Analytics in Action

Before we get started, I wanted to remind everyone about the BIG Treasure Hunt and SALE going on with the Promo Frenzy team on Etsy! You can click on the pretty button to the right to read my post about it!

In last week's web marketing lesson, your "homework" was to get  Google analytics set up for your websites.If you did that, you should begin to see some results and start to know how people are finding you.

Memorial Beads is a HUGE keyword for one of my websites!

To view YOUR results: From the Analytics dashboard, click "View Report" beside the site you wish to access. In the left navigation, click Content / Content by title. Scroll down to the bottom of the window and tell it to show "100 rows."

Below is the top search results for my glass beads website.

 Followed by the results for my Artfire Site:

You may be surprised that the top results are different!  My Etsy search is also very different! But I have different goals for each site! And I have multiple sites for a whole other purpose which will come next in this series.

My own website is ultimately where I hope people shop. It costs me less money to maintain but it is more work... My favorite thing to make that I only offer there is Memorial Beads containing the cremains of a dearly departed loved one or pet. Because they are time consuming and require much interaction with a customer, I don't want to pony up a sales commission to another site on those!  So my main goal is to give plenty of information on memorial beads and to inform customer's who already like my work that my newest stuff is there.

As you can see, my #1 search term is memorial beads. #3, #4 and #8 is my business name or some form of it. I mentioned last week that people are often searching for glass cupcake beads so... I spread some of those out on every site I sell on. #7 proves my point.

My Artfire site is where I move my oldest work from my site to. I also use Artfire as my main holiday venue for timely sales: Valentines, Christmas, Halloween, Breast Cancer awareness items go directly there and, a few weeks later, on to Etsy. I do this because those sites provide lots of traffic quick. And I want to turn those items around faster. Big traffic is where Artfire and Etsy excel...IF you know how to stand out.

Because I'm a rubber stamp manufacturer, I designed a set of stamps with jewelry makers in mind. I have to make perfect sheets of these to go into stores... but I have lots of "seconds" where the images didn't come out of the stamp machines perfectly. I sell these on both Artfire and Etsy and am amazed at how many people find my beads by looking for those stamps!  I knew that people were looking for them en mass from the Analytics on my rubber stamp site. But by making my seconds  (The images are still perfect but instead of one sheet of 12 images... the buyer could get 12 perfect but separate images) available on these two sites with LOTS more traffic than I can ever hope to generate on my stamping site, I pick up bead customers as well!

Notice my #3 term on the Artfire example: rubber stamps for PMC. My Etsy results are the same...  Do research on Google's keyword tool. Are there any items similar or closely related to the inventory you already sell that you could add to your shop??

Are people zeroing in on one detail of an item in your shop that you could offer more of??? Example, people often start searching for Christmas lampwork glass beads right about... well... NOW. By paying attention to that phrase (you can download and save your keyword reports!) and noticing when traffic requests are on the rise, I know when it's time to start stocking my shops!

By taking a hunch from the Analytics tool (Gee someone searched for purple beads!) to the Keyword tool: I find that way more people are searching for BLUE glass beads. I know I need to go back into all my blue items and make sure "blue" is higher up in the tags!

I would love to hear from you guys what you've learned from Analytics this week and did it make you take action???

Next week: Your google footprint and...how to fix it!