30 of 52 - A diversion into Google Analytics

When I first joined Etsy i'd never heard about Google Analytics (GA) before and had no idea how it works.  But, I have learned a little bit now and then just by clicking about so I thought i'd share some of the things i'd found.

The first thing i'm going to start with is something that was posted on a forum thread I was on recently.  How do you find out where traffic to a specific page comes from?

So, you're checking you views and an item has shot up without any intervention from you.  You've probably checked Craftopolis and Craftcult and they don't show you as being featured anywhere on Etsy*.  Where do you look in GA to find out?

If you go to the dashboard for the site you're looking at (I'm assuming you know how to get to the first page here.  You have, after all, managed to install the tracking code already so that's a start.  Then look in the bottom right hand corner there is a box called 'Content Overview' (shown below).

Click the 'view report' link at the bottom of that box.

This will show you the full content overview.  In the bottom left hand corner of the new screen has a table of your 'Top Content' or the pages that are looked at the most.

If the item you want to see is in the top five most viewed pages, then select it (just click on the blue link) from the table you can see above.  If you can't see it, click 'view full report' again and you should find the page you want on that list.

So I want to look at my second most viewed pages which is for my new Caramel Long Fur Bear and when I click on it, I see a page like this

I have marked the 'Entrance Sources' link as that's the bit you need to click next.  This tells you exactly where all of the traffic comes from.  You will now see a table breakdown of the top ten traffic sources for that specific page.

So for my item, most of my traffic is direct (which I expected for this item as it was recently on the Etsy Front Page) but I can see that I get traffic from Google, Bronto (the system that Etsy uses for it's emails), Facebook and an interesting site called Demonkidz.com (a site which freaks me out but they regularly link to their Etsy shop so I figure they're coming to me afterwards).

So, now you know!  It's pretty straight forward but the links are a bit hidden.

If there's another thing you'd like to know about Google Analytics, let me know in the comments and i'll find out.

*I use Etsy as an example here, the same applies to Folksy, your blog, or website.  Anywhere you have Analytics tracking installed.