted a long one. I asked and she had a long version already made. Yay for me! I don't really have an occasion for the skirt, though I thought it looked pretty great with the hoodie I was wearing when it arrived. Imagine walking down the street like this. Then, I would feel accidentally cool.

Speaking of cool, thanks to all of you who commented yesterday. I clearly have self esteem issues and your words gave me quite a boost. I also want to thank everyone who took the time to click through to my store for the sake of my data tracking obsession. There was a clear correlation in my GA data and I appreciate the help. Have a great weekend!