Etsy vs Goimagine Analytics

[BadBob]

Every day, I learn more about Google Analytics GA4. One thing that has become clear is that Etsy's analytics are almost useless if you only sell in the US. They don't filter out anything, including the referral spammers, so Etsy's numbers are greatly inflated. Goimagine's analytics seem to filter just about everything outside the US. I figured out how to filter and block the referral spammers and most sessions from outside the us. On 31 March, I started promoting my Goimagine store, so here I am looking at data from 31 March until 25 April. I have been promoting my Etsy listings for years, so there is a lot of stuff out there. The big surprise is that there is no big difference between The Etsy sessions, which are only 17% more, and decreasing as the filters go into effect.

UTMs are working. I can see which listings are getting hits from my promotions and where they are coming from. After I have done this for a while, I will have enough data to eliminate the ones that are not producing. A few days ago sessions from my promotions became the number-one source.

 

[kmmcrafts]

Your research and information has been interesting for sure.. I recently started tracking using the GA4 and it's a lot different than the old GA I used to use back in the day. I have always known the Etsy tracking views are way over inflated even when I was selling worldwide the "real views" was really only about 50% of what Etsy stats was showing... Maybe changed now as I stopped doing a lot of this monitoring back around 2014 ish.. when I left the Artfire platform. Artfire had people that helped teach and coach us sellers but when the couple staff members that pretty much ran the site left the site went downhill fast and closed up. While I was on Etsy in 2010 I only had a handful of items on there and I never really worked my shop until I left Artfire back around 2014 so I put more focus on Etsy then and back then Etsy also had a lot of groups that did features and promoted one another etc.. A lot of that good help has left and you're kind of on your own to figure it all out. 

 

[BadBob]

The only help I have been getting is from Google AI Gemini. I have to be careful about how I write the questions, and occasionally, I need to have a discussion. It seems strange, but it works much better than queries in the search engine. Then, I am off to do some experiments. I got into this because of the amount of work involved in promoting via social media. I wanted to know if it worked and where the sessions originated. It works, and some social media platforms are not worth the effort. There have been a few surprises. For example, LinkedIn is producing better results than Pinterest. A lot better.

I have had a link to my shop in the signature of my emails for years and have always wondered if anyone clicked on it. I added UTM tags, and 1% of my sessions are coming from my emails. This is a keeper. It costs nothing.

I sold three puzzles in my Goimagine shop today, the first time I have sold more than one puzzle in the same order. Shippo integration still doesn't work for me.

[kmmcrafts]

That's good to hear, Yeah I haven't done much with linkedin. I heard a couple years ago that LinkedIn is a good place to promote but I never figured out how the system works and was at that time too busy to try to work it as TikTok was doing so well I just didn't try to learn it.. Maybe time to revisit that again.. sales have been slower but I've been busy with helping family remodel houses and just been off track of business things and sales are showing that too, LOL.. I'm kinda losing my selling knack and getting out of the loop of things. 

I've also heard that creating a email list is one of the best things to do for your business.. I had one when I used etsy's pattern shop but since etsy kinda screwed with me on some things I dropped out of that and went to shopify which also had one but my email newsletters was not going to those who signed up so I must of had something wrong.. then that is kinda where life got busy and I've not been doing what I should be for business. 

[BadBob]

An email list is on my to-do list since I can add this to Mosaic. It's in one of their videos. Life does have a habit of getting in your way.