Introduction
Using Zazzle’s built-in Insights tool is a great way to get information about how your store is performing in terms of views and sales. But sometimes the data you get in this screen isn’t easy to understand. For example, have you noticed in your “Top Search Terms” section that there are some results that are just unreadable?
I’ve figured out what these characters mean, and I will show you how to convert these strange characters into a format you can read and use.
It’s URL Encoding
The reason you’re seeing percentage signs through some of the words in your results is because these are words that have been URL encoded.
What is URL encoding? Well, first we have to start by understanding something about URLs. You can’t just use every character on every English and foreign keyboard in a URL. URLs can only use characters in the ASCII character set. And there are only 255 characters in that set, in English and Latin. So, what happens when a Dutch-speaking person does a search for the word ‘deaf’ which would be the word “döv”, and that word becomes part of the URL in the search results?
Well, it gets converted, or encoded. Each letter that is not in the ASCII character set will be turned into a combination of percentage signs and two letters or numbers.
In this case, döv gets turned into d%C3%B6v
Thankfully, you don’t need to know how to manually convert these strings of letters and numbers. There are tools online we can use to do it for us!
Converting a URL Encoded Keyword
Copy the word from your Zazzle insights page, then go to https://www.url-encode-decode.com/ and paste it in the left box. Then, click the ‘Decode URL’ button under that box.
From there, you can copy and paste the decoded word into Google Translate to know what it means.
Conclusion
Congratulations, you can now interpret those mysterious %-filled words in your Zazzle Analytics!
I hope this blog post has been helpful. If you have any questions about this process, leave a comment below.
Peace, love & sunshine,
JessicaAmber
