*** The shop fitness calculator is down at the moment for updates. Not sure when it will be back up as we ONLY allow the absolute best features to be live on our site. ***
In this episode, Richie and Gordon dive into Marmalead’s Shop Fitness Calculator. They discuss what it will cost (spoiler alert – it’s free) and what sort of information you’ll get from it (spoiler alert – a pretty decent amount). So read on for this next episode of Etsy Jam!
The secret weapon
So what’s the Shop Fitness Calculator all about? Well, it’s something we’ve had in our Marmalead arsenal for a while now. It’s available to anyone who has an Etsy account and would like to take it for a test drive. It was one of the first tools we built out when we were building Marmalead. What does it do? Basically, it looks at your shop at a much higher level than just what Marmalead focuses on with SEO. It looks across a much larger platform and will tell you how your shop is doing in many different areas. If you’d like to follow along with the calculator while listening to the Jam for this week or just reference the calculator as you’re reading the blog, you can find it here.
Getting started
Basically to start off with the shop fitness calculator, you’re going to fill out some information which the calculator will…calculate…and it will deliver you with a grade. That’s right, like a good old fashioned letter grade. In this blog (and Jam) we’re going to walk you through everything from the information you need to fill in on the calculator to how your results are shown at the end.
Back to basics
Let’s say you’re at the shop calculator. First you have to fill in basic info like your email and shop name. Then, the next really important thing you have to put in is what time period you want to look at when you’re calculating the score for your shop. You have a few different options with this. You can choose the last seven days, last thirty days, last three months, last twelve months…you get the picture. Maybe you made some changes in January and you really want to look at only the last twelve months and how those changes have affected you. Maybe you just started your shop and you don’t have twelve months of data yet and you want to see the last thirty days or less. You can do either of these things (and some in between) and specify what fits you best within the calculator.
Choose wisely
An important thing to remember when you’re choosing a timeline is this: for the remaining data we fill in from Etsy on the shop calculator make sure your time period matches between what you’re looking to do with the shop fitness calculator and what time period data you’re looking at in your Etsy shop stats. Here’s how you do this: when you log into Etsy, go to your shop manager. On the left hand side you’ll see a section for stats. When you go into your stats section at the very top right, there’ll be a drop down that defaults to a day (or today). If you click this it will give you some of the time period options we mentioned earlier. Make sure when you’re looking up numbers to enter into the shop fitness calculator, you always have those two time periods set up so that they match. Otherwise, the math behind the scenes won’t be right and things won’t add up correctly. Meaning your results won’t be accurate.
We have triplets folks
The next three pieces of info are things we’re going to pull straight from our Etsy stats page. (Side note: Again, you don’t have to have a Marmalead account to do this. You don’t have to pay anything. This is a free tool that we offer. You don’t even have to tie your Etsy shop to it. Just go to your Etsy shop, look up this data, type it in on this page and it does its thing for you.) So about those three things:
Number of active listings- To see this go to shop manager and then listings view. Look for the the number of active listings that are listed there. It shows over on the right hand side when you’re in your listings view. Now, let’s say you’re running this for last year. Unfortunately, Etsy won’t give you last year’s info, so you just have to use your best guess. If it’s not a number that’s exactly in line with what you have now (say you have two-hundred listings now and you know you only had fifty last year) go ahead and put fifty in here. This will help make things more accurate instead of going off of your current number of active listings.
Number of orders you had for time period selected – For this you’ll be in your shop manager in Etsy. We’ll get the next two numbers from the stats view. The first one is the number of orders. This is easy. Etsy does a great job with their revamp stats and number of orders is front and center at the top of the screen when you go to your stats view. Enter in whatever it says underneath orders.
Number of listings visits you have for time period selected – Also on stats just to the left of where they show orders they show visits. You’ll want to take whatever number shows there and paste it into the shop fitness calculator as well.
We have lift off
Another great thing to remember is if you’re thinking of launching a campaign, this is a tool that can be useful for that. It’s a great baseline measurement of how changes you’ve made to your shop are working for you. Let’s say you’re going to launch a Pinterest campaign. You’re going to start pinning things more often and you’re going to try and target your customers on Pinterest, pulling them from there to your Etsy shop. Running the shop fitness calculator at the start of your campaign and then running it again at the end can give you valuable insight into how all the stuff you did with your campaign actually worked.
Leader of the pack
Once you’ve filled in all the basic info above, hit next. You’ll have three more pages of info to fill out, but it’s basically the same things repeated three different times. What we’re looking at inside of our Etsy stats is our highest three keywords. One of the cool things that Etsy shares back to us as sellers is this: inside of stats if you scroll down there’s a section called search terms.
The reason this is cool is because Google analytics used to do this by default. Then they removed it (giving you access only if you paid for ad words) but Etsy however, is basically telling you the keywords buyers are typing into search to find you. They’re saying here is what’s working right now so buyers can find your listings and get to them! What we want to do with this inside the shop fitness calculator is look at those top three keywords and score them. We want to let you know if these really are good keywords or could you be finding even better keywords than your top three? We want to make sure that you’re not using a general keyword where you could be more specific and vis versa. The point is, it could be a good keyword for your specific shop, but that doesn’t mean it’s good in all of Etsy. This is just the best of what you already have. It’s only going to show you keywords that buyers have used to find your listings. It’s not going to give you new keywords.
First page
First we’re going to take our highest keyword and type it into the shop fitness calculator. Then, we need to find out the number of listings and the top one-hundred results for that keyword. The easiest thing to do is to go into Marmalead and do a search (we’ll need this data later anyway) for your keyword. As a Marmalead Entrepreneur you can filter down and say “show only my listings” and it’ll give you an exact number for how many listings you have that are in the top one-hundred. Enter that number in here. If you’re not a Marmalead Entrepreneur you can still use Marmalead and do a search. You’ll have to scroll through the different items that come up and count how many of yours you find. You can also put your browser into incognito mode, log out of Etsy, do a search on Etsy itself and count your listings that show up in the top one-hundred there. However you choose to find this number, you’re going to enter that.
Three more
Next we want three more pieces of info from Marmalead. The first is the average views per week for that keyword. So, we already entered this keyword into Marmalead and we did the search on the keyword search page. Right at the top it’ll show you underneath the Marmameters how many average views per week this keyword gets. You’re going to put that number into the calculator. Right next to that in Marmalead is the average number of favorites per week that this keyword has. Enter this into the shop fitness calculator as well. Then the last piece of info here is the number of categories that this keyword has. The easiest way to see this is inside of Marmalead. When you do a search you’ll see the filter bar where you can say “just include my listings” and right across from this is filter by category. At the bottom of this it shows you how many categories there are.
Repeat after me
Now we’ve filled out all the info for your first keyword. You’ll need to click next and repeat this two more times for your other two keywords from your search terms in Etsy stats. Once you’ve repeated this for both words, you’ll want to enter those numbers into the calculator as well.
Getting the grade
We’ve filled everything out! We’ve made it through. We did all our basic shop info and our top three keywords along with all their info. Now we’re ready to be graded. Cross your fingers and hit next! The shop fitness calculator will give you an overall shop fitness score which is a letter grade. A, B, C, D, or F. It’ll show you what your score is as well as the average score of everyone who takes the shop fitness calculator. We realize that if we just gave you a letter grade and left you with that, it wouldn’t be a very useful tool. Instead, we break this down into different sections to try and give you an idea of where you could use the most improvement. We also let you know which sections you’re being an absolute rock star in! Then, inside each of these sections we also offer ways to improve this score if you need it.
Sections one by one
Listing visibility- this measures the number of views your listing gets per week against the average we’ve seen in Marmalead. This is a good way of measuring your listings compared to other sellers’ listings inside of Etsy on a big scale. If this needs work you can affect it in a couple different ways. Work on your SEO and try to target more people from Etsy search. Use Etsy’s promoted listings to try and pay Etsy to drive more traffic to your listings. You can also utilize social media platforms and google ads to try and drive more traffic to your listings as well. These can all help with visibility of your listings.
Conversion rate- basically this is measuring the amount of visitors you have to your shop that turn into buyers. If you take the number of orders and divide it by the number of visitors you’ll have your conversion rate. Typically you’ll see around 1.2%, which is the average we see inside the shop fitness calculator. Go listen to Etsy Jam Episode 40 for more awesome info on conversion rate! Some ways you can improve your conversion rate are these: make sure your items are priced appropriately, have your descriptions include all the info your buyers need, improve your listings photos and choose more specific keywords.
SEO ranking- this measures the number of your listings which appear in the top one-hundred for each of your top three keyword searches. If you’re doing a great job with your SEO, you can have as many as three listings show up in the top one-hundred. This is because of the way Etsy currently ranks everything. If you get three listings in the top one-hundred for a keyword search, you’re definitely sitting pretty for that keyword. The opposite of course is true if you have none show up.
Keyword engagement- this measures the level of engagement from Etsy shoppers like views and favorites. This is for your top three keyword searches and it compares it with the average we have seen in Marmalead. If you feel like your top three keywords aren’t indicative of your listings, feel free to run the tool again with the keywords you’re trying to target. Then investigate why those aren’t in your top three. It’s always important to understand why things are the way they are. That way you can come up with a basic plan of action to try things out and then check them and see if they’re working for you.
One last thing
With the shop fitness calculator, the overall score that you’ll see at the top is the average score of what most users see when they use it. The average score is a C. If you’re getting a C, you’re average. Don’t be too upset about that, obviously there’s room for improvement, but don’t beat yourself up over this. Also, in each section we talked about above we also show what the average score is in each of these too. These also go by letter grade, an average being a C here as well. At the bottom of the results page there are a couple buttons. One let’s you print a report of your scores which can be helpful to have around. You can also click the button that allows you to do it all again. You can also tweet and share with your friends what score you got;)
So there you have it, folks! That’s the shop fitness calculator broken down. Let us know how it goes for you and if you have any questions or comments. You can email us at success@marmalead.com. AND if you’d like to be a guest on one of our Jams, we’d love to have you contact us! We love having guests on to chat with Gordon and Richie. As always, thank you for reading and listen to this week’s Jam! It’s full of extra tips and suggestions to help you get even more out of Marmalead. Happy selling, everyone!
Etsy Jam Scoops
- What are we talking about?
- Back to basics
- Make sure they match
- Just remember
- Time matters
- It’s so cool!!!
- How to find it
- You’ve got the grade
- One last thing
