How It Works

Our data source

KW Metrics is built entirely on Etsy's official Open API. We don't scrape Etsy's website, use unofficial endpoints, or buy data from third-party resellers. Every listing, tag, price, and engagement figure you see either comes directly from Etsy's API or is calculated from it.

What we compute

Keyword Competition Score

We count how many live Etsy listings are currently competing for a search term, then weight that count by how popular the top results actually are — specifically, their favorite-to-view ratio. A lower score points to a thinner, weaker field of competitors — a realistic opening for a new listing.

Tag Relevance

We look at how often a tag appears across the top-ranking listings for a search term, weighted by those listings' engagement. A tag used by only a handful of listings can still be a strong opportunity if those listings are performing well.

Shop Sales Trend

Etsy only publishes a shop's lifetime total sales — not a day-by-day breakdown. For shops you track, we record that lifetime figure over time, turning a single running total into a visible trend.

Listing Audit Score

We check a listing's title length, tag usage, and description completeness against patterns seen in top-performing listings for similar search terms — then point out specific, actionable gaps.

What we don't claim

We don't show Etsy's internal search volume, because Etsy doesn't publish it, and we won't invent a number and present it as if it were real. Where you see actual search volume in KW Metrics, it comes from Google's Keyword Planner data — and only if you choose to connect it. We label every figure clearly so you always know exactly where it came from.

Data freshness

Listing data is refreshed within a few hours; shop data more frequently. We follow Etsy's API data-freshness requirements as a floor, not a ceiling, so you're never looking at information that's meaningfully out of date.

Where AI is used

Tools like the AI Listing Helper write suggested titles, tags, and descriptions grounded in the real data pulled from Etsy elsewhere in the app — they don't have a separate pool of knowledge they're drawing statistics from. If a number shows up somewhere in KW Metrics, it traces back to Etsy's API or basic arithmetic on top of it, not a language model's guess.

A note on Etsy

KW Metrics uses the Etsy API but is not endorsed or certified by Etsy, Inc. "Etsy" is a trademark of Etsy, Inc.