The screen shot from Google Analytics clearly shows the diminished visits to Silver Drops Design Blog on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Eve of 2011
Introduction
Google analytics is a great tool to figure out how your shop is used. This is important for holidays for two reasons. First, if you have seasonal items, such as Halloween items or Christmas items. Second the holiday’s can affect the flow of your data and statistics and you need to adjust your conclusions because of that.
Seasonal Items
Many sellers have seasonal items. Some sellers only sell seasonal items with long dry spells. I met an artist in an Etsy chat room who declared that she was a Halloween artist. She made 90% of her sales from mid August to October 31. All of her items had a Halloween theme.
This specialization may be a bit extreme. However most sellers on Etsy have some seasonal items. It could be hearts for Valentines Day or pine trees for Christmas. Whatever your seasonable items be might be, knowing the analytics lets you know how affective your SEO is for your seasonal items.
If you have spikes for seasonal items before the holiday approaches that means you are doing good. If those items are not being viewed anymore than normal right before the season you might want to experiment with a few things, such as changing title tags from professional terms to more natural language. An example could be changing jack-o-lantern to pumpkin. Another suggestion is trying to promote your items in forums and websites devoted to that holiday.
Statistics Affected
Holidays can mess up data. An example from my shop and blog is that on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas day the number people coming to my sites drop to almost zero. That means when looking over the numbers for that month you need to recalculate what they mean. Historically for me there is either a dip in December or a plateau in December because I get so little traffic between Christmas and New Years.
I have started taking time off from my sites around this time. I will put a note up on my blog that I won’t be posting for the next few weeks right before Christmas. I might even put my Etsy shop on vacation mode after the 22nd of December. This way I can take a break and spend time with my family during a time when my sites get so little attention anyway.
Conclusion
Holidays will affect your statistics no matter what. It could be an increase or it could be a decrease. Just remember that when you try to draw conclusions from your analytics to think about the affects holidays have on them before you make decisions. It would be tempting to try and promote something on your blog between Christmas and New Years to get more traffic but why should you when people are spending time with their family anyway?
Posted by Silver Drops Designs Blog
Hosted by Silver Drops Designs
