How We Use Data as Teacher Sellers

What data points do you check to drive decisions as a Teachers Pay Teachers seller?

We both use data frequently to make all kinds of decisions about our business. We geek out about all things data.  The more insight we have into what's working and what's not helps us so much. In this episode, we discuss the different data points we check and what they can tell us about our resources. We've even scored some awesome info from Benson at Team TpT to help you understand TpT data better.
How we use data
We use data to drive all sorts of decisions about our business. It can tell us when a resource is popular and that gives us the information we need to make decisions about when to promote a specific resource. It also helps us to decide which resources to make more of. Spoiler Alert: It's not always the ones we love the most. We may gravitate towards a particular resource that we think is great but it may not always be the best choice to be spending our time on that.

It can show us if resource line is declining in popularity or if it's just not the best time of year for that particular topic. If we see a decrease in sales, data can help us to figure out why it may be happening.
Use a larger set of data rather than a smaller set
Benson from TpT told us, "Another piece of advice (more generally about data) is to make decisions using a large set of data. Don't run a promoted pin for only a day or two and then try to decide if it was worth it or not. Set a budget that will last you as long as you possibly can (within reason) and then use that larger set of data to make a decision. Try to always get at least a week's worth of data before making any decisions, because buyer behavior can be all over the place day-to-day. At TpT, we run all of our tests for at least a week, and some for much much longer."
Looking at the pin data below, we can see that the pin was more popular different times of the year. Had we just pulled a week worth of this data out, it wouldn't really give us a clear picture of what is happening long-term with a pin.

Using dashboard data to decide on promotions
We use our dashboard to tell use more about our overall sales, how a particular resource is selling, and even how a resource line is selling.

Some of the data points we like to check are:

Total sales (Earnings)
Conversions
Views

We change the dates to look at bigger or smaller chunks of time. You have a lot of options here.
You can also look at all of that data for your whole store, a particular resource, or a resource line. Just uncheck all and choose the resources you wish to have more info about. There's even a search bar so you don't have to scroll through tons of resources.
We take this info and also compare it to last year by checking that box. This is a huge help to see it compared to the year before. This helps us to see if a resource is losing momentum.

Using the traffic tab to determine what's working
We used to get so frustrated with the UTM links because we knew they were not accurately reporting our data. We felt like we were just throwing money out of the window on promotions and never knew what was working. TpT has been making changes and updating UTM links