Hi everyone .
Having problems with the view counter on Folksy for example yesterday according to google I had 57 views yet on Folksy view counter I had 2! Not sure who to believe, would love to know if others have had the same problem and which view counter should I follow ?
Thanks
I would go with GA, it’s generally more reliable. However…it may be including your own views (unless you have filtered them out) and it will include both item and shop views, whereas Folksy only include item views. So if someone just looks at your shop front page, it will not be counted by Folksy.
Ok thanks , I think I have got the filter up and running .
Hi, am newish to Folksy and am finding Google Analytics absolutely dreadful to use. How do I exclude internal traffic from views? Where can I find the IP address to use in the exclusion? Are there any easy to follow instructions anywhere? I’ve looked at the GA tips site but can barely understand it and I’m really not too bad with a PC : (
Cheers,
Emma
Hi Emma,
To find your own IP address, just google ‘what’s my IP address?’ and it should show it. Bear in mind that many ISPs use dynamic IP addresses, so it will change quite frequently, sometimes every day! And different gadgets may use different addresses too, so it’s really hard to exclude them all. I gave up in the end as I was constantly adding new ones to the filter.
It’s worth checking where the traffic is coming from. I’ve had a load of spam traffic showing in GA recently and have found out that it’s not traffic hitting my shop, just my GA stats, for some reason. The most recent culprits are things like ‘event tracking’, ‘get free traffic now’ ‘share buttons’ to name but a few. Very frustrating for pointlessly skewing the stats, and you can filter them out but there are so many of them and some without obvious URLs to filter. At the moment I’m trusting Folksy stats over GA! Hope this helps! 
Hi Christine.
Many thanks. I found my IP address so set it into a filter … I think. GA is not particularly user friendly. I also found a reference to a Google Chrome extension to exclude my own views. Belt and braces!! I have been getting lots of pageviews according to GA but not Folksy and I am inclined to believe Folksy. Wish they could use a simpler system to understand, something along the lines that Etsy uses…
Many thanks again,
Emma
Hi Kaye,
Many thanks to you too. How do you check where the traffic is coming from? I am getting lots of pageviews according to GA but I do not believe them to be correct … not even close!! It is indeed very frustrating. Etsy has a much simpler and easier to use system 
Hi Charmed,
once you have logged into google analytics, click on all website data and then look down the options on the left hand side - one of them should be ‘acquisition’ - click on this to bring up the sub menu and select ‘over view’. This should produce a pie chart with sections for ‘direct’, ‘referral’, ‘social’ and ‘organic’.
‘Direct’ is where people have typed in your url, clicked on certain types of links to the page (eg links in instagram) but it is also where web bots show up. Some bots are good (checking server speeds, search engine bots etc), some are bad (trawling the internet looking for email addresses to spam), I’m still working on how to filter these out as they seem to have made up almost 90% of my direct traffic in the last month. Anything where they land on a page and spend 0:00:00 seconds on it is a bot and can be ignored, for me they land on a page called /.
‘Referral’ is where lots of spam hits show up but you can also find the results for how many people have clicked through to your shop from the forums, you can filter out the spam referals (social- buttons etc) in the admin tab by generating specific filters for each one. (the amount of referal spam I got to my folksy shop went up massively when I opened my etsy shop but the 2 events might not be linked)
‘Social’ is where people have clicked through from facebook/ pinterest etc. These are genuine interested potential customers and should be cultivated. If you click on the blue ‘social’ word under the pie chart it will take you to another pie chart with a break down of which social media platform they came from so you know which one to target your efforts on.
‘Organic’ is where people have done a google (or equivalent) search for something and then clicked through to the item or your shop. Unfortunately mine doesn’t tell me what search term they used for most of the hits.
Hope that’s clear and helpful.
Sasha