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When considering where traffic to your Etsy shop comes from, most of us default to thinking about search traffic. After all, many of us probably look for products we want to buy most commonly by getting on the search bar of our favorite marketplace and typing in what we are looking for. While in many cases this may be the way lot of people who are intentionally looking for a product find your listings, it’s not the only way.
For Etsy sellers, there is often a lot of focus on optimizing our shops and listings for Etsy SEO. While this is important, we should be thinking about how we can optimize our listings and marketing assets for the other potential sources of traffic.
Gauging Your Current Traffic
Before trying to focus on building up a certain source of traffic, it’s a good idea to figure out where your traffic is coming from. You can click on the “Stats” button in your Etsy dashboard and scroll down to “How shoppers found you”. This will give you an idea of how traffic is finding your shop for the time frame you have selected.
Now that you have an idea of how traffic is finding your shop, let’s look at each potential traffic source in a bit more detail.
Social Media
It’s hard to do much these days without having social media involved in some shape or form. This is traffic coming to your shop from the many social media platforms. Think Facebook, Instagram, and the like. Love it or hate it, social media can have a powerful application in driving traffic to your shop, so you should be trying to leverage this tool as an Etsy shop owner.
Traffic from social media can come in a few ways. This can be from links that you include in your social media posts, or in your profile. They can also be from links that your followers share within their content. Building a social media following that trusts you and finds value in what you are sharing is key to making this traffic source work for your brand. While directly marketing your products has a place here, your focus should be on community and providing content relevant to your brand. If you are authentic, the traffic and sales will follow.
Another thing to consider is that a lot of Etsy social traffic comes from Pinterest, so it may be beneficial to become familiar with that platform and take advantage of that traffic. If you are interested in learning more about Pinterest, check out this post.
Offsite Ads
These are ads that Etsy buys on your behalf to run on sites around the web. These can be Google search ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, etc. Unlike Etsy ads, you are only charged for these when a click converts to a sale.
While you don’t have a lot of control over these ads, this is still potential for traffic into your shop that you wouldn’t otherwise generate.
Etsy Ads
This is one we are all probably familiar with. Etsy ads are priority placement in search and can generate traffic to specific items that a potential buyer may be searching for. These ads appear within a user’s search results and can be identified below the items price that says, “Ad by Etsy Seller”.
Etsy ads can be effective but will cost you money per click regardless of whether that click converts to a sale or not. If you haven’t tried using Etsy Ads, you may benefit from experimenting with this traffic source to see if it works for your shop.
Direct Traffic
Direct traffic is simple. Whenever someone types in your shop URL and presses enter, they are directly entering your shop. Direct traffic can often be attributed to people who are familiar with your shop and what you offer, and rather than searching for you, they directly go to your shop to find what they are looking for.
One way to generate direct traffic from potential customers would be using a business card or QR code. Let’s say you are selling your handmade goods at a local craft fair. You could pass out cards with your shop URL on it, or a QR code that leads potential buyers to your shop.
Another direct source of traffic would be from your email marketing list if you have one. This can be a great source of direct traffic since you control when and where you want to send traffic.
Referrals From Other Sites
When we talk about referrals in relation to Etsy shop traffic, we are talking about traffic that comes to your shop from a referring site. This can be a link on a forum somewhere, a shout out on a blog post, or any link that comes from a site other than Etsy.com or social media. The nice thing about referral traffic is that it is typically evergreen, meaning that provided the referring website still exists, or doesn’t remove the link, you can still generate traffic from the referral.
Now that you understand what referrals are, how can you start building some referrals that lead back to your shop? For the sake of this scenario, let’s say your shop sells handmade wedding ring boxes. One way to get a referral link would be to reach out to wedding blogs or websites and offer to write a guest post related to the topic of wedding items. Then include a link back to relevant items in your shop. When writing a guest post with the purpose of generating traffic back to your listings, be sure that the post offers value to the reader. If someone doing wedding research finds value in what you write, they may share that post and help create more traffic for you.
Start Creating More Traffic
The purpose of this blog post is to help you think outside the box in terms of where your Etsy traffic comes from. Remember that while optimizing your products for search is very important, it’s also beneficial to build traffic from these other sources. Get creative and find ways to leverage all these streams of traffic.
Do you have any tips or ideas to take advantage of all these opportunities for generating more traffic to your shop? Let us know over on the eRank Facebook Group.