I’m sure this has been asked and answered before but I can’t find where.
I thought it would be useful to know what search terms people use to find my listings (apart from those which get to my listings / shops directly via my FB / Pinterest / Twitter and Instagram promotion that is).
Had a fiddle in Analytics which is to me (an ex IT professional 
) one of the great mysteries of life which I can never quite commit myself to getting my head round.
It is after all not much use setting up lots of tags on my listings if those are not the words / phrases which people are using in their google searches.
I did get one whole page suggesting that the only searches anyone ever does are for my fused glass dichroic jewellery … which I find hard to believe as that accounts for a minor part of my sales.
Had anyone got a simple, step by step guide to how I get a simple analysis of the search terms used to get to my listings. Pleeeaaaaase :)saal
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That makes me feel better about the mysteries of GA if you can’t master it either, Joy! I’ll be interested if anyone has discovered how to do this.
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I start trying to work it out and then think “life’s too short” and do something more interesting
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Don’t bother - life is too short and you do have more interesting things to do.
There is a very large chunk of traffic that google analytics never seems to be able to (or prepared to) account for (‘direct’ traffic) its the same stuff that gets filed under misc on the folksy stats. Looking at my data for the last 2 years there is only 10% that GA might be able to give me a search term for (the rest is ‘direct’, social media etc) but for the vast majority of that google is choosing to not tell me what search term was used to protect the privacy of the searcher. If you are prepared to pay for their ads they will share search terms with you so they obviously don’t care that much about our privacy.
Looking at your landing pages (under acquisition then search console) gives a good suggestion as to what people were searching for - for me the top landing page is my fordite collection which fits with the only search terms google is prepared to share (those are found under acquisition, search console, queries). You might need to go into analytics admin to link your analytics account with the search console function.
Or do something far more interesting (probably in your garage involving some glass).
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I started reading an article about how SEO works on another platform. It was the best cure ever for insomnia, and I still have no idea how it works…
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Thanks very much for that. Yes that does show that the main search is my fused glass / dichroic jewellery. Obviously nobody ever ever searches for my stained glass suncatchers so goodness knows how they actually find them before they buy them. Life will remain a mystery and I will ignore what it is telling me because I just don’t believe it !
I found it far more interesting this evening to draw up a pattern for an “herbaceous garden” suncatcher which I will probably be making tomorrow as the weather forecast is dire so finishing filling my (many) garden pots is unlikely to be an option. Either activity beats trying to get the better of Analytics hands down
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I am so pleased you said that. For starters, next time I get insomnia I will find something like that to read. When I look at all the options on the Analytics page, which gets more and more complex each visit I think “I’d rather watch paint dry”
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You’d probably get better insights from watching paint dry. Can’t wait to see the herbaceous garden suncatcher.
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I gave up on GA ages ago and just look at my Folksy stats now. I used to find it interesting to see which countries/towns people who were looking at my shop came from and it was quite entertaining to put something on Stumbleupon and watch the little real time counter whirring round but none of it seemed to relate very much to the sales that I had, so I gave up on it. I seem to do well by just promoting my shop on my own social media pages and by word of mouth from my existing customers - so now time is spent more profitably on sewing.
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