Brecho Variedades

I originally wrote this as a section of my Squidoo lens "Using Etsy Search Ads to Promote Your Shop" but I think it's so important I want to post it here too. While this is written for the new Etsy Search Ads it applies equally to Google Adwords, Project Wonderful, or any other advertising you run. To get the most for your money and to be the most effective you have to look objectively at the numbers.

Don't be Fooled by Big Numbers
Lots of impressions and clicks doesn't mean a good CTR. 

Here's a perfect example. For 6 days I ran "polymer clay" as a keyword for my ads. This is a term that you would assume would perform well for my items because I make polymer clay jewelry. It also garnered the most impressions and clicks for that time frame.

However when you actually do the math and look at the CTR for this keyword you can see that it wasn't actually a good keyword for me to use with a CTR of under 1%. In contrast, over the same period of time "squid" received 359 impressions and 8 clicks for a CTR of 2.23%, "octopus" had a CTR of 2.36% and my best keyword in terms of click through rate was "halloween jewelry" which had a CTR of 3.64% (though being a seasonal term will be just about useless for most of the year).

Be willing to waste a little bit of money to run ads for one week to determine click through rates then mercilessly eliminate those with low click through percentages. Those with low impressions (less than 100) and no clicks be willing to let run a bit longer to see if they do, a keyword that only get 30 views in 2 weeks but get 1 click may not be getting much visibility but when it does it's effective.

NOTE: Since the changes eliminating low performing keywords went into effect this morning the overall CTR for my ads today has improved dramatically. Next week I'll do another follow up with data from a longer time frame.

Digging into the statistics for your business can give you a lot of valuable information. Today I decided to figure out what days of the week people buy the most from my shop. This information can help me better plan when to list new item, run ad campaigns, and whether a sale is likely to be successful. I took all my sales data from the last year and broke it down into the percentage of sales for each day of the week. Here is the result:
So what does this tell me? Clearly Thursday and Friday are my best sales days with a over 43% of all my sales (24.4% and 18.9% respectively) while the very next day, Saturday, plummets to just under 9% of my sales. There is also a significant bump in sales on Monday (14.75%). So my customers like to shop at the beginning and end of the work week and not on the weekend. Even if I break it down by month, every single month in that date range Thursday and Friday had between 30-50% of all sales. It's very consistent for my shop. The interesting thing is that this is despite the fact that my busiest listing days are generally Sundays and Mondays (because I create over the weekend and list Sunday night and Monday) so the bump on Mondays may only be because that's when I average the most new items listed.

My data also shows that Cyber Monday is not a busy day for me, in fact it's about average for the holiday season. Instead it's usually the first week of December that is the busiest with Wed-Fri being the busiest days. Of course I only really have two years of data for the holiday season since I started my Etsy shop October 2008 so that first holiday season I was still getting things rolling. I'm interested in seeing it this trend hold up.

I'm not encouraging anyone to take my data and use it for their own shop. You should look at your own shop's data, if you don't have many sales yet look at what your highest traffic days are (they tend to match sales patterns fairly well). I wish I had more data to go on but my google skills have failed me and I haven't found any good statistics online of when people shop to compare it to my data.

Are you panicking over Etsy's change to make relevancy search the default? Should you be? Visits can fluctuate widely from day to day for reasons that have nothing to do with Etsy's internal search. To really see what's going on you need to look at only visits coming from Etsy's internal search. Here's a quick way to check if it has helped or hurt you. For this you need Site Search tracking set up on Google Analytics (if you don't go here to see how, but I'm not sure if it will give you site search stats retroactively). You could also do this with Etsy's new shop stats but I prefer Analytics for it's ability to do direct comparison of date ranges.

Log into Analytics and go down to Content->Site Search. Set your date range to August 9, 2011 - Yesterday's date (because we want stats for whole days not partial we don't want to include today's date). Then check the box that says "Compare to past" and it should select an equal number of days right before August 9th then click "Apply".In my case the number of searches on Etsy leading to my items increased by 31.85%

Now I don't think this change has been around long enough to get really meaningful results yet, my increases could just be a fluke or because I've added new items, but it's a start and if I had found I was doing worse I'd be in changing my listings to improve them.

It's been a while since I've done a Link Roundup but I thought this was a good time to do one with the launch of Google+ (yes, I'm on) and many sites on Google and elsewhere launching major redesigns. In fact Blogger which hosts this blog and is owned by Google has a fantastic new look if you use the Blogger in Draft feature that lets you try new features before they roll out to everyone.

So this roundup is recent news and articles focusing on web technology and how it relates to or can be used by small business.

The Tech Stuff

Google Plus Doesn't Need to 'Kill' Anything to Be a Winner from AllBusiness
Google+ Statistics Report from FindPeopleOnline
Top Gmail Apps and Plug-ins for Running a Business from Small Business Trends
Find & Make Your Own Infographics With Visual.ly from Mashable

Some Great Non-Tech Stuff
5 Ways That Content Marketing Has Changed The Art Of Selling Forever from Duct Tape Marketing
Free Class – Copywriting 101 from Indie Biz Chicks
Business Thank You Letters – Your Secret Marketing Weapon from Craft Marketing Tutor

What time of day people are viewing your shop can be a valuable bit of information to know. You could time new items to go up during the busiest time, and make changes during the slowest times. If you post frequently on twitter or facebook you might find the trend correlates heavily to when you are posting to those social media sites and make an effort to spread your posting out more to communicate with people who aren't online when you are usually posting.

So how do you find this out? Assuming you are using Google Analytics it's pretty easy though a bit hidden in the interface. Here's step by step how to do it:

Step 1: Log into Google Analytics.

Step 2: Click Visitors in the sidebar menu

Step 3: Click Visitor Trending

Step 4: Click Visits in the secondary menu under Visitor Trending

Step 5: Expand your date range. To get the best average you want to use a large date range. I used a year but if you haven't had Analytics collecting data that long you could do 6 months or since you installed Analytics. It's up to you but try to use at least several months worth of data to get the best picture.

Step 6: Click the Clock. Right over the visits graph on the right you will see some tiny icons, you want to click the one that looks like a clock face.

Step 7: Analyze the information. In my case my least views are at 6am and the most at 5pm for my time zone. Google uses a 24 hour clock not a 12 hour one which can be a bit confusing if you aren't used to it, just subtract 12 from times past 12:59 (14:00 is 2pm).

I always like to take a look at what tools Etsy is featuring in their Handmade Code series on the Storque blog. Usually I either think it might be useful and add it to my Squidoo lens on Etsy Tools or bypass it if I don't see it as very useful. However they recently featured a tool I had to try out and I find it really interesting because I love stats.

Metricly lets you see data about your shop in pretty easy to understand graphs. Here's one on New vs Repeat Sales (I edited it to show from the 1st of this year and number of items sold, the default is the last 12 months and the $ amount of sales):

The graphs are very easy to understand and edit and compile some very useful data on your shop. I think this is a great way to help put into perspective how your shop is doing over time.

You can also connect other data sources such as google analytics for your Etsy shop. I need to play around with Metricly a bit more to figure out how that will work and if it gives any insight I can't get easily from my Analytics reports.

I came across this fantastic article on setting up post purchase customer surveys with paypal. I just set one up for my account and it was extremely easy. Also while your setting up the survey consider customizing the payment page with your logo or adding some of the other available options.

Time once again for me to share useful links I've come across.

Internal Tracking with Etsy Stats This article shows how to set up Google Analytics to track internal Etsy traffic. This will give you more information about Etsy Searches, and whether someone found you from the front page, Storque, showcases, etc. Make sure you follow the link to the video, it's worth watching for more info.

The rest of the blog also has a lot of good information on stats tracking.

Tech Update: Checkout Updates Details on the changes to Etsy's Checkout system.

Handmadeology: Handmade Directory A new directory for handmade shops, blogs, and twitter profiles.

I recently started running some ads with Google Adwords. Been working nicely from the standpoint of sending visitors to my Etsy shop but I ran into a problem: the integration between Adwords and Google Analytics wasn't working right. Usually Adwords and Analytics integrate well to show you extra information about adwords campaigns bringing visitors to your site but it wasn't doing that for me. I tried tweaking various setting in Analytics and Adwords and finally figured out the problem.

I was using http://noadi.etsy.com as the link adwords was to use to send people to my shop, once I changed it to the direct link http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6288550 it started registering the stats correctly. I think this is related to how Etsy handles urls for subdomains. I still use noadi.etsy.com as the url that is displayed on my ads but it's not where visitors are directed.

So if you're using Adwords to advertise your Etsy shop you might want to edit the ads so you get more accurate stats in Analytics.

With Etsy and ArtFire joining selling venues like eCrater in offering Google Analytics I figure it's time for an article on this incredibly useful tool. If you need help setting up Analytics and the technical aspects of it here are some useful links:
Tech Update: Etsy Web Analytics Now Available
Google Analytics Help Center
Google Analytics Video Tutorials

Now once you have Analytics set up how is it useful?

The types of stats you can get from Analytics:

• How many visitors view your shop per day, week, month, or whatever time fram you want.
• The average number of pages they view and how long they stay in your shop.
• What are your most and least popular pages.
• How many people immediately click out of your shop and what pages they do it from.
• What sites are sending visitors to your shop.
• How much traffic from search engines are you getting and what are the search terms they are using to get to your shop.
• Find out what if any links visitors are clicking on to leave your shop.
• See what countries your visitors are coming from.

Where Analytics really becomes useful is as a tool to analyze and improve your promotion efforts. Here are a few ways you can use it for this purpose:

• If you are running ads on a site like OwnTheHour or another site find out just how many people are visiting from that site and whether it's worth the money your spending for the ad.
• Analytics integrates with google adwords to give you added tracking of the performance of any adwords campaigns you are running.
• Is Twittering working? Check to see how many people are clicking from your tweets to your shop. If not reconsider how your using Twitter, are you maybe tweeting too much about your shop? Too little? Not enough followers? Etc.
• Is your blog sending visitors? If not maybe the links to your shop aren't prominent enough or they're too far down the page. For that matter set up Analytics for your blog too if you haven't already and use the two reports together to get an even better sense of what is and isn't working.
• Do you only sell in the US and your getting a lot of Canadian visitors? Maybe time to rethink selling to Canada or retool your promotion to bring in more US visitors.