Opening an Etsy store and starting a blog has introduced me to the world of stats. Stats on your sites can be a wonderful tool. They can show you what your most popular products are, what you need to improve, and provide insight to who your audience is. But sometimes stats are just a confusing pile of crap.
Actually, stats are more like having a scale when you're dieting. Using a scale can lead you to weigh yourself every day, and therefore into insanity. Day One = X pounds. Day Two = X pounds. Day Three = X - 2 pounds. Day Four = X - 1 pound. It's frustrating. Looking at my Etsy stats can feel the same way.
But I like looking at the stats every day because my store is new. I'm trying to grow my business, and I need to see what works. Plus I'm just curious. I seem to average about 8-10 store and/or listing views a day. If I look at a certain day's stats and that's what pops up, I'm content. But if the total is zero, I start obsessing a tad over why.
I'm currently confused by a bump the other way. Yesterday, I had 30 shop views and 41 listing views. Ooh! But WHY? This is the trouble with being a former journalist: I have to know the who, what, when, where, why and how. Stats can fill a lot of that in, but not the why. Since I'm hard on myself, I figured someone just got locked into my page somehow and was tripping the page views. I know it happens. My 6-year-old is responsible for unnecessarily hiking the page views of one of my friends. She's a big fan of my friend's shop and loves to look at all her jewelry -- sometimes several times. I try to prevent this, but my daughter's figuring out how to use Google and can sometimes get to my friend's shop on her own. So I know not every page view is a valuable page view. I figured that's what happened to me yesterday.
But then I read my e-mail and discovered a lot of people did discover my store yesterday. I had several e-mails telling me people had "liked" one of my pieces or my store, or had added me to their Etsy circle. As to why, I still haven't figured that out. I didn't list a new piece yesterday, or join a group, or link to the store from Facebook or here. So what happened? The universe just ain't gonna help me on that. Now what I need to do is just sit back and be happy about it. And not start obsessively checking today's stats. They're trending a little high again, by the way. Wait! No! I mean I haven't checked my stats today! Not once!
No, not once. More like three times. Sigh.
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