Contributor on Art Fire!

I’m very honored that Art Fire has added me as a contributor.  They have posted my first of two articles (which will continue to grow) on how to use Google Analytics with your Art Fire Account.  I really enjoy writing up these types of tutorials and am happy to see them help the Art Fire community!

Would love to hear your feedback on these articles and any topics you would like to see covered in future articles.

I am going on a trip for my ‘day job’, so will not be online as much over the next few days.

Google Analytics Overview – Round One

Hi everyone!  So, I’ve noticed that a lot of people have asked about using Google Analytics once it is set-up on your Art Fire site (or other sites).  So, I thought I’d do a round one overview of some of the great high level features you can use starting… now!

Using an Analytics account from a blog I used to run I’ve captured screen shots to walk you through some of the key areas (or what I think are key):

1.  Google Analytics Home Page – Here you will be given a months worth of data shown at a very high level.

1. You will see number of visits in graph format by day
2. You will see the overall numbers for the entire length of time chosen (one month here)
3. You will see Unique visitors and a map that shows where they came from by country (highlighted on the map)
4. You will see a graph showing how users found you and a list of top content pages viewed

2.  Let’s dig a little deeper – You can narrow down data to a day or group of days by clicking on the arrow next to the dates shown in the upper right, click on one day or create a span and click ‘Apply’:

3.  Once you have the date(s) you want, you can start digging into the data.

4.  Let’s start with Visitors-Overview:  Here you will get a great snapshot of your visitors, overall visits and unique views, along with the browser they were using and connection speed.  To explore some more, click on anything that is hyperlinked and you’ll be taken deeper into the numbers:

5.  Next is the Map Overlay:  Here you can see users by country, city, subcontinent region:

To get to the city layout, click on the drop down above the country list (right now it is set to country/territory) and pick cities:

Click on a city name, and you will see detailed stats for that region:

6.  Next we will check out the Visits Trending section, starting with Visits:

This area gives you a look at your visits by day, and the average # of visits per day:

Next take a look at the Absolute Unique Visits (this only captures an ip address once so you get a real feel for the number of people checking out your site):

Next lets see how many Page Views there were (this gives you a good idea of how much content is being looked at):

7.  Let’s see how people got to you by looking at the Traffic Sources section:

First is the overview section which will show you visits, a graph that shows high level sources (search engine, referral link, direct) and top traffic sources and keywords:

Then… I like to look at Referring Site, Search Engines and Keywords (Keywords is especially powerful if you are or are planning to run an ad campaign… it will help you really narrow down which key words are being used to find your site.  For my ad campaigns, I choose to buy keywords that aren’t appearing here so that I can broaden my market, as I’m already being found easily through Google Search on the keywords here):

Referring Sites:

Search Engines:

Keywords:

I will end this first high level overview of Google Analytics here.  I hope this gives you a good idea of what type of information you can begin getting, right now!  It is so helpful to know how many people are finding you, what part of the world/country is coming to your site, and it is especially great to know how people are getting to your site so you can get smart about marketing campaigns, etc.

I will go more in depth next time, and will also do some very specific write ups on the AdWords component, which really helps you see how succesful the specific parts of your campaign are doing.

Feel free to leave a comment with any questions or feedback you may have.

Art Fire – Google Analytics Integration

I’m so excited to see that Art Fire has quickly implemented Google Analytics and has made it easy for us sellers to integrate.  The stats they have been providing are good, Google Analytics will make it even better.  The other good news, all sellers (validated and not validated) have been given these tools, for FREE!  This makes me even more happy (well, I pay $7/month, but that covers my listing an selling goals).

Here is an overview of the integration process for sellers:

1. You will need to sign up for a Google Analytics Account here
2. Click on ‘Sign Up Now   
3. If you need an entirely new Google Account, Click on ‘Sign Up Now’ otherwise, sign into your existing Google Account to attach Google Analytics
4. If you are creating a new Google Account, fill in the required information
5. After setting up your Google Account go to Google Analytics and click, Access Analytics
6. You will then see your main analytics page
7. On the main analytics page you will see your Google analytics number:  UA-#######-# (I’ve deleted mine out, but it is right after your bolded url.
8. Copy this number and paste it into the field that Art Fire has provided in the ‘My Stats’ section
9. Done!
10. Give Google about 24 hours to start tracking and filling in stats

I hope you’ve found this tutorial helpful.  I just did the integration, so will see stats in Google soon!  I can’t wait.

Feel free to leave a comment with any questions.

Making Totes and Taking Pictures

I just made some more totes and finally re-did all of my pictures.  I think they look much better and will work very well for my brochure and other marketing materials.  Amazing what a white fabric background will do… .

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving!  I ate too much turkey, had a turkey sandwich and will be eating leftovers (including another slice of pecan pie!) tonight.  I love Thanksgiving… the food is the best!

Here is one of my new totes (and new picture formats):

Set Up Google Base – LetsEts

Using LetsEts I’ve sucessfuly set up my Google Base.  This allows me to add my feed of products to the Google search engine very easily.  The process was not too bad and I thought I’d share what I did:

1. Go to LetsEts
2. Enter your Etsy User Name
3. See your product images and information appear as a list
4. Download your xml (or whichever file format you choose)
5. Click on the Google Base link provided at LetsEts
6. Sign up for Google Base account if you don’t have one (Google will take you through the steps automatically if you need an account)
7. In the settings of your Google Base account make sure you type in your URL, otherwise the next step will not work correctly
8. Upload your xml (or whichever format you saved) file
9. Voila!  If it has worked, you will see the number of files uploaded and the expiration date

I look forward to see if this proves to help my sales on Etsy.  Will definitely report back.  It’s hard to tell as Etsy doesn’t have a real stats program, but I’ll see if anything increases in the next week or two now that I’ve uploaded my product information.

Would love to hear how Google Base has worked for you.