Google Analytics For Your Etsy Shop by Leal

Google Analytics, if you haven't heard of it, is an excellent tool whenever you have a website or blog that you're trying to grow a following on.  It provides a great deal of information about your visitors including what times of day are your busiest times, how people come to find your site and much more. It's well worth the time it takes to install it on your site and learn the ropes of using this terrific, free service provided by Google.

For many, installing this tool on your site is confusing.  Especially so when you're working with a site that has it's own templates like Blogger/Blogspot.

I hope this will help you understand the process.  Once you have it down, you can then adapt the process to get "GA" (Google Analytics) installed on nearly any online page or site you have.

• First, if you don't have an account, now's the time to sign up for one. You can do that here... 

• Go into your Google Analytics account. 

• From there, look on the right hand side. There should be a link that says " + Add New Profile " Click it. The page that comes up will be titled "Create New Website Profile"

• On that page select "Add a Profile for a new domain" Then, put your blog's address in the box where it asks "Please provide the URL of the site you would like to track." ( example: Ours is http://gilliauna.blogspot.com )

• Click "Finish"

• The next page that comes up is titled "Tracking Code". Scroll down and under "What are you tracking?" Select... A single domain (default)

• To the right of that, there's a window with some code in it. Copy this code and then open your blog in a separate window. Make sure you're logged into your blog if you aren't already.

• Go to your blog's dashboard (there should be a link at the top of the page that takes you there). From the dashboard, choose the link named "layout".  

• In the "Page Elements" tab, choose "add a gadget".

• In the pop-up window that comes up, click the + button on the gadget entitled "HTML/JavaScript". It will open a box that asks for a title and content. Leave the title blank. Paste the code from Google Analytics into the "content" box then click Save.

• Go back to the Google Analytics page you got the code from and click the "Save" button at the bottom.

It will take approx 24 hours (possibly 48 if they're bogged down) for the GA to start reading your site. Once it does, when you open your GA account, your blog will be listed and it will have a green checkmark under "status".

From there, you can click on "View Profile" to explore your site's statistics to your heart's content.


This article was written by Leal Kim, a 21 year old full time college student and artisan that makes handcrafted jewelry and accessories.  Coconspirator of Bits n' Beads by Gilliauna on Etsy ( http://www.etsy.com/shop/gilliauna ) and proud member of the Queer Etsy Street Team ( http://www.etsy.com/shop/queeretsystreetteam ).