Friday, February 11, 2011

Renewing Success! Preliminary Results......

Its been three weeks since I implemented the strategies outlined in nerd Jerk's article about being smart when planning your Etsy item renewals.  Even though its still early in my experiment, I was eager to see if it was working so far.

I ran the numbers comparing the three weeks of my experiment (January 19 - Feb 10 ) to the previous three weeks (December 28 - Jan 18), and was surprised to see that it *IS* working, even after just three weeks!  While a lot of my Etsy friends are reporting a dip in visits and sales, I'm experiencing an increase in both.

Here's what I did:
-Determined my highest traffic hours of the day using Google Analytics
-Used http://www.statsy.org/ to set at least two items to automatically renew each day during my peak traffic hours
-Edited most of my listings to cross promote my items by including a link in the beginning of each listing to a similar shop section or matching/coordinating items

Here's how it went:
-My unique visitors have increased by 11%
-My page views have increased by 14%
-I saw a 38% increase in the number of first-time shop visitors

Here's how that translated into sales:
-My number of sales increased 200%
-My revenue increased by 65%

WOWZA!!!  Yes, it is still early, but I'm thrilled to be seeing these statistics thus far in my process.  I'll definitely keep analyzing.  I also learned something about my peak times, which happen to be around noon and then again at 7pm.  I saw better results when I only renewed items during the noon hour, as opposed to splitting them between noon and 7pm.  I now only set my items to renew during the earliest peak hour of the day.  However, when I renew items very early in the day (at say 8am instead of waiting until my peak time of noon), I had lower shop/item views.  In summary: renewing early in the day doesn't necessarily bring more visitors for me, but renewing at my first peak hour of the day does bring in more visitors, even if that happens mid-day. 

Has anybody else been trying this experiment?  How has it been going?  If you haven't done it yet, are you planning on it? 

3 comments:

  1. That's amazing! I think I need to start working the program too!

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  2. Mishelle - that's freakin' phenomenal news! :) I'm so glad that you've seen such wonderful results! I've heard a lot of positive feedback about it from other Etsy Sellers as well. I'm just glad to be able to help providing a little direction when it comes to something so daunting as renewing. It's also interesting how each person's results is a little bit different. I'm glad that you've found that your target market likes to shop around noon (where as my geek market usually cruises the internets at night).

    Congrats on all your success and being awesome! :D

    <3 - Steph @ www.nerdJERK.etsy.com

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  3. I read Steph's article and tried it, except I don't have nearly enough items to keep it up! However, I did notice that my traffic increased and I got a lot of hearts! Congrats on your success!

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