Lessons

Lesson Info

Understanding Statistics & Web Analytics

Let's dive into those etc shops stats and take a look at um how we can find some of the information that we need to make decisions about some of those squishy year areas like marketing um, so there are two ways to get to your etc stats you confined it under the your shop menu it's about halfway down um it's also a link in your dashboard if you'll remember that dashboard slide it's one of the first things they show is a sort of stats overview on and you can also find it here on the side bar menu under stats again, it's about halfway down there's a drop down menu here where you can choose what you want to see stats for you unfortunately can't choose a custom date range for what you want to look at, which I find really helpful, especially if you're trying to track the effectiveness of like, you know, marketing campaign that's gone across a certain period of time um but you can choose things like year to date um all time this year this month this week, etcetera on and it will show you seve...

ral different kinds of information, so it sort of goes from, um biggest two smallest in terms of group of people on but also goes sort of from least valuable to most valuable, so first they'll show you views um I guess they only started introducing these stats in twenty eleven because of course my shop has been open since two thousand five oh well um so you can see the number of views my shop was viewed most often uh in twenty thirteen and uh I don't know it's been fairly even throughout obviously twenty fifteen is only like two weeks in a zoo the filming of this class so that's why that number is so low uh but that will bump up as the year progresses then you have favorites. This is the number of people who have click that little heart button either on your shop in general or on a particular item um then you have orders so you can see how many orders you've had overtime on and then you've got revenue, which is how much money you've made in that time. So I want to show you a little bit of a comparison between those two here is my, uh, orders chart that they've been tracking back since two thousand five and here is my revenue so you'll see that it's you know, it spikes around two thousand nine in terms of number of orders, which is pretty consistent over here and then like we discussed the meat trends sort of started falling out of favor, so I started shutting down this shop um the number of orders I had in twenty thirteen was pretty low and looks like it was around twenty. Um but look at that revenue. Look at the revenues spiked. Look at how much money I have paid in twenty thirteen, even though it was only off of twenty orders. Um, what does that mean? What does that tell you? You increase your price. Maybe maybe I increased my price. Um, any other guesses what it says first and foremost, is that each of those orders was for a larger amount, then previously so either I increase my prices. If I'm selling the same number of items, maybe I'm selling in more bulk, right? Maybe each order includes many, many more items, then it normally would. Either way, I've done something in twenty thirteen to make it such that each one of my orders is bringing in a lot more revenue. Um, it was sort of a combination of those things. Uh, I wrapped up this sweetmeats business in twenty thirteen, but not without a last hurrah. Um, I did. One of those gallery shows that I mentioned where I went back and I hand made you know, each of the meats that I had made sort of from the very beginning, although I was much better at it now, um, with a couple of tweaks, so I had, uh usually I had a little small hand that I saw and then they had a big hand so I made one of these big cams and then I also made ham slices coming off of it and I'm a little bits of lettuce and then I made the tray out of fabric as well the little like deli tray that it went on and so um in addition to being able to buy uh individual meats from this deli case at the exhibition you could also buy like the whole tray of ham with its slices et cetera um eso after the exhibition was over anything that hadn't sold at the gallery I threw up on etc um so some of those items like the big ham on the tray were really expensive while the big hand in a trance hold of the gallery but um let's see there was like a large bacon that also head slices on a tray um that item I had priced as a piece of fine art and when I put it in my etc stop I said you know I made this by hand it was part of this gallery exhibition it's one of you know the on ly remaining pieces it's the only one I had ever made I will never do this again if you want this is part of your collection here's your only opportunity and I was able to price that it like two hundred fifty dollars so when someone bought that, um that makes the price of the that makes the revenue spike in relation to the order itself, then there were other people who were like, oh my god, she hasn't made any of these in years I want to get my hands on them it's never going to be here ever again and so they bought like four different ones eso in some cases it was that the item itself was more expensive in some cases it was that the order contained multiple items, but either way I got my price per order way up in twenty thirteen um and that was largely through marketing and again we'll talk about this when we get to the pricing section, but, um, you know, these were sold not as playthings, not his toys for children or pets like I normally sold them to be, like, loved and cuddled and destroyed. You know, in a certain matter of time, these were meant to bay o b j dar right that you put on display somewhere and you keep it forever and you don't let anybody touch it and whatever, um so that commanded a higher price, it was also this notion of scarcity, which is something that you brought up, um, where I said right out, I'm not making these anymore if you want one this is it this is your only opportunity you don't have time to decide on it. You know I gave the impression that there were other people competing for this s so you better jump on and now and you know I'm sorry the price is so high but so many people wanted and there's only one of them or two or three or whatever the case may be um that you know this is what they're worth right? This is what the market demands as faras cost so um yeah let's let's compare so in two thousand twelve let's see revenue mean, it was the exact same number of orders so revenue was around one hundred twenty five dollars? Um let's say one hundred twenty dollars, twenty orders that would make the average order six dollars right is my math right there? Yeah, um which seems about right ah, because I had a couple of plush type things but mostly what I was selling at that point was digital patterns for eight dollars you know, buttons for two dollars apiece um and then I finally had some plush to sell again and I got back up to these levels. I had these bigger, more expensive products this was like average six dollars per order and then this let's see, we've got around six hundred dollars uh in revenue and twenty orders so that's more like thirty dollars per order so multiply the amount that I was making per order by five five times more money per order per transaction um through marketing and product choice right? Okay um let's keep going let's look at some more analytics here so like I pointed out um a couple of slides ago you have a few things that you can look at views favorites orders revenue you can also look at there's a math if you want to see what countries you're selling to most often that's kind of neat um it's not usually super useful unless you're doing a lot of business overseas and it's for a very specific reason um so if you're incurring like I mentioned earlier if you're having you know, like problems with that vat on digital products or if you're incurring a lot of fees from your bank because you're doing a lot of currency conversions, then it probably makes sense to track the geography of your customers. For me it doesn't really matter. Um it's just kind of fun to see like well after the united states and canada like turkey is my most, you know popular that's not true but um is the most popular place where people find me and then maybe trying to figure out well, why is that? And then maybe you find out some interesting you know, cultural fact about turkey that leads them to purchase plush meat again not true it's, not turkey. I don't offend inadvertently the nation of turkey, but yes, so that's that's available for you to look at too, but it's a pretty limited a set of things you can look at and a pretty limited set of time periods that you can choose. However, etsy also offers web analytics through google, and this is all the way at the bottom of the menu. It's hidden in shops, settings, options it doesn't say web analytics anywhere in any menu. It's on lee this tab when you get to shop options where you have things like download your data, right? We talked about that before vacation mode and closing your shop like this is the catch all where they put everything. I don't know why I don't know why they did not put web analytics under stats, nothing no sense to me whatsoever why they would offer you this option and then bury it and hide it completely, um, because they've had this around forever. I mean, this option has been part of etc for years and years, not since two thousand five, but for a long time for a so long as I've been teaching anything about, etc, um, and this allows you to look at ah your google analytics which is way more powerful um and we'll take a look at that in a minute um and the way that you would set that up is you create a google account they're free um you created google analytics account and they give you this little property I d you just copy and pasted in there and you save it that's it that's all it takes to set it up it's like literally two minutes it's totally free and men google analytics will start tracking every single one of your etc pages what this does basically is it pastes that little piece of code into every single page that you have on etsy on the back end every individual listing page all of your category pages, et cetera. All right, so let's look at some of this I have pasted it into google analytics and now I am tracking two different etc stores remember I've told you I had the sweetmeat store which is still there I haven't quite closed it yet although it doesn't do much business these days um and then I have my l o v my lauren over me over me my horan open l etc store um I just plugged in the analytics to the lauren belle store so I'm still getting some data on that but the beauty of google analytics is just how deep you khun dive into these crazy nitty gritty he's um first of all, you can choose any date range you want since you've pasted the code in so you could choose, you know, thirteen days starting in two thousand thirteen, you know, really focus in on what you were doing at a particular point in time, so this is invaluable for analyzing marketing efforts. Um other information that you can look at, so those are my two, uh, this is the two places I'm tracking the two stores. I'm track and you could see some sort of top line information, but when you click on one of these what you will get, um and this is again just the audience overview is tons more information so you will get not only the number of visits it's which etc tracks also sessions is the same thing but also the number of users, right? So even though there were one hundred forty two visits during that time period um there were only one hundred fifteen different people, which means some of them went back and that's really useful. Um, you khun track. So there were one hundred fifteen users one hundred forty two sessions that two hundred seventy two page views. So that means that most people looked at at least two pages um, they spend an average of forty five minutes in my etc shop the bounce rate it is sixty five percent. What that means is that sixty five percent of people got there through search or some other method and then went oh no this is not what I'm looking for and then went elsewhere thirty five percent of them stayed and looked around uh seventy five percent new sessions that means that twenty five percent are returning and this is just the overview um you can dive into all kinds of things like uh you can set up custom reports where you can look at the number of people who looked at four items or more you know and like what countries are those people from? I mean like you can combine the information in all kinds of different ways um we're not really going to have time today to dio whole google analytics tutorial but they do exist out there on the web and I highly recommend excuse me implementing the web analytics to your etc shop uh so that you can really see these things in like, excruciating detail um you khun track uh what's so useful you can track incoming links so you can see and you can actually see this in the etc stats somewhat as well asi stats will give you um key words so what? People searched for both on the web to get to you and what they searched for on etc specifically to find your site um you can track all kinds of incoming links and if you set up a link in your newsletter or if you set up a special link on twitter then you can track how many people clicked on that particular newsletter how many people clicked on that particular day tweet or facebook post and you can see and you can actually follow them in google analytics you can follow the path of where those people went and you contract that to your sales like when people clicked in there where did they go next? Did they hit the buy button? You know, like it's so useful it's so so useful you can do this with a non etsy website as well it's just not as easy to like copy and paste you actually have tio you know, get the piece of html code and you have to paste it into every page on your web site. Um if you're using something like I don't know squarespace or big cartel or whatever, they might also have a similar plug and I don't actually know I haven't used either of those services myself um but they might have a similar analytics plug in otherwise you'd have to do it yourself or sort of ask your web master but um I highly recommend implementing this just because it gives you not only so much more information but also so many more options for arranging and combining that information's um, it's. So, so useful in it's easy police for me to spend hours getting lost in google analytics just like checking on things. And really, these people did that thing. That's amazing! I had no india. If you're a cultural anthropologist, google analytics is fascinating. Uh, because it really it really gives you a picture of online consumer behavior. And it's it's so funny. Um, another way that incoming links is helpful is it shows you who's linking to your store like, maybe you didn't know that a bunch of different blog's or magazines or whoever we're mentioning your shop. So this helps you track your publicity. Um, and your press like, where did you actually get mentioned? Wow, I had no idea. That's amazing. Um, it also helps you figure out your market in that way. Maybe you've never heard of any of these blog's that have linked to you recently, but maybe they all have something in common as far as the kind of people they appeal to. So maybe that helps you figure out who your ideal customer is. And maybe you can tweak your branding and your marketing a little bit to reach that person, right, so that's, pretty exciting.