Sunday, July 10, 2011

Who's looking at your ArtFire shop?

One of the most important things for an online business is finding out from where your business is coming! There are various free programs for blogs and websites that you can use to monitor activity. I use Blog Patrol here, which gives me a blog counter as well as stats on where my traffic originates.

Their stats page tells me the number of hits my blog has gotten for each day of the current week, as well as in what hours of the day those hits occurred. It also gives me a summary of pages that were visited and the referrer sites, or how my viewers found my blog. Plus they give some nice visualizations of some of the stats, too.


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blogpatrol-1

Funny how searches on some of these things have brought people to my blog, eh?

ArtFire has a built-in stats feature for your shops. It's easy to find, from either your home menu or your Studio tab.

artfire-my-stats-1

artfire-my-stats-2

Once you're there, it gives you the number of shop and item views you've gotten overall (circled in red). I keep track of mine in a spreadsheet so I can calculate daily views. It also gives you incoming item (1) and studio (2) URLs. If you hover over the truncated links in this section, it'll give you the whole link in a pop-up. This is good because for the search engine links, it'll give you the keywords that someone used. Keywords are good! Keywords are your friend.

artfire-my-stats-3

Plus, there's (3) - if you click on the links fore each of the items listed in this section, it'll show you all the incoming links for every one of them. It's almost TMI, but not really, because every little bit helps when you're trying to make your shop stand out in the wide wide web world.

Why is this all important, and why should you care about all this information? Being able to see if I have incoming links from social media, or from a website on which I'm running an ad, and being able to compare the number of hits I get to days or weeks when I'm not doing lots of promo activities lets me know if my efforts are paying off. Plus knowing what people are searching for will help me tailor my listing titles and descriptions, to make me more findable.

So go forth and check your stats. Do you know where your business is coming from? You should!


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2 comments:

Made By Tammy said...

Great info! Thanks for sharing.

Unknown said...

Thanks for the pointers, great information!