Why is My Etsy Shop Traffic Down?

Is your Etsy shop traffic down?

Many Etsy shops come to me and wonder why their traffic and sales are down from one month to another (be sure to read about my 30-Day Etsy Success Plan below). The obvious answer is because buying patterns are not constant, they fluctuate with holidays, seasons, even the economy.

So how do you know if it is just your traffic and sales that are down as opposed to the traffic and sales on Etsy being down overall?

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Look at Your Etsy Ad Impressions

One easy way to tell if it is just you or an overall occurrence is to look at your impressions if you are running Etsy Promoted Listings. The number of impressions is based on search demand, so if your impressions are down from last month, then it would indicate that searches overall were down and it is likely not a problem specific to you (provided that you did not make any changes to your ad campaign from the previous month). When this happens it is a good time to reach out to your previous customers with a special offer to get things going again.

Look at Etsy’s Quarterly Stats

Etsy is a public company so they have to release their quarterly sales revenues. Historically, Etsy’s strongest selling period has always been Q4, which is October 1st to December 31st. Also historically, Etsy’s slowest selling period is Q1, or January 1st to March 31st. So you can’t always expect to sell in March what you sold in December, but again this can depend on what you are selling. However, it is a good time to run a sale because when demand is down, prices should go down (and vice versa).

Look at Your Etsy Stats

Login to your Etsy account, go to your dashboard and look at your stats for last year. A bar chart will come up that will clearly indicate which months were your strongest and which ones were your weakest. So if March was a bad month for you last year, it makes sense that it might be bad again for you this year. The key is not always to measure if sales drop from month to month, but rather that they are increasing month over month. In other words, if sales for March 2018 were lower than February 2018, but still higher than they were for March 2017, then I wouldn’t be panicking as overall growth is still there.

Look at Google Trends

Certain products sell best at certain times of the year. If I type “backpacks” into Google Trends, it is quite obvious that searches peak in mid August (see below), so I wouldn’t be panicking in February if sales were down, but I would be upping my advertising budget in July and August to maximize this sales opportunity.

Here is How to Really Drive More Traffic

I have created the 30-Day Etsy Success Plan. This is an actionable step-by-step list of daily tactics to do to improve your Etsy shop, drive more sales and improve your sales. Everything is easy to follow in bullet point form with multiple tactics for each of the 30 days. I can’t recommend it enough. All of these tactics work, so you can’t lose. Available now at my Etsy Shop.