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? 

More on the science of renewing your Etsy items....

Its a new year, and I'm hoping you are all making the most of it so far!  I have definitely neglected my blog, but I wanted to pop in quickly and share an amazing article with you Etsy sellers out there.


Mini BobOmb by nerdJERK

The author is an Etsy teammate of mine and an amazing shop owner, nerdJERK.  When I first met Steph, she was itching to break her shop full of geeky awesomeness into serious sales and has become uber successful - in what seems to be a very short time (although she would probably disagree!).  I feel like I can say "I knew her when!", but seriously, her story is really inspiring.  She did her own experiment on the item renewal concept, and was kind enough to share her results with the rest of us, including how you can find the same success she has found. 

She increased her page views by about 500% just by being smart about her renewal process, using several free seller tools websites.  Sound interesting?  Go check out her article, and the rest of her blog too!  If you're interested in her geekery, like this cute mini BobOmb, check out her shop!

Direct link: http://nerdjerk.blogspot.com/2010/11/increase-traffic-in-your-etsy-shop.html