Question About Utilizing Our Artist Websites

Good question. The stats for AW and FAA are the same, so I would assume that it counts the same, but am not sure.

I used to promote my AW site directly. But I discovered that none of the images on my AW site that I promoted ever show up in a google search - only those on my FAA portal. It seems that the AW site is not really a separate site at all - perhaps its just a few different fields in a database that cause it to display different styling, URL's and hides links to the FAA site. Now I only promote my personal site (which has the FAA shopping cart and also its image pages are linked to my AW site).

The images on the AW site are contained in an FAA image directory. So Google won't display what is in AW site since its exactly the same as what is already in FAA. So it seems that from a Google standpoint, promoting your AW site will not help your AW site being found on Google or other search engines (although it might help your FAA portal).

It seems that promoting your AW site directly may only help in driving visitors to it from social media, blogs, etc but not from Google or other search engines.


Dave Gordon
http://dgportfolio.net

as far as i know this is all one big site with different doors. even the images there are from FAA. anything you sell would count to move you up. you want people on your own page so you don't distract people with other options.


---Mike Savad
MikeSavad.com

Your AW pages won't send visitors to other people's work. That's why I stay mostly on AW. People can only look at what I have and don't get distracted by other possibilities.

Yes, I certainly get that I want visitors on my AW site so that they aren't distracted by other options, that's obvious.

Why I'm asking is that I'm wondering if, from a search engine discovery perspective, is it redundant to try and drive traffic to both the AW site AND your FAA/Pixels gallery?

I think what David is saying makes sense. Only, I'm not as fond of the layout of the embedded AW store on my personal site. I think the layout of the AW site store is less confusing. Not that the embedded stores are flawed, but that it's not obvious there are galleries to browse through. It looks like it's just one large image collection. If the embedded store looked more like the content area of the AW store, I'd drive traffic to that instead I think.

The old AW sites had code (canonical reference) telling search engines to attribute that content to the FAA domain. That's why the AW pages didn't fair well in external search results. The new AW sites do NOT have that canonical reference to the FAA domain. They are telling search engines to pay attention there, rather than FAA. This is one of the major changes 'under the hood'. The new sites have great potential for search engines.

Same - redundant to do both. Everything is integrated.

And I just sold a print from my AW site - my little experiment worked and they used a discount code I used as my profile pic on there, so I know that's where they ended up.

Greg,

Thanks! So that's good news from the perspective of mostly enjoying the fruits of our own efforts, but does that mean we should be working all of our collections on each FAA, Pixels, AW sites, and embedded stores ? Or, is that a waste of time and we should just focus on the AW site alone?

If you're in it for the long haul, your own site under your control is the only viable option. Then you have full access to stats, total control over appearance and content, there is no SEO confusion over an ever-expanding universe of duplicate content and your site doesn't shuttle visitors off to other artists.

A personal website allows you to build your brand, not someone else's brand. The goal in that scenario is to have people looking for art by Skip Hunt, instead of searching for a picture of a sunrise. That's how you build an audience who buy $2000 art from Skip instead of a $100 print of a sunrise. Both those things might be exactly the same image and same physical object, except one of them has a much higher perceived value.

Search engines change their rules and goals. So do social media sites, so do POD services. If you're going to invest time in marketing, make sure you're building your future on your land with a stable set of rules.


Dan Turner
Dan Turner's Seven Keys to Selling Art Online

Skip - I believe you will benefit most from promoting your AW site, particularly if it is a redirected domain. When you shared links to your pages in the past, you were basically providing backlinks to FAA. Now those backlinks are directly to you. There are still a few holes in the SEO of the new sites. Most prominently, the keywords metavariable on the main pages are still blank. I expect the big guy will do something about that soon. The new sites have tremendous potential for sales.

Edit: I do agree with Dan. I have many personal sites. But the traffic to my new AW site is much greater.

Dan,

Yeah, that's what I'm starting to think too. The only issue is that I really light the clarity of Sean's new Artist Website store layout. It's clean, and intuitive to navigate. I'd prefer to put ALL my effort into driving traffic to my own site as you suggest and don't want them to have to leave my site to shop. I know the new embeds have been greatly improved, but they're not as nicely intuitive as the AW sites are. Ideally, the embedded shops could present the same as the AW content shop area does.

I've also come to the same conclusion you allude to regarding the pricing. I don't think I can compete in a lower-priced general market, but I have some unique stuff that has garnered higher rates and I think that might be a better track for me. Still sorting it all out, but I'm fairly certain that I'm not going to be able to have my cake and eat it too. ;)

Greg--That is great news about the new AW sites not having the FAA attribution code. That was a big irritation for me and made me grumble way too much. Was there an announcement about it or are you a tech genius who can figures these things out?

Nancy - it's visible in the code, which can be 'viewed' for any page. With Chrome, it's under 'More Tools' on the right. In IE it's under view along the top if your menu bar is visible.

Greg--Thanks for the info. A non-techie like me would never have figured it out.

Greg, I've noticed I get traffic to the AW site without doing much of anything at all. It certainly helps if I put in some effort, but I've noticed that my personal sites get almost no traffic unless I drive traffic to them regularly. The AW site would still get visitors even if I did nothing at all. And, I'm not talking about image views... I'm talking about actual page views as reported by Google Analytics.

The AW sites definitely have a lot going for them, but it makes me nervous putting so much effort into something that ultimately isn't really mine, ie. the "Artist Website". I too prefer the control for the long haul you have with your personal site.

At the moment, I'm mostly focussing on the AW site, and mostly referencing it from all other sites. I've also got an another domain name of mine forwarded there now, and may forward a second domain name I own there as well. It just makes me nervous to put all the eggs in the AW basket. If that gets yanked away at some point, that'd be catastrophic.

@Skip - just a personal observation. You have more than a million hits. That's a huge number. You have done well promoting your work. I think your prices just scare off some potential customers. While I certainly don't agree with what Sean recently told you about huge price cuts, you might consider just lowering prices on some things that haven't sold yet. Not big cuts. Maybe something along the lines of your markup being 5 or 6 times the print cost (as opposed to more than 20 times). I bet you would see your sales start to pop, without having to change your style of focus.

Greg, yes... I've been coming to the exact same conclusion. I have lowered some pricing but I don't think I'm there yet. On some stuff I think I went to low, and on other's I'm still too high. Just trying to do it in a way that doesn't devalue the stuff that's already sold high.

Pet peeve of mine. I absolutely hate it when I decide an app is worth a higher price of say $50 and pay it. Then, the developer decides to go for volume a couple months later and lowers it to $5. The app is still worth what I paid for it to me, but the fact they just lowered it to a fraction of what I paid really gets under my skin. I don't want to do the same thing to those who've already become patrons.

Thanks for your insight on all this too. Much appreciated!

Just don't lower prices on any pieces that have sold. Make a temporary gallery and add pieces that haven't sold, then adjust the prices on that gallery. After the new prices are established, you can get rid of the gallery and still retain the new prices separate from your already sold work. People will pay pretty well for things they love. But they have to love it a helluva lot to spend over a thousand dollars.

Greg, thats a good idea and good advice. Thanks!

Just had a look at your galleries. You've got some incredible nature stuff, and much of it looks unique with a high quality. Your seem to have a good grasp of all this and your prices seem low to me. Are you moving a good volume with ease? Or, are you having to work really hard at it to get a few out the door?

When I joined in 2011, I had stuff sell without doing anything. Those were different times with much less competition. A year later my sales pretty much stopped and I began building external websites. I concluded that I made the mistake of trying to expand my portfolio when I was already selling Teton images and needed to pound away with what was selling. I've done okay this year, but not nearly as much as I'd like. During November I had streaks of daily sales up until Thanksgiving. I've just had one this week so far. But I didn't embrace social media until a year ago, and that has tripled my views, so I am hopeful for next year and plan to raise prices in late summer for the shopping season.

The pricing thing is strange and very hard to figure out. I've made images all my life for the most part, but didn't even try to sell anything until around 2007 I think. Mostly focussed on commercial, then stock (when there was still a market) and the "arty" stuff I just did for myself. I'd edit down a sheet of 35mm transparencies and show them to friends after travel, or after I had a nice collection I was proud of. People kept asking where they could buy them and I'd tell them I wasn't really selling anywhere.

Then someone goaded me into trying to have a little show and I went for it. That's around the time that I joined FAA because their prices were better then that what I could get locally.

I priced everything low and around the same if not slightly higher than what you could get off the shelf at shops like Pier One, World Market, etc. Nice stuff but sort of generic. I don't think I had anything over $125 and that was a good size print, matted, and framed with glass.

Didn't sell a single one. Had another show. Zip, nada, nothing.

Got very discouraged at all the work and money I'd spent to not sell anything at all. So I got really pissed off and figured, "If they're not going to sell anyway, then eff'm. I'll raise all of my prices 7-10 fold."

Gave it one last shot with the exact same framed images. Figured they weren't going to sell anyway but I'd already committed to the 3rd show.

Only this time, all of the prices were in the hundreds and close to a grand. Guess what? The same exact images started selling. Sold about 6 or 7 at that show and got a couple commissions.

Seems people valued my work more simply because the price was now higher.

I also know selling online vs selling in person is a completely different animal, but I think the same idea is there, ie. that for many, value can be attributed by nothing else but the numbers on the price tag.

Here's another recent example. I've been a fan of the band U2 for a long time, but mostly their earlier, pre-stadium rockstar days, ie. The Unforgettable Fire, Boy, War, etc.

When I heard they had a new CD about to drop, I got excited. I would have paid full retail for the CD without even waiting for reviews. Then they did something strange this time. Via an arrangement with Apple and a huge buyout deal, they gave the album away for free to ALL iTunes users. I was thrilled with this, but many complained that it violated their privacy and was arrogantly presumptuous, etc.

You know what? I barely listened to it much at all. I gave it a couple half listens and decided it was too bland and safe, etc. but more importantly, I strongly believe that my perceived lower value of the new U2 album was directly effected by the fact that the price tag was $0.

Greg, I know you're already aware of that and I think you completely understand what I'm trying to do, but for others out there... much of the time the perceived value of your work will be as low as the price tag you put on it, no matter how great it really is.

By far the biggest advantage to me of the AW, other than the obvious thing that it doesn't advertise other people's work, is that we get proper analytics.

With a bit of setup you create reports so you can instantly find out things like:

What percentage of your visitors look at the pricing for a product.
What percentage of your visitors add something to their shopping cart.
What percentage of your visitors spend more than 5 minutes on your site.
What your most popular images are.
What your most popular galleries are.
Where your visitors came from.
Where your visitors who added something to their shopping cart came from.
Etc. etc.

No need to guess if your pricing is putting people off -- change the lowest price (the one people see on the image pages) and see what that does to the conversion rate of people going to your product pricing page. Change your other prices and see what that does to the conversion rate of people adding something to their cart. And so on.

For those who are about to inevitably complain that Google Analytics is complicated, yes, it is. But everyone here has spent years learning how to produce their art, it's constantly amazing to me that so few people are willing to spend a couple of weekend afternoons figuring out how to use the industry-standard tool for tracking how your customers interact with your site.

How about a tutorial for us Alexis, please?

Good insight Alexis. I go through GA data a couple of times a week, but should focus more on the flow as you mentioned.

Skip - your anecdotal observations are instructive. I just recently looked at pricing for some of the top sellers. I was shocked to see how low a couple were. But there are others still pretty high. I have one composite image from Yellowstone that I was thinking last week I should lower the price on. As a composite, it was more like a poster. Then somebody Saturday paid $457 for a 48" canvas print. So you never know how a particular potential customer will perceive a particular price. I know I look for value. My significant other is more like your buyers when you jacked your prices up. Maybe just do a test run of some images. I think I did that some time ago and lowered some prices in one gallery, but I didn't notice a difference in the sales of those images.

Mick: I'm a bit busy to do a full tutorial with images at the moment, and it's something I have earmarked to blog about (to get more reach), but here's some instructions you'll hopefully be able to follow to get started. If you haven't set up Google Analytics on your AW site yet, you'll need to do that first (I think there are instructions somewhere else on the discussion groups).

* Go to Google Analytics and click on your AW site (It's probably called 'All Website Data' if you didn't change it). This will bring you to the first page that shows the graph of all your visitors.

* Click on 'Admin' at the top.

* Click on 'Goals' in the right of the three columns.

* Click 'New Goal'.

* Under 'Goal Template', choose 'Custom'.

* Under 'Goal Description', enter 'Add Product to Shopping Cart'. Choose the Goal Type of 'Destination'. (The name can be anything you like, that's just a suggestion)

* Under 'Goal Details', click 'Begins with', and in the box enter '/shoppingcart.html' (No quotes, but the first slash is important). This is the page that people end up at when they add something to their cart -- you can find these pages by performing the actions you want to track on your site, and looking in the address bar.

* Leave the other settings default, and click 'Verify this Goal'. Hopefully it'll say you have a x% conversion rate in the last 7 days, where x is greater than 0! If it says 0, double-check the above settings (especially the html bit), but accept that maybe nobody added anything to their cart in the last 7 days. This is likely if you haven't promoted your AW site, or if you've just configured Analytics.

* Click 'Create Goal'.

You've now set up this goal that Google Analytics will constantly track. Now when you go back to the main page (Click on the Google Analytics logo at the top left), you'll be able to see instantly your shopping cart conversion rate.

If you want to get more information about who completed your goal actions, click on your AW site in Google Analytics (getting you back to the first page with the graph of your visitors), click on 'Conversions' at the bottom of the menu on the left, then 'Goals', then 'Reverse Goal Path'. You'll now be able to see (provided you have some goal conversions!) the images that people added to their carts, as well as whether it was framed, metal, acrylic, canvas, bare, etc.

That's the 5 minute very basic intro, but hopefully enough to get people started. Let me know if you have any questions :)

Edit: It should look something like this just before you click Create Goal:

@Alexis - do you know whether the GA data for the AW address includes the data when using a custom domain?

@Alexis, THANKS! That's awesome. I knew the tools were in there but didn't know how to get to them. +1 for a "blog about (to get more reach)" and make sure you either let us all know, and/or post it on the forum. Very useful info. :)

@Greg, yeah... that's another wrinkle. Some of the sales I've got at the higher level, though very welcome and appreciated of course, made me go "What?!"

I'm obviously partial to my own work and all, but guessing what people will love has been a grand mystery to me. Stuff that I almost deleted permanently will sell, and stuff I think I out did myself on, get's no love at all.

@Alexis, yep... that took right at about 5mins. I know you're busy, but if you could let us know (with detail intstructons like above) what maybe the top 3-5 goals you think are most useful to be monitoring? Please, please, oh please! And thanks again :)

During a recent promotion over the last week, I watched the live analytics and it was useful. Recording goals would be much more useful. I saw users going to different galleries, add to the cart, then back out... then come back... etc. Having that recorded in data I could easily would be super meaningful I think.

Nice little tutorial, Alexis. Thanks! Hope to see some more.

Thanks, Alexis - awesome information to have.
I think Mike is right, same sight, lots of doors. A few of you mentioned no distractions from competition in AW, true - but if you don't drive people there, they will never get there.

one more question for Alexis - what you you do with all those stats once you get them?

Nancy - the most obvious use for these stats is seeing where the person came from before purchasing, how they got there.
If I had 5 sales and the buyers came from pinterest, I know that my marketing on pinterest is having an effect. Replace pinterest with whatever in that sentence...

Cheers Alexis, very useful info.

Alexis, you're a God. Thanks for posting this.
-- mary ellen anderson

On Alexis' tutorial above I was wondering if this is a generic procedure. Can I just replace the '/shoppingcart.html' (without the quotes) with another phrase to get some different numbers? And if so, what are the other specific possibilities? For instance instead of the '/shoppingcard.html' phrase would '/galleries.html' tell us which galleries they used or would '/images.html' tell us which images?

Thanks for the feedback everyone, lots of great questions :) I'm just heading out but will be back in a few hours and will try and answer them :)

Alexis,
Is there any kind of report generation in GA? Where you can log past data and track trends and changes?
-- mary ellen anderson

Alexis - when you have time to consider, it seems to me to record data for a custom domain, the default URL and Property Name would require changing to the custom version. If you have a chance to evaluate, please let me know if you think that's not the case.

Thank you, Alexis! That was awesome information. I've been trying to figure this out for a while.

Greg: The important aspect is the Google Analytics tracking code, which is served to the customer regardless of whether they go to your abc.artist-websites.com domain, or to your custom-configured domain. So you don't need to change anything on Google's side to track visits to your custom domain. If you want to verify this for yourself, then go to Google Analytics, click 'Real-time' in the left menu, then 'Overview'. This will show you every visit to your page as it happens. You can now visit your page via your custom domain in another tab, and within 15 seconds or so, you'll see that visit tracked in the Analytics tab. This confirms that Google Analytics is tracking visitors regardless of the domain.

If you want, you can see how many people end up on your page via your custom domain vs. via your abc.artist-websites.com domain. To do this, go to Audience -> Technology -> Network, and then just below the chart, change the Primary Dimension to Hostname. The table will now show you the domains that your customers are using to end up on your AW site.

For those who don't understand all that, don't worry -- the important thing is that yes, Google Analytics does still track correctly if you use a custom domain, and you don't need to make any changes.

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Skip: Goal tracking is best used for things that you really wish a customer would do (as the name suggests), so it's kind of the case where if you were sat behind a customer while they viewed your site, you'd give a fist-pump when they did certain actions ;)

For me, I have three goals that I commonly use:

1. Customer adds something to their shopping cart. Obviously that's a big positive sign, and also, by using the Reverse Goal Path view, you can determine when a sale came through your AW site (by correlating the sale with any matching paths through the site).

2. Customer views a product info page. This means that they went beyond looking at your image, and viewed one of the specific products (i.e., they clicked on Metal Print, Canvas Print, etc. to find out all the prices). This is another great sign, as it means someone is probably pretty seriously interested in the image. You can use the correlation between the percentage of people who view a product info page and the percentage of people who add something to their cart to get a feeling for how well your pricing is working.

3. Customer stays on the site for 5 minutes. While they may not look at any detailed prices, or add anything to their cart, an individual customer staying on your site for a decent amount of time is a good sign, as they're having a good look around, and haven't simply gone back to what they were doing before. A high percentage here, combined with a low percentage of people who view a product page, can indicate that your work is awesome but your base price (the 'from' price on your image page) may not be optimal. (This may indicate that you need to lower your prices, or may indicate that you need to market to a demographic with a higher disposable income!)

If you have other goals that you want customers to do, of course you can add them -- for example, a goal for you might be visiting your bio page, or viewing a certain gallery, and so on.

The other important similar metric is bounce rate, which comes pre-configured. This shows how many people who arrive at your site immediately leave. A very high bounce rate can be an indication that you are doing misleading marketing (people are ending up somewhere they didn't expect), or that your page isn't appealing (a very distracting background, for instance). Note that any site will have a pretty high bounce rate -- a bounce rate of around 40% or under is usually considered pretty good.

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Nancy I: In my opinion, the value of these stats is being able to see the effectiveness of your marketing.

Excluding the art itself, the two main things we are able to do to increase the chance of getting sales is optimising our SEO potential (by using correct and plentiful keywords, by using good titles, and by writing thorough descriptions), and marketing our work (by publicising either our FAA pages or our AW sites).

A great many people here do marketing by effectively just shouting into the wind. They pick some marketing channels and they flood them, but they have no real idea of how effective their marketing is. This means you have a very high chance of wasting a great deal of your time on ineffective marketing (and in some cases money). If you were selling in a store, you'd probably be quite likely to ask customers how they found your work. If 9 out of 10 said they heard about you on Twitter, and 1 out of 10 said they heard about you on the radio ad you paid good money for, you'd immediately know where you'd choose to focus your next round of marketing. By promoting our AW pages (rather than the FAA site), and by using Google Analytics to track our performance, we can start to do that here as well.

In the example of the very simple goal I described setting up, the first thing you can do is the single most important thing you need to know -- are people buying stuff from your AW site. By correlating sales with the reverse goal path in GA, you can identify with a very high probability of accuracy whether each individual sale came through your AW site, or through FAA's site. If you're spending 5 hours a day on marketing your AW site, and not a single sale comes through your AW site, then you're probably best changing your marketing, or spending that time instead on creating new work. If you're spending 15 minutes a day marketing your AW site and 75% of your sales come through your AW site, that's a great indication to ramp up what you're doing!

(Note that this particular piece of information shouldn't really need to be gathered this way -- FAA should tell us on the sales page whether the sale came through our AW site or not. But they don't, so this allows us to get that important information).

This is only the tip of the iceberg. You can also break down the customers who reached your goal (added something to their shopping cart) in a whole bunch of different ways. For example, if you want to see where they came from, you can go to Goals -> Overview, and click 'Source/Medium' below the chart. That'll show you a breakdown of where the customers who added things to their cart came from (Facebook, Twitter, Search engine, etc. etc.). With some social networks you can even dig down and find the exact link they followed, which can be linked back to the tweet or post. With this information, you don't need to spend hours on Twitter and hours on Facebook if it turns out one of those brings you 95% of your customers. You're no longer shouting into the wind, you can target your marketing to where it's working, and adjust your marketing strategy in places where it doesn't.

There's a huge amount of information you can find out about all your customers, and the customers who reach your goal criteria, that can help your marketing, far too much to mention here, but hopefully that gives just a taste of why this information is important.

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Nancy M: You can replace the shoppingcart.html bit in that goal with any other page on your site, but as I discussed in my reply above to Skip, it makes sense to have goals that are actually meaningful to you. For example, if you want to track when people view a product page, as I discussed above, you can create a goal in much the same way, but instead of choosing 'begins with', choose 'regular expression' (simplistically, this can be thought of to mean 'contains'), and then enter the word 'products' into the box (again, no quotes). This will trigger the goal whenever anyone goes to a page that has the word 'products' in the URL (which is where you end up when you view the sizes and prices of your work).

Another option you might want to investigate, which makes more sense to get general information out about customer flow, is to use a custom report. For example, here's how to configure a custom report to show which of your galleries are proving most popular with your visitors:

* Go to Google Analytics and click on your AW site (It's probably called 'All Website Data' if you didn't change it). This will bring you to the first page that shows the graph of all your visitors.

* Click 'Customization' at the top.

* Click 'New Custom Report'

* Enter a Title of 'Galleries', and a Name of 'Galleries'. (I'm honestly not sure what the difference is here, but again, these are just names, you can call it what you like).

* Choose the type 'Flat Table'

* Add a dimension 'Page'. (When you click 'Add Dimension', you can type Page into the search box at the top of the pop-up that appears. There are a number of things with Page in the name, you want the one that's called *just* 'Page'.

* Add a metric 'Pageviews'. (Again, you can type this into the search box in the pop-up that appears, and again, you want the one called just 'Pageviews').

* Add a filter 'Page'. (Again, you can type this into the search box, and again, you want the one that's just called 'Page').

* Change the drop-down box from 'Exact' to 'Regex'. (Again, for simplicity this just means 'contains').

* In the box next to 'Regex' enter 'art/all/all/all/' (again, no quotes). This is the common part of the URL which all of your galleries have.

* Leave everything else as default and click Save.

Now you have a new custom report called Galleries, which when you click on it will show you a list of the galleries your customers have visited, most popular first. If you want to do the same for images, you can use the regex 'featured'.

Again, a bit complex, so let me know if you get stuck, and here's how the page should probably look just before you click 'Save':



Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg of things that are possible -- I'm really not even slightly a GA expert, I've just spent a couple of hours watching videos and reading tutorials, so there may be easier and better ways to do all of this! This is what works for me :)

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Mary: I'm not sure if the above answers help you? I believe that Goals aren't retroactive (so you can only see goal data from after when you created the goal), whereas Reports will show historical data. So if you can craft a report that gets you the information you want, you should be able to view trends back to when you first activated GA on your website.

Thanks Alexis. Good to know. I did as you suggested and noticed that the custom domain bounce rate was 26% lower than the AW. So for those worried about the change, that's a very positive indication. Thanks again.

No problem, Greg. I also saw a similar reduction in bounce rate when I moved to the AW v2 design, and an even more significant reduction in mobile user bounce rate. (In the hostname view, Click 'Secondary Dimension', enter 'mobile' into the search box in the popup, choose 'Mobile Including Tablet'.)

Alexis,

What an amazingly interesting post. I had a goal rate of 2%.

Is that good or bad?

Dave

David: Assuming your goal is the 'Add to Shopping Cart' one I described, rather than the 'View Product Page' one, then 2% is pretty good, I think. Pulling up some random vaguely-official-sounding report suggests that the average conversion rate on eCommerce sites for people using laptops/desktops is around 3%:

http://www.statista.com/statistics/234884/us-online-shopper-conversion-rate-by-device/

Given that we're selling art which is probably one of the hardest things to sell, 2% sounds OK to me (although remember this is only adding to the shopping cart, not actual sales -- we can't get that information from GA without FAA feeding them that information, unfortunately, and some carts will be abandoned). But the important thing is that now you can easily track that, you can now try different techniques to see how you can increase that.

Wonder if someone can help me to get the browser to show only my artistswebsites page and not the artwanted page.

What's happening is the fineartamerica is listed before my artistswebsites. I do not want the fineartamerica there at all as it is not the nice custom look I had made with artistswebsites.

Alexis! Thank you; thank you. Your directions were crystal clear and work like magic. So cool to learn which galleries are most visited. It will be interesting to see if that changes with my promotion efforts.

Thank you very much, Alexis!

You're amazing, Alexis! Thank you!

Vincent - when you say browser do you mean something like search engine results? Because your AW will likely never be above FAA.

I made one big change. A simple change based on how my potential clients were
using my site. I took down my header of the Mona Lisa. It is a deep cultural cliche.
Even for me there is a part of me that says this has been done before. Even if
it was only done on Monty Python.

I put up a much better soothing image of a slice of The Elegance of the Kitchen Maid.
Subtle and interesting.

www.bridburg.com

I repeated this swap out on my SM sites as well.

Dave

Alexis,

Thanks for taking the time with very good, clear, and useful information. MUCH appreciated!!!

You should do a full version, of a turtorial.. maybe expand it out to the 10min version, and post it in a new thread. And make sure you pepper it with a bunch of your own images for better search indexing. LOL ;)

Seriously, I know the little videos on Google Analytics are fairly clear and concise too, but I think a 10min overview like you've done, posted on your blog and here, etc. would be awesome and would get loads of hits. It's not that the info isn't readily available elsewhere, but that you've done an excellent job of condensing the essentials down in a clear manner that makes it all look a little less scary and confusing to some of us. :)

Thanks again for taking the time!

Thanks for taking the time to explain all this Alexis, it's so helpful

I'm reading and thinking about some things in this thread but for now I have found no use for my Artist Website. I don't think having a "custom look" matters one bit to a potential buyer. It's about the art that you have there. I grew tired of explaining to people that AW was really FAA so I simply direct them to the the original one and only Fine Art America.

@Alexis

Sometimes the best informations are buried in threads you donīt expect them to be!

@Alexis Thanks for the very thorough post.

As has been suggested, a great idea to make a blog post here to gain you more traffic.

I did notice that I had lots of traffic from my home town, until I realised it was me!

There is of course, a filter to block your own IP from being recorded, doh.

Great comment. This thread just keeps getting better and better because of ALL of you! Cheers.

I'm bumping because I want to follow this discussion.

Alexis thankyou! This is the clearest, easiest to understand explanation I have read on using Google analytics I have come across (I live in a rural area with limited internet data so watching videos is not possible). Just wanted to let you know that the time taken to provide this info is very much appreciated!