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!

Curiosity Is Killing This Cat

When I returned from my short trip I was greeted by a small burst of attention in my etsy store. I had a new chunk of people favoriting my store and a few more messages than usual and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why this happened. No front page I could find or blog mention or anything really that would explain it. This was the first time I really got antsy for the stats that are soon to be coming our way from etsy. I heard just a while ago that they are beta testing google analytics for sellers. I didn't really see the need for them for me as I don't advertise or anything, but I am an information junkie.

I've had google analytics on the blog for quite some time. It provides me absolutely no vital data. I don't really need to know how many visitors I have, where they come from and what browser they're using. I don't need to know what percentage of visits I get from each country or how many pages they visit or even what search terms landed them on my page, but I don't want to live without that information now that I know I can have it. I'm sure it will be the same with the stats for my etsy page. It won't really affect how I conduct myself, but I just have to know.

I am dying to find out where my customers come from and how they found me. I've had a fair amount of exposure though various channels online, but I rarely have any connection from those moments of exposure to sales. I have no idea if a blog interview or even my brief boing boing fame brought me any new customers. Sure, I get the occasional message telling me where they spied my work, but the rest is silence. I don't know when to expect this new information, but I'm sure as soon as I do I will have a brand new obsession.

I Was Found

Well, I planned on giving you all the stats from my day in the Etsy Finds email, but it turns out that means I would have to do math. Me and math do not get on very well so it will take a little longer before I can offer up those numbers. What I can do is give you the easy numbers.

The mask that was featured in the email started the day with 388 views and this morning has 1181. It also garnered 89 new hearts for a total of 106. I started the day with 2008 shop hearts and this morning I have a whopping 2137. I know that already seems like a lot of numbers, but hearts and views were littered all over the store and I wanted to go through and see what these new eyes gravitated towards. This is the first time I actually had the forethought to go to majaba and get all the numbers before and after an "event" so I could really get accurate numbers.

If you have an etsy store and you haven't yet discovered majaba's heart-o-matic, you must go try it out. Of course it will just give you yet another thing to be addicted to, so I do apologize to your families for sharing.

I did also make a couple of sales and I even sold one of my other masks. All in all it was a pretty good day, now we'll just have to wait and see if any of those who hearted the store return to buy anything or if it was just a case of, ooh, that's pretty. All the activity of the day gave me that antsy feeling that preceeds the holidays. I'm both looking forward to and dreading the upswing that may occur in the next couple of months. Of course I love to make sales especially since my etsy money has been earmarked as our only holiday spending, but I have actually been enjoying the extra time I've had lately to design stuff without a deadline on other projects looming. I guess you can't have it both ways, so I'll stop complaining and roll with whatever comes my way.