How to Connect Your Etsy Store to Google Analytics
Google Analytics is an extremely powerful and free tool that you can use to understand traffic to your web properties. You can use Google Analytics with Etsy, Shopify, WordPress, and other sites easily to better understand your traffic.
This article focuses on how to configure Google Analytics for your Etsy store, so you can supplement the data Etsy provides.
If you get stuck, you can also refer to Etsy’s Google Analytics guide or Google Analytics’ help page.
1.) Set up a Google Analytics account
2.) Navigate to “create property
3.) Select “Web” and click continue
4.) Link your Etsy store
In this step you can find the URL of your Etsy store by logging in and clicking your store name. The URL should follow this syntax: www.etsy.com/shop/yourshopname
5.) Copy your unique Tracking ID
5.) Navigate to your Etsy store, go to settings, then options
6.) Open “Web Analytics” and paste your Tracking ID
7.) Wait a month, then dig into your data!
Google Analytics is a very powerful tool that can help you understand your audience. At a very high level, you can learn about your audience geography, demographic, age, referral method, and so much more. This information is crucial to being able to understand how to better market to your ideal audience.
Here are a few insights from my Etsy store:
Geography
It’s no surprise that most of my visitors are in the US. However, maybe there’s more I can be doing to ensure my UK, Canadian, Australian, and German customers are comfortable checking out. Maybe I need to offer imperial sizing, local fulfillment options, or language transaltion to capture more of theses sales.
Age
Most of my customers are young adult to middle aged, so I need to take that into account when looking at trends, product style, and communication methods.
Session Stats
Looks like I’m getting more users in the last 90 days, but they’re staying for a shorter time on my site. This may have to do with my keywords as it’s possible I’m targeting too broad of a niche, or that I don’t have enough ancillary products to keep buyers’ attention.
Active Users
Uh oh! My active users is on the way down. I suspect this is related to reducing my daily ad spend in reaction to the new Etsy Ads changes. I’ll have to monitor this as I dial in my advertising keywords, in additon to working on my organic traffic process.
Moving Forward with Google Analytics
I recommend you spend some time in the GA dashboard to get comfortable with the different views and types of data being collected. Google Analytics is a complex tool with lots of documentation and industry expertise behind deciphering it.
If you’re curious about learning more, I would start with Analytics Academy. Be open to learning from what the data tells you (not your own pre-conceived notions about your customers) and let me know what you learn along the way!
Best,
Spencer
Full Transcription
Hey everybody, I’m Spencer from Merchlifestyle.com, and today I’m going to show you how to link your Etsy store with Google analytics.
Google analytics is a completely free platform that you can use to better understand your Ecommerce properties. Whether you’re selling on Shopify woocommerce Etsy or other sites, google analytics can help you better understand your customers. As far as where their location is in the world, why they came to your site, what their interests are, and how they got to your website. All of this information can. be combined to really help you get a better understanding of your customers on the internet and ultimately that will help you sell more on your eCommerce journey.
I’m going to go show you how to do that in six simple steps specifically linking Etsy to Google analytics and we’re going to go over to Merchlifestyle.com and I’ll show you exactly how to do it.
You can follow the link in the description or you can head to merchlifestyle.com where then you can click on the blog link which will link to my article called how to connect your Etsy store to Google analytics.
Navigate to that and then you’ll be brought to a page with step by step process that you can use to set this up. I’ve also provided links to Etsy’s Google analytics guide and Google analytics help page in case you get stuck or this tutorial isn’t in-depth enough for you. I try to keep it broad enough so that in case any of the actual pages change that this won’t be out of date.
So if you do get stuck the overall process should be the same, but you can go get exact specific step by steps using these links. First thing you want to do is set up a Google Analytics account, follow the link I provided here. Their home page will look like this, click on start for free once you get that set up, it’s going to look like just a homepage dashboard.
You’re going to navigate to create property and then at that point you’ll select web, which means it’s just simply the configuration for Etsy that is going to work the easiest. Once you select web and hit continue, this part is where you’re going to link your Etsy store. You’re going to tell Google analytics what you want to measure. I would give so I would give it a website name so that you can keep track of it in case you have multiple Etsy stores you can do this with each of those. So use your Etsy store name and then type in your website URL here. It’s going to look like www.etsy.com/shop slash whatever your store is called. And if you want to double check that you can go into Etsy, sign into your store and then click on your store name. It should bring up the syntax so that you can see the exact name. But I think if you just follow etsy.com shop slash your shop name, you should be just fine.
So set that up choose the industry category shopping and click create. What you’re going to get from there is a unique tracking ID. I’ve used this one here, don’t use that one because it leads to nowhere. It’s a property I’ve already deleted. it’s just there to show an example of what you’ll see you’ll see this multi-digit number. Copy that from Google analytics and then navigate to your Etsy store, sign in, go to settings this little gear on the side and then click on options.
Once you see options, you’re going to navigate over to the middle where it has a tab for Web Analytics. At that point you simply paste in your Google analytics web ID. Use The one that we found right up here after you created your property paste that in and then you should be all set.
It’s going to take a little bit of time for Google analytics to collect this data for your store. It’s not going to be super interesting in the first few days, but I would recommend you waiting a month or so and then that should give you enough time to actually see the beginning of some trends. And I pulled a little bit of data from my Etsy store so that you can see what trends might look like over a 90-day period and what the different kind of data is that even matters.
What’s the point of Google analytics? Why are we even looking at it?
Here are a few insights from my store. The geography of my users over 90 days. No surprise here that over 60% of my Etsy store customers are from the US but I also have a surprising amount from the UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany and now these aren’t exactly customers, they’re just visitors and what this might tell me is that I need to maybe do a better job of catering my store to these different locations.
If I’m getting almost 20% of my traffic from the UK, am I offering sizes of my products in imperial units ? do they have an option to check out with a size of centimeters or is the sizing appropriate for that part of the world rather than just inches and having such a US focus.
The same would go for shipping options. Am I offering a local shipping option that is affordable for them?
In the US I offer free shipping, however, in the UK, Canada, Australia and Germany, I charge a flat fee in order to fulfill to those areas. Another thing you can look at to is whether you’re localizing your Etsy store in the language of different countries that are visiting your store. So what you could do is you can set up those language translations and then you could track to see if those countries are visiting your store more and more after you made those changes. This is some of the kind of stuff that you can see in terms of geography and I think it’s super interesting for your store, too.
Age is another huge one. I was a little bit surprised when I looked at these age numbers. I thought my customers were a bit older than this. However, the vast majority of my users and my customers are my visitors come through in our age 25 to 34. So like right in the middle of where I’m at. So what that tells me is I need to be making sure my advertising plays to these different groups. It might not be that useful for me to cater my marketing my messaging towards, you know, 45 and up when the majority of my customers are 44 years and old and under so that’s really interesting. I think sometimes as store owners you can have assumptions about your audience without checking the data and this is really interesting to have it shown right there for you and these are the facts so you can adjust accordingly.
Session stats is another one. You can see how many users are coming , their bounce rates, so how many are directly leaving your page for another page and an interesting one is how long they stay. One thing on Etsy that you can control is how many products you have, the kinds of products you have, whether you encourage customers to click through to other products that you have. Generally the longer that a customer stays on your store, the more likely they are to complete a purchase, the more likely that they’re interested in something that you’re offering.
And then the final point is active users. This is an interesting way to see whether your store is on a growth trajectory or not. Right now mine is actually trending down and I think that has a little bit to do with how I am driving most of my traffic through promoted listings and how promoted listings has just changed with Etsy Ads. And I think there’s a lot of churn going on with how that’s being worked out. This is a metric I need to keep an eye on and think about how do I increase my organic traffic to balance out the heavily weighted traffic I drive with paid listings.
These are all things you can see with Google analytics. It’s easy to understand on the surface, but to master it there’s a ton of education, and certification that you can get. I would recommend you check out Google Analytics Academy if you’re interested in learning more and be sure to be open to what the data tells you instead of relying on any preconceived notions.
Derive the data as you will learn from the academy as you dive deeper and leverage this tool across each of your e-commerce properties. So that way you’re not only relying on what Etsy gives you, it’s another way to drive a competitive advantage in your business.