Studying your store statistics is one of the most important things you can do as a TPT seller to identify how well your store and individual products are performing.
The problem with the statistics that Teachers Pay Teachers provides by default is that they don’t take into account how long the products have been in your store. So if you’ve got a product that you posted three years ago and a product that you posted 6 months ago, it’s impossible to easily tell which one is actually performing better because the numbers are skewed by the amount of time the products have been live. You can’t compare them objectively.
If you’re like me and have had a store since 2012 (!) then there is a huge discrepancy between your old products and your new ones. Your older products will almost always look like they’re doing better because their numbers are higher, but is that accurate? How can you accurately compare how various products are doing?
You need PER DAY calculations.
TPT doesn’t provide this, but it’s actually an easy calculation, and it will change how you look at your product statistics. A “per day” calculation uses your existing data to calculate each statistic as it would be in a single day – how many times EACH DAY does your product get viewed? How many times EACH DAY is that product purchased?
When you recalculate your statistics as a PER DAY value, now you can easily see which products are really working for you, and which ones might have only looked good because they’ve been around so long.
A PER DAY value can also help you calculate what your average overall earnings are per day – and this can be insanely helpful in terms of predicting your ongoing sales and projecting how your sales will change in the future.
Download that stat file – let’s get to work
Go to your statistics page and click “Download to Excel”. Open that file up in Excel. Let’s rock!
1) Re-write your posted dates so that Excel recognizes them.
I don’t know why, but when you import your downloaded stats from TPT into excel, some of the dates don’t convert correctly (TPT, could you please fix this already?)
Be careful here, because I’ve found that sometimes they LOOK like they’re real dates, but the year and month or year and day are switched. I haven’t found a shortcut for this other than to re-write them manually, so grab a tall glass of something and put on a re-run of RuPaul’s Drag Race and get to it.
(I suggest once you’ve set up your stat file, just paste the new stats without the dates once they’re already fixed so you don’t have to do this every time. Unless you’re REALLY enjoying your drink-and-RuPaul time. I can relate.)
2) Calculate today’s date
Now you need to add another column that calculates today’s date. For this you enter:
=TODAY()
This will automatically update, so your “days active” calculation will stay current no matter when you open the file.
3) Calculate each product’s days active
Now to calculate days active, in the field next door, type an = sign, click on the field with today’s date, then a minus sign, then the field with the date your product was posted.
Voila! Now you know how many days your product has been “alive”.
You can use this number to do things like:
- Calculate your sales per day (how many times that product sells each day)
- Calculate your views per day (how many times that product is viewed each day)
- Calculate your income per day (how much you actually make per day on that product)
If you’ve gotten to this point in my instructions and no longer understand what the heck I am saying to you:
Here’s a sample file for you to download – it’s not fancy but it will get you started. You’re welcome. 😏
What do you do with all these numbers?
Use these statistics to accurately compare products and identify which ones are the highest performing in views, sales, and income. You can also use them to choose which products you should make more of, which ones may need improved descriptions / previews, and which ones are not getting enough traffic.
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