Etsy Day Takes Over The World

A few weeks ago, Etsy artist Susan Schumann, aka schugirl, suggested that all Etsy members unite to collectively promote Etsy on April 24th (you can read more about it here). From videos on Youtube to four-legged billboards in France, Etsy members helped spread the gospel near and far. Thank you, schugirl, for your incredible effort and enthusiasm for Etsy.

We know many of you are curious about the impact of Etsy Day on Etsy’s site last Friday. Before we get into numbers, we want to emphasize that an organized effort like Etsy Day will undoubtedly have an impact well beyond one day. YouTube videos, blog entries, and other viral content live in perpetuity on the Web and will be viewed time and again. It is only over a longer period of time that we can begin to truly evaluate the lasting impact of an effort like Etsy Day.

And, we should also put our analytical comments in context. According to our internal metrics (Google Analytics), Etsy attracts about 7-8 million unique visitors per month and around 500 million page views per month. Like other reasonably large sites, Etsy receives a good deal of traffic from search engines (organic and paid), as well as from direct connections to the site (folks typing in www.etsy.com or having it bookmarked). 

Etsy Day did not materially impact search engine or direct traffic to Etsy, so our overall traffic last Friday was not much different than most Fridays. However, we did see this day of Etsy-love push the needle on Twitter.

There, Etsians proved strength in numbers could be leveraged in awesome ways. Tweets about Etsy Day placed the hashtag #etsyday among the top trending positions on Twitter, where it remained most of Friday. During its highest point, #etsyday was the most frequently used terms on Twitter—we observed it being used over 500 times an hour! Traffic referred to Etsy from Twitter was up nearly 40% last Friday.

All this tweeting caught the attention of Geoffrey Fowler of the Wall Street Journal Digits blog, who wrote a little post about the phenomenon Friday evening.

Equally exciting, the exposure from Etsy Day helped us land a much coveted position on Twitter’s “suggested user” list as a Twitter feed one should follow. (Note: You’ll only see us if you don’t already follow @Etsy.) Check out all of the suggested Twitter users at http://twitter.com/invitations/suggestions.

We want to thank all who took time out of their day to participate in this extraordinary event. This is guerilla/grassroots marketing at its best.

Finally, special kudos to schugirl who came up with this great idea.

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