Since the start of our beta program, people have been asking for some global statistics. People want to know SHD's place in the world. We're still just getting started of course. But recently I finally built a stats page. Here's what it currently looks like:
I was able to build this because not long ago I also added a tool to get daily updates from the Google Search Console API. What I'm currently getting is a list of every URL that showed up in Google searches during the previous day with how many times they showed up and how often users clicked on them. The number of clicks is pretty small for now. I'll add that info later too. But the number of impressions is ... impressive? To me at least. I know it may seem like having only 9% of products in our 74k product catalog show up in Google searches is somehow small. But it tracks with what is fairly conventional in the industry. No big website gets fully indexed by Google. And no big website has every page show up in Google searches.
But the real stunner for me was when I rolled the data up to see how many stores are showing up in Google searches. 97% might as well be 100%. Almost every store is showing up in at least one Google search. I don't meant to say that they are showing up millions of times a day. And of course just one search result counts for this. But this number is stunning to me personally. In this case I'm only counting which stores had at least one of their product pages show up on Google. If I included storefronts, designs, and collections then the percent might be a little higher. I need to do more work on this stats page.
Anyway. Why should you care as much as I do about this 97% number? You want to show up in Google searches, right? Are your Zazzle stores all showing up in Google searches currently? Is it worth your time to register your Zazzle stores on SnuggleHamster.com for free and click a button for each to import your inventory in return for a near guarantee that you'll show up on Google at least a little more than your stores do now?
You don't have to pay a dime for this service. It's genuinely free. Do I want you to pay for Premium features for your agency? Sure I do. But consider taking advantage of the free stuff first. See if you want to pay for a subscription to just be generous. And to get the extra analytics we think will help you hone your sales of course.
So I did go back and update the stats calculations. Particularly the "Stores with views" one. I expected the value to go up. I didn't expect it to hit 100% though:
Let me clarify what I did. Because the 100% stat seems farfetched until you understand the calculation. I did as I described though. I went back and updated the database query to get every store that had a search result for at least one product, at least one design, at least one collection, or of its storefront page. Storefront is that 53% number above. Every store has a single "home page" that I'm calling a storefront here. I'm amazed that 53% of them show up in Google searches, frankly. But there it is. When I add that in, the overlap becomes 100%.
There is one other detail I should point out. Think about what happens when someone adds a new store. The number couldn't possibly be 100% at that moment, right? True. That was actually bothering me when I first put this together. So I added in a 2 week aging window. That means I ignore stores that were introduced less than 2 weeks ago. Google indexes the SHD site slightly more frequently than once a week. Which means it's next to impossible for them to show up in Google searches in a week. It's a fudge. But not doing it is also a fudge.
But yeah. Bottom line is that 100% of stores are showing up in Google searches apparently. Are store owners doing the searching? It's possible in some cases. Not all cases I think. But anyway. Yeah. 100%.
