I have been playing around with Google Analytics, trying to answer the question “What should my Mother make?”  For her birthday, I created an Etsy website so that she could sell her handcrafted jewelry online.  She had been selling bracelets, earrings, necklaces and lanyards at fairs and events. 

Well, she has been making bracelets like crazy.  She has 40 or so on her website and at least that many which have not yet made it online.  She has only a handful of necklaces currently available on the web and probably less than two dozen which could be posted to her website.  Should my Mother be making so many bracelets?  

I analyzed this from two different angles.  First, I analyzed what pages visitors were viewing on her site.  With Google Analytics you can set an entrance path and see what pages were viewed next.  I choose her home page to be the entrance path and found that:  

• 36% went to the second page of her shop
• 15% looked a her featured jewelry
• 13% clicked on the necklace section of her shop
• 8% visited the bracelet section of her shop

Google Analytics also tells you where visitors went next so I know if they continued browsing her inventory, looked at her profile page, or reviewed the feedback purchasers provided about her.  In addition to understanding how visitors are navigating the site, it also indicates what items are most popular.  For example, one jewelry item had many page views.

Visitors clicked on the necklace section more often than the bracelet section, which indicates that necklaces are more popular.  However, necklaces are the first section listed and it may be that the order is causing more page views.  Thus, I will switch the order and check back to see if the pattern continues. 

Next I analyzed her online sales.  Necklace sales outpace her bracelet sales.  In addition, the average cost of a necklace was more than twice the average cost of a bracelet.  I had thought that visitors would gravitate towards bracelets because they are less expensive; however, her online sales suggest that visitors are more likely to purchase necklaces even though they cost more.

From a business perspective, it makes sense for my Mother to make more necklaces; however, my analysis doesn’t take into account her offline sales or her artistic goals.  My Mother is an artist and not a factory.  However, I will suggest that we update her necklace inventory on the website.

For my Mother’s birthday, I created her very own website on www.etsy.com.  My Mom was speechless when she saw a site dedicated to selling her handcrafted jewelry online. 

This was a labor of love.  I spent many afternoons taking pictures of her necklaces, earrings, bracelets and lanyards and then researching the materials she used.  Using the etsy template, I created her “shop” by loading the pictures of her inventory, creating descriptions for each piece, setting up tags, outlining her shop’s terms and conditions (including shipping costs) and setting up a Google Analytics account so that I could track the performance of the website.   

It is so rewarding to receive feedback from customers that they love my Mother’s jewelry and think it is well made.  I also enjoy analyzing the web site’s performance and playing with Google Analytics.   In case you haven’t had a chance to use Google Analytics, here’s a screen shot from one of the standard Google Analytics’ reports.

The top graph shows the number of visits by day for the most recent month.  You can look at the metrics by day, week or month and set the time period to be analyzed.

Next on the report is site usage metrics including visits, pageviews, pages/visit, bounce rate, average time on the site, and percent new visits.  Most of these metrics are straight forward but you do need to be mindful of anomalies.  There are some weeks when I will see a huge spike in visits; however, those correspond to times when I was loading jewelry to the site and thus frequently visiting the site to see how it looked.

Her bounce rate is 39%.  Google Analytics defines it as follows, “bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”  Not everyone who comes to her page will be interested in her jewelry.  Three visitors who typed in the keywords “buddha inspired chinese” were directed to her website.  I doubt they found what they were looking for!  Bounce rate is a powerful metric and I will be discussing it in another blog post.

Next is the visitor overview.  This is the number of new and existing visitors that came to the site.  It looks very similar to the Dashboard chart but the difference is that it measures visitors and not visits.  The Map Overlay World shows me at a quick glance where visitors to the site are coming from in the world. 

The pie chart below shows the traffic sources — direct traffic, search engines and referring sites.  Finally, the report shows an over view of the pages that had the most pageviews.  The first is the home page of her site and the subsequent ones are the pages for particular jewelry.

 I have no idea what I will do for my Mother’s next birthday but I will probably still be playing with Google Analytics until then.