Recently I’ve seen quite a few posts on the Etsy forums about how to get Google Analytics setup on to Etsy accounts. Being a visual learner myself I created this pictorial. Happy tracking!

First thing you’ll need is to setup your Google Analytics account/profile

Find out how from Google Analytics.

During setup you’ll want to note (as per Etsy):

• When asked for your ‘Website’s URL’ enter Etsy’s URL (www.etsy.com)
• When asked for your ‘Account Name’ enter your Etsy shop website address (shopname.etsy.com)
• Hit ‘Continue’ when you arrive at the page titled Analytics: Tracking Instructions

Next, get your Google tracking ID

If this was the very first time you setup your analytics you’ll see your Tracking ID right away after completing the previous step. If you had previously setup your analytics, logon to Google Analytics and go to your profile for your Etsy store. Select your site from the list.

Your tracking ID will show up as below. Note that it will always say “http://etsy.com” and not your shop address.

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Copy or write down this ID.

Finally, drop the tracking ID onto your etsy page.

Click on Web Analytics under Shop Setup.

Enter the tracking ID you copied earlier into the area in Step 2 (see image below)

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Click the Save Changes button. You will see a confirmation page with your tracking ID (image below).

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You should be able to start tracking  your views 24 hours later!

If this helped you please comment and let me know how it went.

This installment of plugins features ones embe uses for layout. Without some of these, especially the custom widgets, our site wouldn’t allow us much flexibility with our different pages.

TS Custom Widgets

Enables us to use different widgets on different pages. It can also display different widgets on posts, pages, categories, authors posts and tag pages. I like this one for its ease of adding different sidebar items without having to mess around in the HTML.

Exclude Pages from Navigation

Like the name says, this plug in allows you to exclude a page from the navigation bar (or sidebar menu). This lets embe have many different pages without cluttering up our menu bar.

Wp Post Columns
Allows us to create columns within posts/pages. You can see this one in action on our Products page where we listed the products into two columns. This really saved me the hassle of creating a complicated table! (As you can probably tell I’m all about the shortcuts!)

My first blog was on Xanga.com. For a long time it was great, but eventually I wanted something a little bit more mature and migrated over to Blogger. Blogger lasted me for awhile as well but again, I wanted something with more “oomph.” After trying out a handful of different blogging services, I settled on Wordpress and started craftycathy.wordpress.com. It gave me exactly what I needed: pages, various themes, easy posting and editing– essentially a website without needing to code!

When Mary and I started talking about building a website for embe, I knew Wordpress was the way to go. Although I hadn’t used Wordpress.org before, I was ready to leap right in. It had a higher learning curve then I expected but once I found the right theme for embe, everything began to fall into place.

What I really love about Wordpress.org is the sheer amount of plug-ins that are available. There are so many talented people sharing their work, and I wanted to give them a little shout-out. embeshop.com wouldn’t look the way it does without their plug-in.

embe's homepage slideshow

Our homepage slideshow uses a few plug-ins but the main one is Featurific. Featurific creates a slideshow using blog posts to highlight stories or in our case our products. It’s easy to use and allows you to select which stories by category or by post ID. There are a dozen or so themes to choose from. embe uses the “Time.com (transparent)” theme but I did make a few tweaks to the theme code to make it fit with embe’s site.

There are two additional plug-ins I used in order to make Featurific play nice with where and how I wanted it to be displayed.

The first is Exec-PHP. This plug-in executes <?php?> code in  your posts, pages and text widgets. The Featurific code is in php and Wordpress edits the code to remove php tags when the page is saved.

The second is Deactivate visual editor. This plug-in deactivates the visual editor for specific pages or posts. While you have the option to disable the visual editor for all pages/posts in Wordpress, it’s not very convenient to have to change that setting to make edits to the homepage and then switch it back to edit the other pages.

Stay tuned for the next installment of plug-in shout-outs!