When you’re looking at your Etsy stats you need to understand what information is included in what category, and Etsy doesn’t always make this easy to figure out.
The first part of this series went over where all the stats can be found. In this article we’ll talk about what’s included in every category of stats so that you know what you’re actually talking about when you’re looking at the different sections.
To read the first article that details where all the stats can be found, click here.
For the next part about how to use your Etsy stats, click here: Etsy stats part 3
Table of Contents
- How often does Etsy update stats?
- Etsy stats views vs visits.
- What are bots in Etsy stats?
- What does revenue in Etsy stats include?
- What does Etsy Search include?
- What does Etsy Marketing and SEO include?
- What does Etsy App and Other Etsy Pages include?
- What does Direct Traffic include?
- What does Social Media traffic include?
- What’s included in the Etsy Ads category?
Some of the links in this article are affiliate links that will pay me a small commission if they’re used to purchase something. To see the entire affiliate policy click here.
How often does Etsy update stats?
Etsy updates the shop stats on the home page of the dashboard a few times every day. It is not updated in real-time, so there may be a delay in reporting visits and sales. Occasionally stats update and visits drop, which just means that Etsy has filtered out bot traffic or other traffic that is not considered accurate.
Etsy uses your own time zone to report stats, but this is based on the setting that you chose in your shop settings. If that isn’t set up correctly your stats can display incorrectly.
It’s not unusual for Etsy to display incorrect stats, and to occasionally throw visits and sales that happened late in the day into the next day’s statistics.
As I mentioned in the previous article that I wrote about where Etsy stats can be found sometimes things aren’t 100% accurate and we just need to do the best with the information that we’re given!
Etsy stats views vs visits.
A visit on Etsy is counted when one customer comes to your shop. A view is counted anytime an individual listing is viewed in your shop. If one customer comes to your shop and looks at 10 different listings, that would be counted as one visit and 10 views.
Visits are used to calculate conversion rate, with an average eCommerce conversion rate being one to three sales for every 100 visits.
Views are more for the sellers’ information to see how many listings people look at when they come to their shops.
Obviously, Etsy prefers that people look at a lot of listings, so the goal is to keep people in your shop as long as possible in order to increase the number of views that you receive.
What are bots in Etsy stats?
Bot traffic is computer-generated traffic that is not an actual human, but is a computer sending visits to a site for some reason. Bot traffic in Etsy shows up as large spikes in visits that are clearly out of the ordinary. Etsy generally deletes these visits because bot traffic does not represent actual human behavior.
There are a lot of reasons for bot traffic, including search engines that are looking for pages to index, automated services like Alexa looking for information, and sometimes malicious software that’s looking for information to scrape or steal from a website.
The most irritating thing about bot traffic on Etsy is that it shows up in huge numbers, and it messes up your statistics because it makes it look like you had a lot more visits than you actually did.
You’ll be able to see bot traffic on your stats because it will look like a giant spike in traffic that came out of nowhere, for no reason.
Not all bot traffic is bad, but Etsy usually tries to remove it from statistics because it doesn’t represent actual shoppers.
If this traffic is not removed from your stats, however, it can make your conversion rate look lower than it actually is. This can be a problem if you’re trying to figure out your conversion rate and track it over time.
If you do end up seeing large spikes like that for some reason, you may want to subtract it out manually and figure out your conversion rate in a more accurate way without including the bot traffic.
What does revenue in Etsy stats include?
Revenue in Etsy stats includes the total amount of sales that you made, not including postage and sales tax. If the sale price included discounts, the discounted price is the reported revenue, not the full price. Basically, revenue is the price that the customer paid for the item, but not for the shipping or sales tax.
This can be confusing because in other sections of Etsy, there are different numbers that are reported as revenue.
Stats revenue is just the item price, so you can monitor the sales price of products and compare it year over year and month to month.
What does Etsy Search include?
The Etsy search section on the stats page includes traffic from people who came to your shop and who searched on desktop computers. It doesn’t include search traffic from the Etsy app, or traffic from other pages on Etsy that didn’t involve finding the listing through searches.
When you click on the Etsy Search category, it takes you to a page that details the keywords that were typed into the search bar to find your listings.
This traffic can increase or decrease, but if other search categories go up when this one goes down, or vice-versa, it might just be a shift in traffic patterns, not an actual drop in traffic.
What does Etsy Marketing and SEO include?
Etsy SEO refers to search traffic that comes from outside search engines like Google or Bing, or from ads placed on those outside channels. This category only includes outside search traffic, and doesn’t refer to on-Etsy search. Offsite ads traffic is included in this category.
When Etsy refers to “SEO,” it means keyword optimization that Etsy has done to attract traffic from outside of Etsy.
When Etsy refers to “Etsy Search,” it means customers typing things into the search bar on Etsy.
What does Etsy App and Other Etsy Pages include?
The Etsy App and Other Etsy Pages category includes all search and ads traffic from the Etsy app, plus traffic from pages on Etsy that aren’t search-related. This can include anything like traffic from the forums, people’s favorites, the shopping cart, editor’s picks pages, and any other place other than organic or ads search results.
The confusing thing about this category is that it does include search traffic, so even though it’s separate from the Etsy Search category, it’s still search traffic.
But it also includes random visits from other places on Etsy, so it isn’t only search traffic.
And it also includes traffic from ads on the app, because all app traffic is included in this category regardless of what type of traffic it is.
Unfortunately, there’s no way to separate the different traffic out, so you won’t really know what comes from where.
There is additional search traffic keyword data in this section, though, so make sure to check both this section and the Etsy Search section for keyword information!
What does Direct Traffic include?
The Direct Traffic category in Etsy stats includes any traffic that came from people who clicked on a link outside of Etsy that takes them to your shop. This does not include social media traffic, however. This would be traffic from emails, typing the shop address into the web browser, clicking on a bookmarked link, etc.
This category is a little confusing because it doesn’t include social media traffic, so if someone clicks on a direct link on a social platform and comes to your shop, it’s not included in this category.
Use this category to see how many people are coming from more targeted traffic, because they would have to have a link or have bookmarked a page on your site to have their visit included here.
What does Social Media traffic include?
The Social Media category on Etsy includes all traffic from social media platforms, including ads that Etsy has placed on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. This category includes both organic and Offsite ad traffic, so it’s another category that’s difficult to figure out.
Social media includes traffic from your personal accounts, Etsy’s social media accounts, and the offsite ads that Etsy is running on those platforms.
This also includes traffic from when someone else shares your listings on their social media accounts.
You may or may not ever be able to identify the source of traffic when it’s in this category. You can click on it in the shop dashboard to see which platform it came from, but it won’t tell you whose account it came from.
What’s included in the Etsy Ads category?
The Etsy Ads category in traffic stats reports traffic from Etsy ads on desktop computers, but does not include Etsy app traffic. It also does not include offsite ads traffic, only ads purchased through the Etsy ads program.
This category can give you a little information about traffic from Etsy ads, but it would be better to go to the actual Etsy ads dashboard to get stats about traffic there.
Because the app traffic is separated out from this group, it’s not the whole picture.
Etsy stats are complicated because of the way that they’re reported and divided between multiple categories. To get a real picture of what’s going on in your shop, you’ll need to narrow down what you’re looking at and be consistent over time with what you decide to watch.
In the next article, I’ll go over what stats are the most important, and which ones you should pay attention to.
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