As an Etsy seller you have to check your shop stats for so many things! Today we are going to talk about what a conversion rate is and how it should affect your Etsy SEO efforts.

If you are a brand new Etsy seller, this is going to be more advanced than you can do right now… check out this Etsy SEO for new Etsy sellers!

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What is conversion rate?

So let's start by talking about conversion rate! There are two places this comes up…

• When a buyer sees your listing in the search results and either buys or skips over your product
• When a buyer clicks your product and then decides whether to buy it or not

Each of those are a chance for a conversion. In marketing we measure conversions in percentages… for example a product that was shown in the search results 10 times and had 1 click through would have a 10% conversion rate.

Where can you find your Etsy conversion rate?

For this we are going to have to dig into our shop stats! Go to Shop Manager > Stats > Pick Last 30 Days (we will talk about fun other things to check later, but let's get a baseline for today!)

Here are my overall shop stats for the last 30 days…

So visits are how many people came to my shop in the last last 30 days (think of visitors to your store) and views are how many products they looked at while they were there (think of them picking up something and looking around your shop!)

For overall conversions we are looking at visits, the number of people who came to our store versus how many bought a product. So my conversion rate is 1.26%. (61 sales divided by 4,810 visits)

While that is interesting, it doesn't really tell me anything yet! So now I want to see WHICH of my products are selling better!

Go back to your Shop Manager > Listings and click on your top seller….

This one has a conversion rate of 1.78%… a little better than my shop overall.

I had the 4th most sales of my Etsy SEO sheet, with a conversion rate of 7.40%. Well that is MUCH better!

So what is the difference? Why does one sell better than the other one?

Here is where you have to be a little bit of a detective!

Reader Note! Kellie from Fitch Metal Design looks at her conversion rate this way… “I raise my prices when my conversions are over 12% and lower them when they are below 5%.”

1. Check your traffic source

The traffic sources for your listings are below the first two graphs.

As you can see Etsy sends the most traffic to my Etsy SEO worksheet, but number two is “Other” meaning that they are coming from my websites. Because I talk about my worksheet and they already have read a bunch about it, they are probably more likely to convert to sale! Whoo whoo!

Some traffic sources that typically have a low conversion rate are Pinterest and the other social media platforms. You may have to drive a bunch of that kind of traffic to get more sales.

What to do… check your top 3-5 listings and see where your sales are coming from that you have the best conversion rates on. If you haven't shared your other listings to that source, do it right away!

2. Look at your listings

We would all like to think that we wrote amazing titles and descriptions on every listing, but maybe some are more amazing than others!

I know that I threw up a couple of my listings and swore I would swing back around later to spruce them up, only to get busy doing other things!

Are your pictures great on the listings with fewer conversions?

What to do… really try to figure out why some are selling better than others are!

Conversions From Search

Okay now we are going to talk about something a little harder to figure out! Conversions from search terms, meaning that you show up in search results successfully, but no one is clicking on your listing.

I started thinking about conversion rates when a gal from my Etsy SEO class on Skillshare asked me about keywords.

She sells dreadlocks hair ties for African American men. That is functionally what her products are, but doing a search on Marmalead, we see that there are less than 25 searches per month for that exact search phrase…

So what should she do? She asked if she should go for terms like “hair accessories” or “ponytail holders” which are reasonable since they have higher search volumes.

But are people who are looking for “ponytail holders” REALLY looking for dreadlock hair ties or are they looking for pretty little girl bows.

The first thing you want to do in this case is to do a normal search on Etsy and see what the results look like… here are “ponytail holders”…

As we can see, there is nothing that looks like a dreadlock tie there, so while I might put that in a tag for fun, I would for sure not use it in my title (which could confuse people!)

What I would do is a search for our most factual description, which in this case is “dreadlock hair ties”.

Ohhhh a clue! On some of these we see it is called “dreadlock elastics” (that is our gal's hair tie in the 6th position so she is doing a great job!)

While there are not more searches, the competition is much lower (50%+), so that is great!

While we would all LOVE to find those gems where there are super high searches, Etsy keeps track of conversions from search and penalizes us by ranking us lower if no one clicks through.

And THIS MAKES SENSE!

Even if she could somehow get ranked #1 on hair ties or hair bows or hair accessories, the Mommies looking for cute little things to put in their baby's hair would not click through.

What to do… For your shop you should find a WIDE variety of search terms that could be appropriate. For example, think about the who, what, where, whens and whys someone would use your product.

Loccessories could think about people going on vacation to the Caribbean or gals who are going to Festivals in the summer for “where” and “when”. She could use adjectives like “unique” or “unusual” for “what”.

When you are selling something that is super specific, you want to find the exact people who are looking for this item before branching out to try and find high volume keywords!

Additional Resource :: 4 Advanced SEO Strategies For Experienced Etsy Sellers