How to Filter Your Own Views Out of Google Analytics Reports

Today's guest post is brought to you from Toni of Little House Of Crafting.

Most shop owners visit their own store frequently when working on the design, checking listings & just to bask in it's beauty sometimes. However, visiting your own store will create inaccurate traffic data on Google Analytics, which is a great tool for data analysis in your shop. Toni from Little House of Crafting has whipped up this great tutorial for removing your own clicks from your data for accurate reporting.

You can find filters in the Admin panel of Google Analytics.

Click on the red +New Filters button.

Now you just give your filter a name - I chose "Exclude IP" - and select the filter type Custom. Then select the filter Field (IP Address) & filter pattern (your IP address). You can find your IP address using this tool here.




Make sure to put a backslash (\) in front of the periods. If your IP address is 112.41.251.122 put 112\.41\.251\.122 in the Filter Pattern box.

Hit Save and you're done!

If you use different computers make sure to make a filter for those IP addresses as well so that your Google Analytics reporting is accurate!

connect with Toni

shop/facebook/twitter/instagram

My year-end review using Google Analytics

Do you review your year end traffic via Google Analytics to see where your marketing had the most return on investment (ROI)? It can be incredibly beneficial in planning out your marketing game plan for the new year! 

If you aren't using Google Analytics yet, get that stuff set up ASAP! If you aren't sure how to set it up with your online shop, do a quick Google search for a tutorial. This data is a powerful tool & by understanding how people are finding your site, which sites they purchase from and which sites bring you the most revenue, you can use those numbers to launch your business to the next level! When doing my year-end review, I look at everything but really only analyze three things: revenue, conversion rates & traffic sources. 

Why these three? 

Because to me, examining these three statistics helps me figure out:

• What I did right in the previous year
• What worked for my business
• What didn't work for my business
• Where I should be investing my precious time/effort/hard earned marketing money

To give you a better sense of what kind of goodness you can divulge from these statistics I am going to share a peek at my year in review as well my top three sources in each category! I invite you to explore your own. You may just be surprised by how the stats stack up! Like me, you may just find that all that time you spend in those Facebook groups really is just a waste of time - it may be bringing you traffic, but if if has a low conversion rate or doesn't rank high on your sources of revenue, you need to either reevaluate how you spend you time on that platform, create a new marketing strategy or ditch it altogether to focus on what does bring in the buyers!

First up, head over to Google Analytics and select the time frame from January 1st of the previous year December 31st of that year in the top right hand corner. Now get ready to dig in! 

Revenue

To access this data, click Acquisition>All Traffic>Source/Medium, then select Revenue in the right corner below the graph. To view the graph, click the highlighted drop down menu & select "Revenue".

When I look at what brought me the most revenue in my monster shop during the previous year - and what brought me the least - I can spend my precious time & hard earned money better in the next year. I can also use this data to determine slow times where maybe I could put in more effort marketing. On the chart above the spike in March was because it was my last stocking before a big show in April, which accounts for the dip, and the dip in July was because we were on vacation most of the month & I only did a small stocking that month. September is always slow for me - end of summer vacations, back to school expenses, extra-curricular fees & and all that other fun stuff usually sucks all the extra spending money out of parents, who are my target audience. 

Using this data I can also discover things like if paid ads on blogs had little to no ROI & then I will just save that money instead of renewing the paid ad. If a blog post someone did on my products brought me in loads of revenue, I would know I should collaborate with that blogger again. See how I can use that data to grow my business & weed out things that aren't helping it grow?

Here are the top three sources of revenue for Lu & Ed last year. 

1. Direct traffic. The term “direct” loosely means no referrer, so they came to my site on their own accord, basically, either through a book mark or typing in the URL.

2. Instagram. I spent all of last year experimenting on & researching this platform & am so glad to see that all that effort paid off!

3. Facebook - but with Instagram bringing in several hundred more dollars in revenue than FB. 

Traffic

Click Sessions while on the same view as above to see your traffic sources. Click the drop down box & select Sessions to view as a graph. 

It is so good to know where people are coming from, how they are finding you & what platforms you are marketing on that is bringing people to your site - and it ties in directly with the conversion rate info, helping you to know what sites you are spending time on but don't have much in the way of ROI. 

My top three traffic sources: 

1. Direct traffic accounts for 41.39% of ALL traffic & 50.1% of new users coming to my shop for the year of 2014! 

2. Facebook 

3. Google, with Oh My! Handmade Goodness following close behind! :) 

Conversion Rate

To view this data, click the far right option for Ecommerce Conversion Rate to sort source sites by conversion rate. Select it from the drop down to view as a graph.

More important than knowing where people are coming from is knowing where they come from that results in the most sales. If you don't know what a conversion rate is or don't understand why it's so important to your business, I highly recommend this post from Aeolidia: Improving Sales by Understanding Your Conversion Rate. Basically, I use this data to determine which site turns more browsers into buyers. By knowing this, I know where I should be focusing more energy. The dips seen in the graph above in April is because I had a show that month & I barely had any inventory in my shop. The dip in July is because I was out of town for most of the month & only did one stocking that month. 

Top three sources of traffic with the highest conversion rates:

1. Direct traffic leads again (strongly). Seeing this as the number one for all three items makes my heart so happy - it means that I am on the road to building a strong brand & web presence! 

2. My email list. I launched my campaign at the beginning of last year & it already accounts for 28.7% of total sessions on my website!

3. Instagram. Again, yay!

Quick example of how to use this data

So, let's take a peek over these charts & stats above. Notice that Facebook may have made the top three for traffic, it didn't make the top three (or ten, even) for conversion rate? It may be bringing people to me, but they aren't buying. Why is that?

For me, personally, it's because I started the year in several Facebook groups. I quickly realized after reviewing my stats for the previous year that while a group may have 12,000 members, that doesn't mean it will do jack for my business. I could share a product & get 59 comments, but not a single purchase - because other makers are not my target audience. Over the Spring I made adjustments to how I marketed - and saw a huge increase in my total conversion rate! You can see how it sky rocketed from 1.38% to over 3% in a matter of months from January to March when I started making the switch in how I marketed & where I invested my time, thanks to my stats from the previous year. 

So here's the low down: If one site is bringing you traffic but not sales, ask yourself why. What could you do differently? Is it worth the effort? Could you better spend the time/resources on a site that brings in more revenue or has a higher conversion rate?  

Do a little homework. Once you pull up the Analytics for 2014, write down what brought you the most revenue, the most traffic and which sites have the highest conversion rates & use these as a guide when prioritizing where you spend your time, energy & money for your business. Taking the time to review these numbers last year & apply what I learned made 2015 the best year ever for my business! 

Do you currently use Google Analytics? If so, how do you feel about your year-end review of revenue, traffic & conversion rates? Is it what you expected? 

Conquer Your To Do List with HabitRPG

Today's guest post is brought to you by Tessa of Krmbal. Today she's sharing a tool that's great to help you keep on top of your to-do List and daily schedule.

Running a small business means there’s always something to do. It can be hard to stay on top of all the little things and making sure they get done. I've tried physical and virtual lists, I've tried posting a list with people who would keep me accountable, but nothing works as well for me as HabitRPG.

HabitRPG is an open-source program that treats your life like a role-playing game. It’s technically meant to help you build habits, which I think it does, but I think it’s much more powerful as a fun tool to help you remember your tasks and motivate you to complete them.

When you first sign up, you create an avatar, customizing it as you like. Later you can use money you gain from completing tasks to purchase armor and weapons for your avatar.

Then you create lists of your Habits, Daily Tasks and To Do’s. You can also edit your daily tasks to be done only on certain days of the week. You can also create tasks that are negative that you should avoid to hold yourself accountable. When you complete a task, you get points (or lose them if it’s a negative task) and at the end of the day, you may lose hit points based on whether or not you completed your daily tasks. You can also change the difficulty level of each task.

If you want the basic thing and getting points is enough motivation for you, then you’re basically all set. I’m that type of person, I wanted to mark things off and get points and level up and I didn’t really investigate any further when I first started using Habit. Then my friend Kelly from Craftypodes told me about the pets that you can collect as part of a feature of the game. Catch ‘em all, you say??? I was intrigued.

You can collect pets (and win the Beastmaster achievement if you collect all 90) by completing your tasks, which will randomly drop an egg, a potion or food. You can create a pet by combining an egg and a potion, each combination makes a different sort of pet. It turned out after Kelly told me to go look, I actually had some of each and was able to make some pets right there. Then, you can feed the pets and if you feed them enough, they turn into mounts your avatar can ride.

You can also get quests where you fight a boss monster and inflict damage by completing your tasks. You can join up with your friends and form a party to help defeat the bosses. Sometimes, they’ll have fun events where they’ll hold a worldwide quest to defeat a boss threatening Habitica. Once the boss is defeated, anyone who participated by completing a daily during that time gets rewarded. When a dragon threatened Habitica and was defeated, we all were rewarded with mantis shrimp pets & a mount! For Halloween & Thanksgiving all Habiticans got Jack-O-Lantern & turkey pets.

They also had fun things like costumes for Halloween and all the food for the pets had been turned into candy. You’re also able to choose a class once you hit a certain level where you can use special skills. I’m a Rogue, so I have skills that give me a higher chance of getting a random drop, more money or evade damage. The other available classes are Warrior, Healer and Mage and each has its own set of skills.

So far, it’s been a really fun way to make sure I get things done. Plus, it’s super useful as a business owner who has a very changeable schedule. Since I work as a freelance graphic designer as well as run Krmbal, my schedule can vary from day to day if a client contacts me and needs something done quickly. It’s nice to be able to have a To-Do List that I can add to and changes based on how long an item’s been in the list. HabitRPG color codes your tasks based on how long they’ve been uncompleted. For me, this makes it super easy to be able to keep track of what’s most urgent. You can also adjust each item's position in the list with a new update they've made, so you can put things in order if you work better that way.

For me, Habit works great. I've even added household chores to my habits list and I’m often motivated to go do one of them when I have down time because I might be rewarded with a random drop. I think it’s awesome that it’s totally customizable too. You add tasks that are relevant for you and decide if they need to be done daily, just once, or in-between. New tasks can be added as often as necessary and old things can be deleted if they're not relevant anymore. You can also use the app if you have a smart phone so you can add tasks or mark them complete while you’re on the go.

It’s a fairly simple program, but it can be an effective tool and it’s totally free. Plus, the developers are making it better and more fun all the time! So what are you waiting for? Head over to HabitRPG and check it out!

connect with Tessa

shop/twitter/facebook/instagram

Craftivity - The Goal Setting & Accountability App for Creatives

Planners are fab and all, but I tend to fill them out for a few weeks into the new year then lose them. Or just lose interest in them. I have tried using my calendar and reminders on my phone, but since they don't send push notifications til the day arrives, the alarm dings and I'm like, oh, I totally forgot all about that. Whoops. I lose practically every scrap of paper I write myself a reminder on. Anyone else have a similar problem?

Well, with the powerful new Craftivity app, no more losing reminders, letting an important goal or deadline slide to the back burner or feeling overwhelmed by a two-page to-do list. I heard about Craftivity briefly from #omhg and then recently saw this post by Pulp Sushi on it and thought I'd do a little digging and share what I learned with you guys!

Craftivity works like a planner, where you can set time chunks aside for blogging, meetings, creation time and input important deadlines, you can set goals, like reaching 3,000 Facebook fans or generating $5,000 worth of sales this, and track it your progress towards meeting them. And when an important goal isn't being accomplished, Craftivity will send you an email reminder, a gentle nudge, to keep you accountable & keep you working hard to meet your goals! It helps you strategize your time & increase productivity.

But more than that, Craftivity is also a community, with a built in support system of fellow creatives to connect with!

This all sounds pretty amazing, right? A virtual planner that keeps you accountable, easy ways to set goals and visually track your progress towards them, and a community of creative entrepreneurs ready to help you succeed? Then be sure to sign up to be one of the first to know when Craftivity launches to the public! If you join the Craftivity wait list, you get the app free for life. After it launches, it will costs $5 a month or $50 a year. Not a terrible price to pay for getting your creative businesses schedule and productivity under wraps, eh? 

How do you currently keep track of goals? Do you think an app like Craftivity would help you stay focused on goals better than your current system? 

super simple washi tape storage

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