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Once you learn where Etsy stats are located and how to find the different types of stats that you’re looking for, you’ll need to decide which types of stats you’re most interested in monitoring.
In the first two parts of these articles, I went over where Etsy stats are located and what information they include. In this article I’ll go over what I consider to be the most important stats for an Etsy seller to monitor.
How to use Etsy shop stats.
Which Etsy stats are the most important ones to watch?
How to understand my Etsy stats.
Can you download your Etsy stats?
What stats does Etsy care about?
How to use Etsy shop stats.
Etsy stats can be used to track patterns in your shop to help figure out what’s causing increases or decreases in year-over-year (YoY) traffic and sales. By watching the traffic source data you can see if any changes that you make have a positive or negative effect on your shop, and you can monitor revenue to make sure that your income is increasing steadily.
When you’re using the Etsy stats, you’ll need to remember that they’re NOT a full picture, because they leave off some of the app traffic and other data.
They also don’t give you real-time updates, so you might have a lag in reporting sales and revenue numbers.
Use the stats that you can get and make your best guesses after that, basically.
You can also use Etsy shop stats to check your keywords and make sure that your SEO is bringing in traffic to your shop.
Again, these stats aren’t 100% complete, but it’s usually good enough to get an idea about what kinds of keywords are bringing you the most traffic.
Stats categories on the shop dashboard.
The simple answer to whether Etsy stats are accurate is no, but it’s a little more complicated. Because all stats-gathering software tends to miss some traffic, some of the traffic stats leave out information. The revenue and orders data in the Etsy stats should be accurate but they don’t update in real-time, so there will be a delay in reporting those.
On top of that, the Etsy stats dashboard can be extremely glitchy. The picture above shows that I made 1348 sales and almost $25,000 for the time range “today,” but that’s clearly not accurate!
I don’t even know what range they’re looking at, because I tried a few different time frames in the stats overview dropdown box (where it says “today”) and none of them were the same as what’s being shown here.
So use Etsy stats as a guideline but not the absolute truth. No stats-reporting program is completely accurate all the time even if it’s not glitchy, which Etsy’s clearly is.
Bot traffic shows unusually high spikes in the visits chart.
Which Etsy stats are the most important ones to watch?
The four main data points that are provided in the Etsy shop dashboard are views, visits, orders, and revenue. On the shop stats page conversion rate is also included, so we can add that as a data point to monitor as far as your shop’s growth goes. Of those five data points, revenue is the most important data point to monitor.
Revenue can be influenced by any number of things, some that we can control and some that we can’t.
If your revenue is increasing or staying the same and you’re happy with that, then you’re probably not going to need to go in to look at other things.
If your revenue is decreasing, or not growing as much as you’d like, that’s when the other stats are used to try to figure out why.
Since it all comes back to revenue, that’s the main thing that I watch.
I also watch my conversion rate just as a general guideline, but recently Etsy hasn’t been removing bot traffic from the shop visit stats, so conversion rates aren’t being reported accurately.
You need to be aware of how each stat category affects the reporting of the other ones so that you can ignore weird outlier data that can give you the wrong picture of what’s going on in your shop.
Traffic breakdown for Etsy stats
How to understand my Etsy stats.
In order to understand your Etsy stats, you need to be willing to look at them without being emotional. It can be difficult to separate your feelings from your shop’s performance, but if you can analyze your stats objectively and take action on things that they’re telling you, it will benefit you in the long run.
Visits are good to monitor because there will be times when you feel like Etsy has “turned your shop off.” This doesn’t really happen, but it could be that your listings aren’t being found as often in search results.
If you feel like your shop is unusually slow, check your visits to see if your traffic is in the normal range. If it is, then people are coming to your shop, but they’re just not buying.
That could be something external from Etsy, like bad economic times, but it also means that you might have to improve something in your shop, like your processing times, shipping costs, clarifying your descriptions, etc.
If your visits are normal, it proves that Etsy isn’t hiding your shop, so at least you can eliminate that possibility.
If your views on Etsy are dropping, it means that people aren’t looking at as many listings in your shop when they do come to it.
If your visits are NOT dropping at the same time, it means that you’re still getting people coming to your shop, but they’re not choosing to look at more products while they’re there. For that, you’ll need to work on giving people a reason to stay longer in your shop.
You can do this by linking to other listings in your descriptions, or by putting a link to your shop’s homepage in the descriptions.
If your visits are also dropping along with views, it means that you need to work on that traffic first.
One visit equals one person, and views equal how many pages total were looked at. So you should have more views than visits if people are looking at more than one page when they come to your shop.
The best scenario is when your visits and views both increase at the same time, but also good is when views increase and visits stay the same.
That means that people are choosing to look at more listings when they come to your shop.
Keeping an eye on the average number of orders that you have each day is a basic way to see if your listings are being shown in search enough, and whether your SEO is good.
It can also be an indicator of pricing issues or other problems with your shop policies and settings.
For example, if you raise your prices and your sales slow down, it might mean that you’ve gone too far on the high end of the price range for your category. Before you decide that, though, you should look at revenue to see if it’s also dropped, or whether the price increase has offset a drop in the number of orders.
A drastic drop in orders can mean that your SEO isn’t current, or that your products are seasonal or not trendy anymore.
Basically, a drop in orders might be bad, but not all the time, and you’ll have to do some digging to see if it matters or not.
Click here to get the keyword tracker.
Conversion rate is a stat that comes in two versions.
First, there’s the whole-shop conversion rate, which you want to try to increase over time for yourself, but which Etsy isn’t too worried about.
The average ecommerce conversion rate is reported by different sources to be anywhere between 1-3%, which means that out of every 100 visitors to your shop, you should make 1-3 sales.
Conversion rates that are higher than that are good, but as long as your conversion rate is steady or increasing you’re probably doing fine.
There’s also a listing-level conversion rate, which is more important to Etsy as far as search placement goes.
If a listing sells really well, Etsy will continue to show it higher in search results. If it’s the only thing in your whole shop that sells, so your whole-shop conversion rate isn’t as good, Etsy doesn’t care, and it will still show that listing higher in search.
Also, conversion rate isn’t always related to revenue, which to me is the most important stat to pay attention to.
For me, this is the only metric that really matters in the long run. If everything else drops but your revenue stays the same or increases, that’s fine.
You can probably do some work to get the other stats on the increasing side of things, but if you’re not facing a big decline in your income at the same time, it’s a lot less stressful.
Revenue will be influenced by everything in your shop, and it usually doesn’t go up if everything else goes down, but it can.
Increased visits will also increase views, and statistically that will increase conversion rate and orders, so your revenue should also go up. However, if you suddenly get hit by a bunch of offsite ads that decrease your revenue, it might go down when everything else is rising.
Keep an eye on it and if you see any strange trends with some of the categories going up while others are going down, look into it to see if it’s something that’s affecting your revenue.
Can you download your Etsy stats?
You can’t download Etsy stats other than the basic sales information on the csv files in your shop options section. The information in the Etsy stats dashboard is only available online.
This is pretty inconvenient if you’re really interested in tracking your progress on Etsy, so what I’d recommend is to choose one or two metrics that you think are good to track, and create your own spreadsheets to do that over time.
What stats does Etsy care about?
When Etsy looks at stats, it’s most concerned about conversion rate on an individual listing level.
If you have one listing that sells consistently well, Etsy is much happier to show that listing over and over, and if nothing else in your shop is selling they don’t care.
The Etsy algorithm will continue to surface that one listing because it knows that when something is selling and is popular it will probably continue to sell if they continue to show it.
People worry about their whole-shop conversion rate, but Etsy is really not interested in that, and they have told us in the past in personal communication that it’s really not something that they look at too much, if at all.
The other side of that, is that if you have listings that are not selling and the conversion rate is very low, it doesn’t matter to Etsy. They’re just going to keep showing the listings that are selling, and they don’t mind if there are other listings there that are not selling.
Some tips to using Etsy’s stats:
Don’t take everything as the pure truth, the numbers are usually off.
Never make decisions about your shop using a small time frame. Use at least the last 30 days-worth of data so that you can see patterns, and it’s even better to use 3-6 months, or year-over-year data so that you have a better picture of what’s actually going on.
Don’t worry about all-shop conversion rate very much, it’s not as important as people think! Individual listings’ conversion rates are more important.
Don’t make decisions or assumptions about your shop based on only looking at one metric in the stats. Use multiple data points to see if you can figure out why things are happening.
Remember that revenue is the only stat that really matters in the long run!
Kara Buntin has run a home-based business since 1999, and has a background in art, theater design, and cake decorating. She's a top Etsy seller with over 46,000 sales on Etsy and her own website, and helps other home-based business owners with their business goals and SEO.
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