Stats 9 - How Etsy counts social media

This post is an effort to clear up a cloudy area of Etsy's stats. How are seller stats counted when traffic comes into our Etsy shop via social media?

On Etsy, social media use can be counted in two ways:

• Direct Traffic (left column, see my blog post on the subject)

• The exact social media. (These would be Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and likely others.)

Let's say that someone uses the web browser version of Instagram. If they click through to your shop, then it will show as traffic from Instagram.com.

On the other hand, perhaps they use the Instagram app. If they click through to view your shop in a browser or the Etsy app, then it shows more generically, as "direct traffic." That’s because the apps can't pass click-through referral data from one app to another.

From Etsy Admin: similarly, “a direct traffic shop stat can occur when clicking a link from a mobile social media app like Facebook or Twitter. Phone apps often do not pass referrer information. Additionally, this can also occur when going to a non-secure (http) site from a link on a secure (https) site, as the secure site won’t pass a referrer to the non-secure site. For instance, if someone clicks a link on example.com to go to example2.com, the analytics for example2.com will show the session as direct. Etsy links are generally https.”

“If you’d like to track all of the clicks from your social posts, I would suggest using a link shortener like bitly (bitly.com) to shorten links to your listings. This way, you’ll be able to look up those numbers at a later date with more clarity. Hope that helps! – Jessica”

I use shortened links from https://goo.gl/ in my blog posts so I can track any traffic better. It seems to work well. It tells you how many times the unique link has been used, which is nice.

Is it brighter?

I hope you have enjoyed delving into Etsy's stats. Stay tuned for more posts on how to better sell on Etsy.