TPT Traffic Data vs Clickstream Data | TPT Seller Tip E91

Summary:
This video explains how SEOTpreneur’s Clickstream Traffic Journey Report gives TPT sellers a “second opinion” on where their traffic comes from, compared with the built‑in TPT Traffic Dashboard (Google Analytics). Mike Fuchigami shows how Clickstream data is collected from a biased panel, why it will never match TPT’s first‑party numbers, and how each source has blind spots and mislabeling issues. He then walks through benchmark traffic patterns TPT search, non‑TPT search, “bring your own traffic,” and paid ads and what each pattern suggests about your store strategy. The practical takeaway is to compare both data sets, look for big patterns rather than exact counts, and adjust your SEO, content, and promotion tactics based on where your traffic truly originates.

Video

Transcript

Hey TPT sellers, here is an SEOTpreneur Clickstream Traffic Journey Report. It’s showing traffic to all TPT product pages over the last 12 months. This is the baseline to compare your store against.

48% of traffic to TPT comes from people going to TPT directly. 32% of people use Google or another search engine to find a product on TPT. 14% of people went to TPT from a blog, email newsletter, or social media post. And finally, 6% of traffic to TPT comes from paid ads.

The goal of the SEOTpreneur Clickstream Traffic Report is to get a second opinion. The TPT Traffic Dashboard tells us one story. Clickstream data tells us another story, and the truth is somewhere in between.

Hi, my name is Mike Fuchigami, and I’m the host of the SEOTpreneur YouTube community. In this video, we’re going to look at three things. First, we’re going to look at what Clickstream data is. Then, we’re going to look at how Clickstream is different from TPT traffic data. Finally, we’ll talk about what to do depending on where your traffic comes from.

Make sure to watch to the end because we’ll talk about how to get one of these reports and how to visualize your TPT traffic data. Clickstream data is marketing data that you buy from large data brokers. What if a company knew every website you visited? What if they could track every click you made online?

Then they’d have a complete picture of your browsing history, social media preferences, and online shopping habits. That’s marketing goal. It’s also a huge privacy violation unless you gave permission to be tracked like this. Sometimes, people consent to being tracked for rewards.

There are research companies where you sign up, install some monitoring software, and then get rewarded just by using your devices and answering surveys. And sometimes we use products where the terms of service includes language that permits aggregated, depersonalized data to be shared with partners. Your internet service provider knows where you go online.

And about 20 years ago, Wired ran an article about how some ISPs were selling their users’ anonymous traffic patterns to data brokers. But, Clickstream is more than that. If you installed Avast antivirus software, Avast monitored your web traffic and sold that Clickstream data.

Ad blocking extensions and VPNs know every page you visit. Some of them have terms like this, “We also provide browsing data to third parties for their own use, such as market analytics purposes.” So, if you install some of these antivirus programs, free VPNs, or ad blocking extensions, you might already be contributing to the global Clickstream data panel.

Now, here’s the question. Do people providing data to the Clickstream panel represent the typical teacher using TPT? Maybe. Maybe not. Clickstream data includes information from hundreds of millions of users, but it’s not a random sample of the internet, and it’s not a census of every person who visited your store.

It’s a biased sample of a certain kind of person who uses specific companies. The thing is, we don’t know who is part of the Clickstream panel because we don’t know which companies are selling your aggregated depersonalized web surfing history. It could be internet company A, antivirus company B, ad blocking extension C, VPN service D, or rewards browser extension E.

Do teachers use these companies? Probably some, but definitely not all. So, that’s what I mean when I say that Clickstream is a biased sample. Data brokers buy this big data, and they use AI and large mathematical models to predict the internet journeys of everyday people. Businesses then buy access to this data to make strategic decisions.

Clickstream is useful because it gives us a second opinion, but we also need to be skeptical. If your store is small, there’s a bigger chance that none of the people in the Clickstream sample visited your store through a specific traffic path. Zero doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Zero just means it wasn’t observed in the sample of people used to produce the Clickstream data.

The SEO TPT owner Clickstream Traffic Journey Report is built using the top 300 URLs for your store. So, your store URL and then the top 299 products in your store sorted by best sellers. A single store URL can be too small. There may not be enough observed traffic to see much of a pattern.

That’s why we widen the net, but we keep the net consistent for every store. When it comes to Clickstream traffic data, the goal is not to count every visit perfectly. The goal is to compare relative store traffic patterns. Clickstream provides us with a second opinion. It helps us ask better questions.

Now, let’s talk about the TPT traffic dashboard and why it doesn’t match Clickstream data. The TPT traffic dashboard is based on Google Analytics. And Google says on their help pages that missing traffic information, redirects, URL shorteners, and ad blockers can all cause traffic to get classified as direct.

So, direct doesn’t always mean this teacher typed your TPT store URL into their browser. Sometimes direct means the visit happened, but the original source wasn’t available. TPT shows us the top traffic sources sorted by click-throughs. That’s great. But because the dashboard only shows 10 sources at a time, we can get a skewed sense of what’s actually happening.

Here’s my traffic data from May 1st, 2025 to April 30th, 2026. In my store, my number one source is direct traffic with 36,263 click-throughs. Non-TPT search is only 394 click-throughs. That seems to be what TPT calls Google search.

If I look up search, I get non-TPT search, Bing DSA, which means dynamic search ads, Canadian Yahoo search, and Australian Yahoo search. Google search doesn’t get its own entry. I have over 20 pages of traffic data. So, I’d have to flip through each one to get a sense of scale. I don’t have time for that.

So, I downloaded my traffic data and used TPT seller tip 32 to visualize it. The link is in the video description. Here’s the pie chart. In my TPT traffic dashboard, I had 48,050 click-throughs. The largest source was direct with 75.5% of my TPT traffic dashboard data.

If you add up the different search entries, non-TPT search was only 410 click-throughs. That’s only 0.9%. A good chunk of my traffic, 11.8%, is coming from paid ads that I’m running. And bring your own traffic, so blog referrals, emails, and organic social media, accounts for 6.7% of click-throughs.

But then I compared this with Clickstream data. Clickstream estimated only 7.5 thousand visits in the US. Wait, what? TPT showed 48,000 click-throughs. That’s a huge difference. First of all, we don’t know if we’re comparing apples to apples here.

TPT is counting click-throughs. The SEO traffic journey is showing visits. Are they the same? Not sure. What’s a click-through? If someone searches on Google and lands on your product page, is that a click-through? And then if that teacher then clicks on a bundle in your store, the source of that second click is TPT, but the original source of the visit was Google.

So, which gets recorded here? Even if we’re comparing the same thing, Clickstream data will never match Google Analytics. That’s because Google Analytics is a first-party pixel. It fires every time someone visits the TPT website. It’s like having the door chime every time someone walks in the shop.

Clickstream data is like having someone watch the street outside the shop. They can see where the teacher buyer came from and where they go after visiting TPT. But the person isn’t watching the shop there 24/7. They’re only there a fraction of the time. Let’s say we collect Clickstream data on a Saturday evening.

The data brokers take the observed data and extrapolate what the traffic might look like for the rest of the week. This rough estimate won’t match the exact number of visits counted inside the store. Although Clickstream data will never be exact, we can still detect big trends.

For example, my Clickstream data says that direct traffic was 38.6% and non-TPT search was 40.5%. That’s a huge difference from what the TPT dashboard says, which is that direct traffic is 75.5% and non-TPT search was basically 1%. Now, Clickstream could be overestimating Google traffic, but the opposite could be true, too. TPT may be under labeling Google traffic.

My store is small, so I’m very concerned that small traffic sources might be underrepresented or missed entirely. Notice how the Clickstream data showed zero emails. TPT showed 1,962 click-throughs from email, or 4.1%, and I definitely sent emails, so this means Clickstream data didn’t observe that path in its sample. This is one of Clickstream’s blind spots.

If the person who clicked my email is not in the Clickstream panel, then Clickstream will never know about it. Clickstream also missed my paid traffic. TPT showed 5,675 click-throughs from paid social, and this makes sense because I run Facebook ads. On the other hand, Clickstream showed zero paid social.

This means, again, Clickstream did not observe that traffic path in the data sample. If you have paid traffic showing up, but you don’t run ads, it’s probably because TPT is running ads on your behalf. For example, I don’t run Google ads, but Clickstream did show 168 visits from paid search, or 2.2%, and TPT showed nine click-throughs from paid search and nine from display ads. Thanks, TPT.

The point here is that each data set has a different blind spot. Clickstream can miss the person. TPT can mislabel the path. So, the real question isn’t which tool is perfect. The real question is how are these tools different and what can we learn by comparing the gap.

At the beginning of the video, I showed you some benchmark traffic sources for TPT. How does your store compare? If you have an SEOTpreneur Clickstream Traffic Report, the first thing to do is to double-check the volume of visits on the right here. If you have under 10,000 Clickstream visits in a 12-month period, be careful.

That might be a thin sample. You might not want to make strong decisions from it. For context, the biggest stores have 100,000 plus Clickstream visits in a 12-month period. My store had under 10,000 visits and we saw how the Clickstream sample missed my email and my paid social traffic channels.

So, the report is still worth reading, but just look for the big patterns. Here’s how I think about the most common patterns. Pattern number one, high TPT traffic. Looking at the TPT benchmark, 48% of traffic comes from people going to TPT directly and using TPT search.

If your Clickstream report suggests most of your observed traffic is coming from inside TPT, it might mean your store is winning the TPT SEO game. Obviously, we always want to do better, but the question is what’s helping you rank on TPT? How often do you publish or update titles, product descriptions, covers, and thumbnails?

Which products are creating clicks, sales, and engagement? And what do those products have in common? Pattern number two, high non-TPT search traffic. The TPT benchmark tells us that 32% of people use Google or another search engine to find a product page on TPT.

If you have a higher search traffic stream, you might think twice before you change product titles because that changes the URL, which can impact your Google SEO. Which product pages are getting search traffic? Are they older, backlinked products with lots of Google juice? TPT SEO and Google SEO are not the same. It might be time to consider your Google ranking so you don’t mess it up.

Pattern number three, high bring your own traffic. The TPT benchmark tells us that 14% of people ended up on a TPT product page because we brought them to TPT. This might be referral traffic from blogs, email marketing, or social media traffic. If a good slice of traffic is coming from outside TPT, the next question is which channel?

The interesting move here is to protect and strengthen whatever outside source is already doing the work. If a few old blog posts are sending most of your outside traffic, those are the posts worth knowing about. Cover number four, high paid traffic. The TPT benchmark tells us that 6% of traffic to TPT comes from paid search, like Google Ads and paid social media, like Facebook Ads.

Paid traffic is a separate conversation. I use it with clients either to make a money making machine or to kickstart the TPT SEO snowball effect. Paid traffic brings more eyeballs, more eyeballs can lead to more conversion events, those signals can lead to a higher TPT SEO score, which means higher rank, which leads to more eyeballs, and the snowball grows.

But paid traffic doesn’t always mean profit. Best practices for Facebook Ads for TPT have changed over the years. If the competitors in your niche have a high paid traffic percentage, I wonder if we might be underestimating this traffic source. Let’s wrap this up. If we want to grow our business, we need to understand where our customers are coming from.

TPT traffic data and Clickstream data are two different ways to answer that question. TPT traffic data is nice because it’s closer to capturing every visit. The problem is that it doesn’t always label the source correctly. Clickstream data is nice because it does a better job of seeing where your traffic comes from.

The problem is that it’s based on a biased sample, so it won’t see everyone visiting your store. The truth is somewhere in between. The goal is to ask better questions about where your traffic is coming from and how that traffic can help lead to sales.

If you already have your SEOTpreneur Clickstream Traffic Journey Report and you want a second opinion, email me at [email protected]. If you don’t have a report yet, join the email community and hit reply to one of my newsletters. I only have access to Clickstream data for a limited time, so hopefully you get this message.

If you are small store, Clickstream data won’t help yet. Just focus on creating content, follow the money, and build your store. If you want to get a pie chart breakdown of your TPT traffic data, check out TPT seller tip 32. The link is in the video description.

Just remember that your non-TPT search percentage will probably be around 1 or 2% because it may not be labeled correctly in the TPT traffic data. The real Google traffic to TPT is probably closer to 32%. Make sure to subscribe because next time I’m going to show you the Clickstream traffic journeys for some of the biggest stores on TPT.

Some stores are winning by bringing their own traffic. Some stores are winning the TPT SEO game. Some stores get most of their traffic from outside search. And some stores appear to use paid traffic to get the TPT snowball rolling. See you in the next one. Bye for now.