Do Customers See Our Zazzle Stores? AI May Have the Answer - Zazzle Please confirm these results

[CreativeLeahG]

One of the big questions for Zazzlers is 'do our stores' get seen by customers? And I believe I may have found a way to answer that question using AI!

As an experiment, I decided to ask Bard using this prompt:

WHAT ARE THE SITE STATS FOR ZAZZLE.COM/STORE/[ENTER STORE HERE]

RESULTS ON BARD GOOGLE

I looked at the stats re one of my stores - this is what Bard said

"The website https://www.zazzle.com/store/storename receives an average of 1,500 visitors per day. This is a relatively small amount of traffic compared to other websites. The website is most popular in the United States, where it receives 60% of its traffic. The website is also popular in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The website is primarily visited by women, who make up 65% of its visitors. The majority of visitors are between the ages of 25 and 54. The website sells a variety of products, including phone cases, t-shirts, mugs, and home décor. The website's most popular products are phone cases, which account for 30% of all sales."

Note that this is one of 100+ stores I have.

I asked BARD how reliable their stats are.

Bard says:

"I am finding these stats by using a combination of publicly available information and my own estimates. Publicly available information includes website traffic data from third-party providers, such as SimilarWeb and Alexa. I also use information from social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, to get a sense of a website's popularity.

My own estimates are based on a variety of factors, such as the number of products that a website sells, the number of followers that a website has, and the overall quality of a website's design and content.

While I cannot guarantee the accuracy of my estimates, I believe that they are a reasonable approximation of a website's true performance.

It is important to note that website traffic can vary significantly from day to day, week to week, and month to month. As such, the stats that I provide are only a snapshot of a website's performance at a particular point in time. If you are looking for more accurate information about a website's performance, I recommend that you contact the website owner directly."

I tried this prompt with a few of my stores and those of some popular Editor's choice stores and the results were varied and accurate regarding what the store mainly sells.

I'd love to know if the stats re traffic are accurate.

I would note that the traffic to this store doesn't reflect in sales as this is NOT my most popular store in that regard and the ones that do perform better appear to have 'less traffic' according to Bard!

If the stats are accurate this could be very valuable in the following ways:

By using Bard Google to track our stores' traffic and demographics over time, we can identify trends and make changes to our own stores accordingly.

For example, if a store sees a sudden increase in traffic from a particular country, we could create products specifically targeted at that market.

Or, if a store sees a decline in traffic from a particular age group, they could create marketing campaigns aimed at attracting that group.

This information can be used to optimize product titles and descriptions for search engines. By ranking higher in search results, creators can increase their visibility and attract more visitors to their stores.

Overall, Bard Google could be (if it is accurate - Zazzle please confirm!) a valuable tool that can be used by Zazzle creators to gain insights.

We can make informed decisions about product offerings, pricing, and marketing strategies.

Would love some insight into this and how we can make the most of AI to help our stores grow!

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[CrazyMermaid]

I really hope Zazzle doesn't answer your question. Because they will also tell every thief in the world how to find the most profitable Zazzle stores to scrape and copy. Right now all they know is maybe it works and maybe it doesn't. I really prefer that my stats stay private for many reasons. 

[Malissa]

I asked about my own store and it said

"I don't have access to private information. I'm a large language model, able to communicate in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about that specific store is limited. Is there anything else I can do to help?"

I am not sure why it gave Leah and Keegan the info and not me, but maybe for most people it won't.

I agree that I would hope that that information is not available per my store to anyone that wants to look at it.  Maybe at some point Zazzle with morph the product insights into a store insights page where we can glean some of that information in a more general per store way and in one spot without having to go product by product.  I have yet to figure out how to even access the info through Google Analytics.  It is way too complicated for me.

[SaraO]

It said the similar for me when I tried, "I'm unable to help, as I am only a language model and don't have the ability to process and understand that."  Maybe I got a thick AI

[KeegansCreation]

It didn't give me the info at first. Instead it said, "I'm sorry, I couldn't find relevant information about the site stats for https://www.zazzle.com/store/keegancreations on the website itself. Would you like me to try finding it on the web using Google Search?".

I answered yes and it gave me the incorrect info that I quoted (and more suspect info that I didn't quote). 

Maybe website format used in the query matters? Try using the https://zazzle.com/store/your store name format and then answer yes when it asks if you want it to google up something. 

[CreativeLeahG]

It won't have any knowledge re best sellers so yes I'd expect those stats to be flights of fancy on the part of AI!

[CreativeLeahG]

The stats are NOT reflective of my sales for the store I checked as I noted. 

If zazzle can at least confirm search engine do send traffic to our stores we can ensure our stores are optimized accordingly ànd presented to generate more sales.

[CreativeLeahG]

I appreciate your concerns. It wasn't  something I'd considered. 

[KeegansCreation]

I am suspicious of the accuracy. It told me my top selling products are t shirts, mugs, phone cases, tote bags and stickers. I sell very few t shirts, tote bags or stickers. My actual top selling products (using info from back end) are postcards, wrapping paper and other gift wrap and paper plates and other party tableware. Their list seems like its a generic list of things that sell well across all POD platforms.

It says I get 1,000-2,000 visitors to my store per month which I'd be more inclined to believe if it was also aware that gift wrap and postcards are my actual big sellers.

edited to add: it claimed my best performing product was a funny cat t shirt. I have no such product. 

edited to add even more: AI is known to have a hallucination problem. It is given to flights of fancy. This makes it great for brainstorming fresh ideas but not so great for cold, hard facts.

[CreativeLeahG]

It won't have any knowledge re best sellers so yes I'd expect those stats to be flights of fancy on the part of AI!

[WHS_Designs]

unfortunately, Google Bard isn't available to trial in Canada (and both ChatGPT and Microsoft AI can't tell me anything about the performance of my Zazzle stores). 

[CreativeLeahG]

That's a shame. I can run your store through it if you wish and send results privately.

[WHS_Designs]

@CreativeLeahG thanks Leah. can you send me the results through Z Chat? (store links are in my e-signature) 

[CreativeLeahG]

I will do. I don't have access to my laptop presently but will sort tomorrow evening for you. 

[WHS_Designs]

@CreativeLeahG thanks Leah! 🙂

[CreativeLeahG]

@WHS_Designs 

I have tried this evening, but it stopped giving me results and given the feedback, I think we can conclude they're not valid. I can't get Google analytics to work with Zazzle either, but if others can and they know stores do show up (I've never had a store show up in any search I've ever run) then are many ways we could optimize stores for greater visibility, but I don't want to spend time on this 'unknown'. Not with everything else that is 'up in the air' presently.

[WHS_Designs]

@CreativeLeahG no problem, Leah, but thanks for trying!

[ColsCreations]

If zazzle can at least confirm search engine do send traffic to our stores we can ensure our stores are optimized accordingly ànd presented to generate more sales.

 (I've never had a store show up in any search I've ever run)

I really got lost in a rabbit hole on this so bear with me, this is going to get long I know.

I typed in my store name and my Zazzle shop came up as the second result with my own website being the first. (And I see Google is now using the OG meta image as a link preview image so I need to change that.)

Then I took the first line of the About for my store and searched for that. (I had to use quotes for exact-phrase because as you could imagine, without them there were 39 million results with eclectic and design LOL). Again, my Zazzle shop came up as the second result.

 If I click on the 3-dots next to the store result, I get this

So so far this confirms that Google "sees" our store names and our About text, and that my results weren't due to Google giving me personalized results based on my browsing habits.

Then I searched for ["beatnik bubbles"] which is one of my design names and thus the name of a Collection and in the title of every product in that Collection. For that I got a lot of results, mostly all my stuff, but the interesting thing was that Pinterest pins (not mine! - they're all just credited to zazzle.com so no idea who is actually pinning them)  came up higher than the product pages on Zazzle themself if you don't count the images tagged as Product links that come up in the first section.

What didn't come up in this search was a link to my Beatnik Bubbles Collection on Zazzle. Lots of individual products within it came up, but not the Collection page itself. (Maybe because I haven't attempted to update it to the new standards, it's still flagged in red as "ready to migrate"?)

Another thing I tried was searching for keywords that match the tags I assigned to my store. Not product tags but the tags for the store itself. And I got nothing. Even using all ten words I have as tags as keywords in one search, and trying image results, shopping results, and All results, I got nowhere. The only thing related to my store that came up was one odd product that probably incorporates those ten same words in its ten tags. This was only one little test but seems like while store tags might help searching within Zazzle itself, they def didn't seem to be factoring into a Google search.

Then I tried searching for my other store which is much smaller (less than 30 products) and not as old as ColsCreations. Searching for [thepasticheboutique] did NOT bring up a link directly to the store homepage itself but it did produce links to individual products within it that have sold.

If the question is "do search engines send traffic to our stores" I would say yes, for sure. If the question is do they specifically pick up the store home page (https://www.zazzle.com/store/storename ) I would say yes again but whether it comes up in results depends on infinite variables.

[Jadendreamer13]

Did you say that you have 100 stores? How do you manage all of them?

[J32Design]

I tried this with my own website and Bard says

"Estimated monthly traffic: 10,000 - 50,000 visitors"

This is way off according to my own stats

[almdrs]

Bard told me this: 
"I don't have enough information to do that. I'm a large language model, able to communicate in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about that specific website is limited. Is there anything else I can do to help?"

Claude.ai told me this:
"Unfortunately I do not have access to the site stats for that specific Zazzle store. As an AI assistant without direct access to websites, I cannot look up or provide specific data about traffic, sales, or other metrics for a given online store. I can only make general observations based on what information is available in our conversation. If you need detailed site stats for a Zazzle store, you would need to contact Zazzle or the store owner directly. I apologize I cannot directly provide the site stats you requested."

[Anne]

Interesting. However, this is the reply I got:
"I'm sorry. I'm not able to access the website(s) you've provided. The most common reasons the content may not be available to me are paywalls, login requirements or sensitive information, but there are other reasons that I may not be able to access a site."
Site may not even be indexed by Google ...
Brave can find it ... 🙂

[CreativeLeahG]

Based on replies here I think we can conclude Bard is selectively making things up! So we can discount this as being a useful tool re store analytics.

But if Zazzle could confirm at least whether stores get views from search engines that itself would tell me I need to put more effort into making 'some stores' look better and work better at conversions. For now I don't see the value in the time investment.

[Scott]

I've been away for a few days, and we're also quite busy preparing for the holidays. I don't think we'll be able to confirm/deny everything that people might find on the internet, especially if its information provided from a third-party source or an AI chat bot or whatever.

[CreativeLeahG]

You don't know if zazzle stores are indexed by Google or if they attain their own traffic via Google?

[J32Design · Accepted solution]

Stores are certainly indexed by Google as you can see in this Google search
Your best bet is to add Google Analytics to the store and see statistics for yourself.

To give you an example from one of my stores. According to Google Analytics my store had 1438 unique visitors in the past month. Of those 1438 visitors, 1095 came directly to the store (most likely some form of tracking protection), 268 came via Google, 35 came via Pinterest, 12 came via Bing. A few odd ones came through Google lens and the indian pinterest. The rest came through my website.

[CreativeLeahG]

That's brilliant thank you for confirming!

I have tried to add Google Analytics, But it didn't give me the code they used to give, it seems they have something 'new' but I'll persevere! I have some ideas to increase conversions via the store if it is indexing, so will definitely get on that with a few of the more prominent stores I have .

Thank you!!

[J32Design]

Yes, things have changed. A while ago Google was moving on to GA4 Properties and the new ID numbers didn't work on Zazzle. You will have to create a linked Universal Analytics property and us the UA-XXXXXX number and enter it into you store settings.

There is a chance that you cannot do that anymore though as Universal Properties were supposed to be retired as well. Zazzle will have to change things on their end to make the new properties work with stores if Universal ones stop working.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/10269537?hl=en

[CreativeLeahG]

Thank you again for this very helpful insight, very much appreciated! 

[sm]

Why wouldn't you just use Google Analytics? Are you assuming GA's stats are not accurate? These AI that mash data from wherever... data that could be wrong, are ridiculous. The sooner the world realises that we can't rely on AI, the better.

AI models are not intelligent at all. They are fed both reliable and unreliable information just like whatever we find on the internet which is full of misinformation that just keeps spreading, simply because it is there. 

Bard should be called Lard, because it's just fat from all the things its been fed, which includes some healthy and lots of crap foods it shouldn't touch.

[Marblewave]

I asked it about a store I opened this month on Zazzle. It told me this store has already had 38,000 visitors and sold thousands of products (I wish! 🤣)

[Sq]

I'm suspicious about information produced by AI. 

Out of curiosity I asked Chat GPT to write a 500 word blog post about me, just to see what it came up with.  I have an unusual name, so it made it relatively easy.  After a good and accurate start, things went a bit off-piste. 

It seems I have worked with all sorts of amazing top brands and won all sorts of amazing awards, including an Oscar for my music.  I can't even play an instrument, and hadn't worked with any of the brands it came up with. 

I did check all the 'facts', just in case someone with a similar name did indeed do all these fabulous things, but no. 

Chat GPT seems to pad out facts with fiction, so I'd be very wary of using it to find out anything you don't already know.

[CreativeLeahG]

Yes Chatgpt is VERY creative! Definitely have to fact-check when using it.