Do we have any expertise on google analytics here?

[Former_Member]

I'm sure that Mary knows a lot about it but she's got a lot going on right now so maybe one of us can take the lead on answering those questions and teach the rest how to dig into it for more information than what we can see on the dashboard. I stumble around but I'd love to learn more about it too.

[Former_Member]

Like you Karen, I stumble around GA. When I want to procrastinate, I watch GA Real Time, it's a great waste of time :)
But really as far as stats go, I just stumble.

[Former_Member]

I look at it a lot ( and I love watching realtime too!) I don't really know much about it though. I mostly just look at a 3 month or so graph to see if my views are going up, which they slowly are - yay!

[ecoPaperie]

Hello! I'm new to the SEO world and am trying to learn a few things. Is GA free? How do you use it to help you... tags?

Thanks,
Anita

[Former_Member]

yep, free. tracks visitors, pages viewed, what keywords people used to find you etc.

[Former_Member]

Hi Anita -

Google Analytics and the google keyword tool are two different things and both are free. GA helps you track your statistics and the keyword tool helps you to evaluate how good your keywords are and gives you ideas for more. The links on the left under "Elsewhere" will give you a good start in understanding it all. Once you read those you can go ahead and start your own thread with one of your items and we'll walk you through improving the SEO for it.

[ecoPaperie]

Oh good to know! Thanks Karen and Heidi!

[Former_Member]

I'm no expert by any means but I have a softness for stats and it would be great to develop this thread a little.

At the moment I mainly use Analytics for the 'unique visitors' values (which I reckon is a good base measure for traffic). Sad as it will sound, I pop them in a little excel spread sheet, where I have a 10 and 50 day trendline and even two bollinger bands (but that was probably going a bit too far!). It gives a good indication of my direction, particularly if the number of visits varies a lot from day-to-day.

As far a keywords go, my traffic in that department is quite slow, so I'm happy to leave that for a while. As it happens, "bamboo block" (?) is my top earner, so I presume Google tracks how people get to Etsy and then records if they happen to visit your shop whilst they're there. Certainly the keywords Etsy searches turn up are markedly different from Google, but that's probably not to surprising.

The main thing I would like to understand more is visitor engagement. There are various stats here (pages per visit, time on site, depth of visit and now the more complex 'visitor flow' graphics). It seems to me that this should be one of the great strengths of using Google Analytics.

[Former_Member]

I'm finding it a lot easier to use for my standalone shop because it isn't all mixed up with how people found Etsy and all of the keywords are mine. Are you looking at Engagement under Behavior? That one gives you a count of your visitors broken down by how long they stayed and how many pages they viewed on average and then works out the percentages for you. Another interesting one is Visitors flow because it gives you a graph of how people moved through your shop and where they stopped looking.

I'm just learning it myself but I'll be happy to try to figure it out with you.

[superiorboundgoods]

This is great information. There is so much to learn.

[Former_Member]

I was thinking about engagement/interaction in a broad sense. In addition to those which you said there are also stats under Content > Site Content, which describe where people arrive / leave and so on.

The visitor flow is confusing at first, but I can see, for example, that my profile page retains visitors well if they come to it during their visit, but has a high drop-off when people land their to start with. Clearly that page needs work, and I could use Analytics to monitor any changes I make given enough time.

I would like to be able to exclude myself from the figures, but haven't found a way yet. Like any Etsy shop owner, my own ramblings round the shop significantly skew some of the stats.

[Former_Member]

Does anyone know what happened to the Google Analytics link that used to be on the left navigation bar in "Your Shop?"

This has been the way in the past to set up Google Analytics.

[Former_Member]

It's still there under Shop Settings ->Options->web analytics tab, Mary. I set that up ages ago but I got mine the regular way for my own shop by requesting a UA number.

Paul, I excluded my IP ages ago on the old version but I'm sure that you can find it if you look around or search help for "filter". I'm not sure what your question is in terms of a broader sense but if you have some specific feature that you're trying to work on I can try to figure it out. I can't give you some overall tutorial or strategy because I barely understand it myself yet. AFAICT there is an enormous amount of detailed info out there that can answer most of our questions about how people interact with our sites.

[Former_Member]

Thanks for the offer of help, Karen.

At this stage I was really just thinking out loud, but here is where I'm coming from...

I followed up an Etsy eMail about storytelling in our shops (link at bottom) and wondered if it might work for mine. It's basically a sort of marketing approach aimed at engaging your would-be customers by virtue of your story as well as your products.

Not being 100% convinced I thought I would test it out on some of my listings first. And that's were Google Analytics comes in. I reckon that if I add this 'story' to couple of listings and keep a couple of similar listings as they are, I could use GA to see if the new format was actually causing visitors to stay in my shop longer.

I don't know how I will do this, but there it is all the same.

Paul

http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2012/why-your-profile-and-product-need-a-compelling-story/?ref=fp_blog_t...

[Former_Member]

There is no Options Tab in my Settings. No wonder I could not find the GA link in my shop! I installed GA when it first became available through Etsy but would still like to have access to that information in my Etsy shop.

Paul, Here is one story suggestion for your Yorkshire Dales photos: This is the part of England that James Herriot wrote about in all of his books, starting with "All Creatures Great and Small." It was so nice to see it in your photos for the first time in color.

[Former_Member]

Thanks, Mary, that's a lovely idea about famous authors.

Paul

P.S. If you haven't already found it, the 'options' is not a tab but a link on the left-hand side. Thus: Info & Appearance (from the drop down menu at the top) > Options (left-hand column, beneath 'Shipping & Payment' > Web Analytics (tab).

That's just where you add the ID code; everything else is done through the Google Analytics website.

[Former_Member]

Found the Google Analytics link on the left. Thank you, Paul!