Hey there Leah. It's an honor to hear from you. You've been at this for a long time with enormous success, credibility, and your own Zazzlepreneurs marketing consultancy and freebies. And you're asking me the right fundamental question: can I prove that what we're doing helps people who are investing their time and in some cases money in Snuggle Hamster Designs? Well. The simple truth is that we are relative newcomers with only modest success in absolute terms. I'm going to answer your question with radical transparency, which is how I prefer to do everything. Time to overshare. I hope it gives you what you need.
And frankly I hope you will join us. I'd certainly love to help you grow your own sales if we can. And I'd love for you to become another active member of our community sharing your own vast knowledge. We just had our public launch two months ago and have done zero paid advertising. We are relying on limited social media posts like this and word of mouth by our own wonderful users. Yet already we count among our members one other acknowledged Pro Platinum seller, 5 Silvers, and 3 Bronzes. About half our agencies are Pro level. So you'd be in good company.
Gargi and I opened our Zazzle agency in February last year. So we’re still just getting started. In that time we’ve earned $366 and of course gone Pro Basic. Here’s what our count of sales orders from month to month looks like over time:
That dark top line is the total. You can see that over the past year Gargi’s Gigi Greetings store dominates our earnings. Initially my own stores predominated our sales. But in the past year I have been focused almost entirely on building our website to serve other Zazzlers. And frankly she’s a much better artist than I am.
Do I think that our solidly upward trajectory in sales is a direct result of using the tools I’ve made available to other Zazzlers? I am absolutely sure it’s not. Again, we’re just getting started. I’ve been writing the code for this site for over a year. But most of the analytics stuff appeared in the past few months. Just in time for our public launch.
I do think we’re earning more now because we have followed a data-driven method that I’m trying to bring to other Zazzlers. One I know you can appreciate. Many months ago Gargi and I did a straightforward analysis. We went through every single sale we had made and asked what they had in common and what by contrast our products that had not yet sold had in common. We actually came up with quite a list. For example we noticed that none of our designs — mostly my own — that centrally featured a solo woman had sold. We had sold designs that featured couples though. A lot of what we had sold were stylized paintings. Almost none of it was straight photography or realistic in style like that. We took over a dozen strong signals, positive and negative, and used them to guide what we were doing going forward. By then Gargi was doing most of the product creation. She has a particular habit of taking whatever thing sold most recently and creating more things that are similar. In any case we have combined a variety of data-driven strategies with our own artistic tastes and talents to make better products that apparently appeal to a growing clientele.
We also got a lot better at creating product titles and tags. I don’t think you make any sales if you don’t. Nobody is going to find your stuff through search if you don’t make your stuff amenable to search. From the start I have been designing the SHD website for search engine optimization (SEO). I’ve just started importing search performance data from the Google Search Console API into the site for our users to benefit from. And just last night I started building a global statistics page for public consumption. It’s not done and so not available yet. But I’ll give you a sneak peek at some Google-specific numbers:
As you can see we have shown up in many Google searches already, despite being very new. I want to draw your attention to that 92% figure. Pretty much every store has shown up in Google searches at least once. The ones that haven’t are probably stores with no products imported yet. I need to do more work to refine that number further. We have over 70k products collectively in our catalog. Considering that most of those products were one-click imported, the fact that 8% of them have gotten Google search exposure means we are already providing measurable value to users who didn’t have to do much work and didn’t have to pay a dime to get it. SHD collections have to be hand-created presently. It’s nice to see that 10% of them are also showing up in Google searches. I would say that the above numbers show that in this way the SHD site is already an unqualified success for Zazzlers using it.
Gargi and I have a lot of work to do. Our alignment score is pretty bad. You see how about 2/3 of our orders are in the Invitations & Stationery department (orange wedge)? Yet less than 9% (orange wedge again) of our products are in that department. About 1/4 of our products (mostly my designs) are posters in Wall Art & Decor, yet they only represent about 8% of our orders:
Our top products sorted by quantity tells an interesting story. Gargi created a stunning design for International Women’s Day this year and scored a single order for 100 magnets featuring that design. There had been a lot of buzz in our small Discord community leading up to IWD. That inspired Gargi to give it a try. It’s still an underserved niche. She tapped it well:
Consider our top product by quantity, the Hawaii themed postcard. Our Product > Insights page for this postcard product gives us some clues as to why it’s done well. We’ve had a steady string of sales of it this past year. They aren’t really originating from Google or even from our own site. Which means people have mainly been finding it on Zazzle. No surprise there:
The Niche Analysis on that page does give us some deep insights though. There are a lot of searches done on Zazzle that match this product’s title and tags. Some of them are fairly niche, like “hawaii sunset postcards”, which has only 361 matches on Zazzle’s site. So it’s no surprise that her postcard shows up as result number 36 in an actual search:
Looking up a level at the Store > Insights page, our storewide Niche Analysis is encouraging. It shows that 97% of the products in Gargi’s Gigi Greetings store match at least one search done in Zazzle in recent months. And there are nearly 2k Zazzle searches that her products could match:
To be sure, this doesn’t mean her products all actually show up that frequently and for those specific searches. Best I can do is roughly mimic Zazzle’s search engine. They add hidden factors in their search and sorting of results that I won’t try to mimic. But that’s why we provide tools for you to dig deeper into all this data.
I could talk about our newer Trademark Search and Trademark Analysis tools. But arguably they don’t affect sales very directly. They are just a unique feature that is already helping some of our agencies discover where they might be accidentally stepping on the toes of some IP rights holders. I’ll also skip discussion of our mechanism for creating and managing social media posts. But I’ll showcase one SM post Gargi created using one of the new templates she’s shared with everyone:
Will SM posts to Pinterest, Facebook, and other sites really help our sales? I don’t know. We’re trying to make it a little easier for our users to do a more polished job of it for their agencies. We’ll see in a few months if we find any solid evidence in the numbers.
Anyway. This has gotten a bit longwinded. But you asked for some data to support my belief that what we’re doing is helping us in particular and by extension other Zazzlers. I hope this is satisfactory evidence. And this is a good example of the kind of consultation we’re offering to do for other Zazzlers who do sign up for Premium.
What do you think so far? I hope you’ll join us soon and share some of your own experience and wisdom with us. Cheers.
For those who might not understand what the site stats mean here's a breakdown @Jadendreamer13
Where it says Google views - these are Google Impressions. This means that this site and it's content has links that have appeared in Google 91k times.
The CTR value indicates how many times those links have been 'clicked' ie, a user has potentially used one of those links to visit the site.
So 0.9% of 91k is: 819
819 people since the start of the site have accessed the site via Google links.
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Meanwhile my individual stats when I had a store on snugglehamster for around 2 days showed over 2000 'qualified views'.
What are 'Qualified views'?
I know from the CTR % that as only 819 people have visited snugglehamster since the start of time that these 'qualified views' did NOT come from google. So where did they come from? Jim as noted below suggested they were bots but my understanding was that 'qualified views' means 'bot data removed'.
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Relevant Google stats being that 819 people since the start of the site have accessed the site via Google links.
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So where does this 'qualified views' traffic come from? On site ... or from backlinks. I checked snugglehamsters backlinks and they weren't showing anything (that I could see from the immediate results) related to Zazzle, or even snugglehamster so it is therefore likely the views are nothing to do with interested potential Zazzle customers.
In essence in my opinion this data and the term 'qualified views' is misleading as it doesn't offer any meaningful insights for Zazzle users wanting to know if their presence on snugglehamster is worthwhile.
Due to a conflict re the definition of 'transparency' between Jim and I have closed my account there.
It is early days for Snugglehamster and Jim and I wish him the best but do feel greater 'transparency' showcasing results that are meaningful is a better way forward.
The Zazzle creators here who are ex or current website designers should be able to verify this evaluation reht figures presented.
Meanwhile Jim please clear up some confusion
You are a pro basic seller as you yourself noted here (less than $400 earnings over 16months) yet in this post on the forum you hint at being much more, stating you don't show off your pro seller status (when in reality you can't as it hasn't been earned as yet). This in my mind is not 'transparency' in action.
Leah and I had a lengthy discussion of this topic in private. I think it's worth responding for clarification to some of her points here. (This comment is not related to my OP, but it's otherwise worth discussing.)
Leah is referring primarily to statistics I make entirely public without any gatekeeping on our "Global stats" page. This is the sort of data companies rarely share with you. Some are great. Some are lackluster. But I'm a big believer in transparency. Here's what that page looks like at this moment:
Leah is correct when she writes "Google views - these are Google Impressions". I made this entirely clear in the pop-up help. But this morning I've even added tooltips to every one of these stats so you can get a clear indication of what it represents:
Leah was the first person I've talked to to suggest that Google views might be misconstrued as people clicking on a search result and visiting SHD. She is correct that it is instead the number of impressions, which is to say us showing up in search results visible to the user.
I published the "Click-through rate" to help further make clear that there's a distinction between views and clicks. Or "linkovers" using Zazzle's terminology. This morning I also added the "Click-throughs" absolute number. 799 times people searching on Google clicked on a link from Google to visit our site. Not super impressive. We've only been open to the public for four months now. It's a start.
We also offer a free (Premium is not required) "Insights" page for each store, product, and design group. At the top of each is a "Stats" section. Here's one for my own newest Rave City store:
I showed Leah how to use these pages. Before deleting her stores she saw something over 2k under "Qualified views". Hovering over that you'll see this explanation:
The total views is the unfiltered number of "hits" on pages within my store. The store's home page, products, designs, etc. Most of those are from bots that visit. Including Google's own webcrawler. That number is next to useless. But it is what most webmasters use to tout how popular their sites are. Our users repeatedly begged to see this number anyway. So I decided to do what I could to filter out the bots. That's what the "Qualified views" number reflects. The qualifier is explained in the tooltip. This is me filtering out your own views of pages, most importantly. But also any bots I can detect from the web hits data. This is not data webmasters typically will give you.
If you are curious about how I determine that a hit is from a bot, the only thing I really have to work with in the data is what's called the "user-agent HTTP header". When a web browser (or bot) makes a request to a web server it typically voluntarily sends along this hidden metadata to let the web server know. In theory that allows the web server to be responsive to the special needs of the user. For example, if your user-agent header says you use MacOS and you offer an app for download, you can direct that visitor to the MacOS version of your app instead of the Windows one. These user-agent headers are fairly long but usually human-readable. Google and other companies will usually voluntarily include something like "googlebot" to help webmasters know. Here's what Semrush's bot sends: "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; SemrushBot/7~bl; +http://www.semrush.com/bot.html)". The important thing to note is that this is voluntary. Many bots are "stealth". Meaning they send along a user-agent string that makes it look like it's an ordinary user browsing with Chrome or Safari or such. All I can do to show these qualified views is look for "bot", "spider", "crawler", and other such strings that mark bots that care to let me know.
So as you can see from the new stats we've had over a million qualified page views. If I take away the filter it's 2.2M. Once again, the majority of those page views are from bots that declared themselves. Do I believe we've had a million humans viewing our pages? I don't actually. Something I explained repeatedly to Leah. But my users have told me very strongly that they want to see these numbers, fully understanding the caveats I've explained here. Best I can do is explain everything as much as possible. That includes labeling, tooltips, a popup help page, and countless public explanations in our Discord server when people have asked. That's what transparency looks like.
You might be wondering how I can log 799 clicks from Google search results and yet 1,163 link-outs to Zazzle. The reason should be apparent though. Our agency owners click some of their product links to see how the Zazzle connection works and ensure everything is in good order. But also, someone who follows one link from Google to SHD may repeatedly follow links from SHD to Zazzle and then bounce back to SHD to view more content. Finally, Google isn't the only way people find SHD. Do I think the majority of these are our users clicking their own links? Probably. But I'm not entirely sure. I know a lot of these are by visitors who don't have user accounts or don't log in. And a lot of them are by agents visiting not only their own stores, but also other agents' stores. Our users are friendly and curious about each others' work. We encourage discussion and sharing within our Discord community.
Leah mentions "backlinks". That's a technical way of saying links from other sites, versus internal links within the SHD site. We don't actually have many links from other sites at present. In our private discussion Leah referenced the website of a blogger friend who has kindly given two links to our home page among his hundreds of posts. Unfortunately she saw another number associated with that and mistook it as saying there were hundreds of such links. There aren't. But she speculated that this might represent some dubious action on my part to pay for links to inflate our public visibility. We have very few links from outside at present. But I can state in no uncertain terms that we have never paid anyone for links. Not with money. Not with promises for reciprocal link schemes. Not with any sorts of quid pro quos. I'm not interested in deceptive practices like this. This is what transparency looks like.
Transparency is what we promise. Radical transparency is what we over-deliver. You won't see the level of openness about practices and data that we demonstrate from many other organizations. And we always welcome people to inquire. I spent a lot of time talking with Leah about all of this. It's her prerogative to decide whether to trust us or not. And everyone else's. All I can do is lay out all of the information anyone needs to make decisions and invite each person to judge us appropriately based on that.
I see Leah extended her comments to include some of our private discussion from a couple months ago. I'm quite proud of it actually. Also of the select screenshot in which I point out that we don't brag about our success. As she noted we don't have much yet. Here's the latest graph of our sales (Gargi and I have our own Zazzle agency):
This is royalty totals per month. Nothing spectacular. Actual total is $456.23. But this is also what transparency looks like. I'm not afraid to share this data about our own agency's modest success as relative newbies.
We have never advertised on the strength of our experience as Zazzle sellers. We have never promised anyone an increase in sales using Snuggle Hamster Designs. Not only do we believe in radical transparency. We also believe in underselling. We put data out there and let you evaluate it for yourself. And we explain things in sometimes nauseating detail so that people who are curious can learn everything they need to to evaluate what we are doing. Even at the risk of deflating some people's impressions of us. And at the risk of making it easier for other people to copy our business model. Why do we do this? Because we believe these principles are more important than any quick buck.
I respect Leah and others who offer marketing advice on the strength of their sales history. That's an enormous value. You should consider taking advantage of their expertise. It's a value one I can personally offer. And it goes to show that there's plenty of room for many sources of information and kinds of expertise to seek out. We offer technical expertise through our technology-based offerings. We offer community as well. And we welcome people who know far more than we do about Zazzle from hard-won experience. Which is why we already have multiple high-earning Zazzlers among our users and subscribers. What we are not trying to do is compete with Leah or anyone else who has something of genuine value to offer.
For anyone curious, this was the graph I shared.
There is no identifying information in it. No numbers even. My exact statement with it was: "This is an out-of-context example of the huge swings from month to month of one of our users. This is nothing compared to the day to day swings I see everywhere." I shared this in the context of a discussion about one day of sales not mattering much. Especially when what I see in all data shared with us thus far includes wild vacillations like this.
I'm posting this lest anyone think I was sharing actual confidential information with one user about another.
Looks about like my current weight loss journey chart
😂Thankyou for adding that bit of much-needed light-heartedness to this discussion. 😃
