Spring CRAFTfest 2013 Statistics and information

After a bustling week Spring CRAFTfest is over yet again! But lets just have a look back on it shall we?

• We had 140 wonderful stalls 
• Our team leaders ran some fabulous marketing skill challenges proving that even old CRAFTfest hands can learn new tricks. :)
• The atmosphere around the whole event was fabulously friendly with a great community spirit.
• We welcomed back CRAFTfest regulars and met lots of new crafty folk who we hope will join us again for future events.
• Our CRAFTfest Comic Relief Team raised over £250 for charity!

Heading into the June event we have already come up with some new ideas that will be of use.

• We are hoping to create downloadable guides outlining all of the promotional activities so that you can be prepared and have something for reference.
• We have found a way of an 'opt in' service that will gain you a country flag on your profile image that will highlight your stalls origin. We think that this will show how international our events truly are.

Now for the bit that I know you are all waiting for. For those eagle eyed people you will notice that the views are considerably down on the November event but there are a few things that you should take into consideration.

• We had 140 stalls at this event compared to the 250 stalls for the November one. This highlights the need for active promotion from you all before the booking forms close as the more of us there are the louder we shout!
• The analytics have been very interesting. Last year a huge number of our views came from Twitter, some believe that many of these are automatic bots which invalidate a lot of views. Now whether this is true or not we have all noticed that due to changing twitter rules (the allowance of retweets per account dropping considerably)  we have not been able to hit twitter as hard as we have done for recent events. This has however opened up other avenues of promotion amongst the other social networks which allows a far better standard of link.
• Very early on in the build up to this event Lu noticed that CRAFTfest stalls were coming up on the Stumbleupon boards, this is due to the hard work of the stumble promoters at previous events.
• The second highest amount of traffic to the event was via organic google search! This is fantastic! This shows that our backlinks and SEO are working really, really well and can only mean that each future event will just get us more and more well known across the web.

I shall stop rambling now and get down to the bit you want to know:

During CRAFTfest week (not including any in the weeks previous due to the ongoing promotions) we had:

3,899 new visitors 

who viewed 31,315 pages

The most popular category this time was Home

The top 25 most visited stalls were:

(This is to their main stall pages only not individual items)

1.  Beadwork and Coe
2.  Beads and Findings
3. Waterlily Cards and Keepsakes
4. Scrapbookerry Mini Albums and Keepsakes
5. Juesaics
6. Paulines Passions
7. Silent Companions
8. Manic Weavers
9. Beadstorm Jewellery
10. Cola Creations
11. Due Amiche
12. Sheena Rogers
13. Epple Bay Ceramics
14. Strombolitwo
15. Trudy's Art
16. Personal Space Interiors
17. Crystal Cavern
18. Jillybean Pottery
19. Rubbish Revamped
20. The Bead Bounty
21. Fairyhogmama
22. Pepperpot
23. Scent Cosmetics
24. Ravens Stained Glass
25. Keep it in a Frame

It was fantastic to see so many visits from the sales fairy too, don't forget to let us know if you have sold by shouting it in our SOLD group. We also have a thread for if you made a purchase this time as well. Please remember that as all sales are made off site we only know about them if you tell us. We really do appreciate you letting us know.

We hope that you will join us all again for the June event. Dates will be announced shortly and the forms will be open in a few weeks for you to grab those all important first page spots.

For now, the CRAFTfest team would like to thank you all for taking part and being such good promoters. We couldn't do it all without you.

See you soon!