I have encountered a phrase which I haven’t had before in my Folksy Stats, and which I don’t understand. When I go to the Search Terms box, then click on Show Search Terms, among the list of search terms that people have used, I have one that says:
No term (front page).
Does anyone know what this means? I’m assuming that these aren’t the actual words that someone has typed in, but are a Folksy description of something or other… I’m a bit puzzled!
I am guessing the visitor arrived on site via Folksy’s front page and clicked on one of your items without performing a search.
Thanks, I hadn’t thought of that. But I wonder why it would be listed in ‘search terms’ rather than just being listed in the ‘items visited’ section of stats?
I have this term “wired crystal necklace” which brings up nothing from my shop… so goodness knows how it can be included as a stat.
I think I’ll just regard it as one of life’s minor mysteries then!
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Well I had ‘Spectacles’ once, never used the word in any of my listings, titles or tags,
Not on Folksy, but on another site we dont like to talk about, someone viewed one of my patchwork shoulder bags, and the search term used was “wooden handled toilet brush”.
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I had that one as well recently, I just assumed one of my items had popped up on the front page and someone had clicked on it. No idea really though!
I was also wondering, I’ve had a few hits from Facebook, but none from Instagram. I’m not on Facebook, but I know I’ve had a sale from Instagram since joining a few days ago. Does Instagram show up as Facebook on the stats, since they’re the same company?
Had someone included one of your items in a Folksy Friday board on Facebook? Just a thought.
Yes, someone did, so it could well be from that. Maybe the people from Instagram didn’t click the link, just copy and pasted it. I don’t want to start obsessing over stats, but it would be interesting to know!
I don’t know if this is it, but when you arrive on Folksy’s homepage, as soon as you click your cursor in the search box, you’re taken to a search results page (before you’ve typed anything in). So someone could be seeing your item on that page (as you can keep clicking “Show more results” infinitely)
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@Eiderglass That’s very true, and I always find it very disconcerting for that to happen as soon as I put one single letter in the search box. As an experiment I went to the search on Folksy and starting typing in ‘No term (front page)’ to see what would happen, and as soon as I got as far as ‘no’ the search page filled up with items where the item title began with ‘No’ swiftly followed by a lot of items that were teachers’ gifts which were probably tagged somewhere with ‘term’ as in school term. I think your theory might be right and one of my items came up by chance on the front page of the search area during a search where the words were incomplete and the searcher clicked on my item. Thanks!
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I find it infuriating and it gets me 50% of the time as i type quickly. Start typing in the short search bar and it suddenly switches to the full line search bar and kindly removes at least the first character I typed on the top line often leaving me with nothing…
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I find that happens to me too, I usually end up with the first couple of letters missing, it’s so annoying and if we find it annoying so will customers.
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Pretty sure that the explanation above is correct as to why we get odd search terms in our stats.
It’s the erratic behaviour of the search bar. 
Was messing about looking for my shop and today
all the abbreviated and often misspelt Joysofglass search terms are showing. …
Which brings me to ask…why are MY searches showing in the stats. ?
That renders then 100% useless.
I too have noticed my searches are shown in the stats, so the stats are of little value to me.
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It’ll be as @Eiderglass suggests, when you click on search it already shows items before you’ve typed a single character, and that’s the front page of search. If one of your items showed in that first view and someone clicked on it, it would show in stats as “no term”.
If they’d started typing, had an incomplete word written when one of your items came up and they clicked on it, then the search term would show as that incomplete word (like “ceram”).
@TheHermitsBothy It’s hard to track views from apps because when you click on a link in an app like Instagram, it opens a browser window and then goes to the page, so the tracker can’t tell that the view came from the original app and it shows as direct instead. There can be very rare times that Instagram shows up, but that’s likely because someone’s viewing the website version of the site and clicks the link. Although you can use an app for Facebook, there are still a lot of people who use the website version, so you’re more likely to see that in your stats.
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Thanks for explaining that - mystery solved!
Ah right, that makes sense @konyskiw, thanks.
But why does it include our own searches ???