After more than two years of waiting, Etsy has finally given us statistics. Google Analytics, to be exact, which they actually call "Etsy Web Analytics" in our shop setup management. Roll eyes.

So right now I have about 3 days' worth of stats in there and obviously, what interests me most as a seller would be how people actually find my tiny little shop and/or listings on teh interwebs:

Under "referring sites", there are blogs, shops and other websites that I know I've never advertised or been mentioned on (and I did go visit them to make sure), the most amusing ones being "referrals" from competitor jewellery shops.

Under "keywords", I've discovered that people supposedly ended up at my Etsy shop after they googled stuff like "pillow boxes", "ebony wood rose earring" and the very exclusive "mei-tai baby carrier brown damask". For some reason they also found me while they were searching for other jewellery designers whom I am aware also have shops on Etsy.

I have 4 other sites using GA and they work fine. I like to look in the list of keywords now and then, and although the results can sometimes be hilarious, I know they're accurate because there are indeed pages on my blog, for example, that contain those precise same words together. All my fault anyway.

Etsy is being its typical Etsy self about this, even though it was brought up during beta testing. They decided to roll it out to everyone anyway, saying that GA is a complex third-party tool that they have no control over, and that the "signal-to-noise ratio will settle itself out". Well, maybe they'll take another 2 years to sort that one out. In the meantime, the stats are next to useless - to me anyway.

It all just reeks of half an ass... thank you for nothing, Etsy.