Why is eCommerce Analytics so important?

Because technology advances quickly and buying preferences shift daily, eCommerce is always adapting, leaving firms in the dark. 

How can you expect to earn sales if every new eCommerce marketing strategy is a shot in the dark?

How can you expect to get achievements if you don’t know where you stand right now?

To be competitive, eCommerce businesses must anticipate industry shifts by utilizing trustworthy data insights. In a nutshell, they require effective eCommerce analytics.

Analytics allow you to dive deeply into facts and statistics, prior business data, and future forecasts to make the best strategic decision for your business.

In this article, we will introduce you to everything you need to know about eCommerce analytics.

Let’s dive right in!

Table Of Contents

1. What exactly is eCommerce Analytics?
2. eCommerce Analytics Varieties
3. What Is the Importance of Analytics for Your eCommerce Store?
4. 5 eCommerce Analytics Advantages
5. The Distinction Between Metrics, KPIs, Analytics, and Reporting
6. Best Practices for eCommerce Analytics
7. Conclusion

Before we get into this, let’s talk about why should you bother with analytics in the first place

Tracking Everything

All traffic may be classified into four types in the realm of web analytics. 

• Search traffic – traffic that originates straight from search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo. 
• Referral traffic – traffic that originates directly from a link on another website. 
• Campaign traffic – traffic that has been tagged by the marketer. 
• Direct traffic – defined as traffic with no identified source.

Conversion Boosters

The first step in laying a foundation for continual experimenting on your website and other aspects of your online presence is to have relevant statistics data at your fingertips. Being able to test specific copy and the general style of your eCommerce site is an essential step for a thriving company looking to increase earnings.

Statistics

You must have statistical data from all aspects of your internet marketing and sales activity. It provides you an advantage over competitors who do not, as well as indicates the areas where you need improvement.

Troubleshooting

Your resources are limited as an owner of a small-to-medium eCommerce store, thus time and burn rate are crucial success variables. You need to know which marketing activities are effective to save money and time. Another indication of this lack of knowledge is that you will lose out on earnings from profitable channels since, instead of doubling down on these channels, your budget will be split across both profitable and unprofitable channels. Knowing these things allows you to eliminate particular products or make strategic pricing changes that will result in large profits or, at the very least, limit profit damage.

Now,

What Exactly is eCommerce Analytics?

eCommerce analytics is the process of collecting data from all areas that affect your online store and using this information to spot trends and movements in consumer behavior to make informative decisions that boost online sales.

Discovery -> Acquisition -> Conversion -> Retention -> Advocacy

eCommerce Analytics – The Customer Journey

These insights take the guesswork and subjectivity out of website optimization and uncover and predict opportunities for improvement and innovation.

Read Setup Magento 2 Google Analytics: 3-Step Quick Guide.

eCommerce Analytics Varieties

When it comes to eCommerce analytics, The 5 types of metrics you must know about are

1. Acquisition

You could discover more about the types of online marketing channels that are bringing the most traffic to your website by analyzing acquisition data. You’ll also learn which channels are responsible for the most sales or conversions.

This information reveals how your customers discovered your store and arrived at your website. This data shows the marketing channels your business should focus on.

You can also observe firsthand which web marketing channels are successful and which ones aren’t.

This information will be critical in determining which marketing channels are the most profitable for your company and where you should devote your resources.

2. Behavior

This information reveals how customers react to the information on your eCommerce site. Customers’ behavior is influenced by the content they click on, the products that interest them, and the purchases they make. Customers’ spending time before completing a purchase or leaving the site could be included in the data.

How do people behave once they land on your website?

• What products do customers ultimately purchase?
• How many people leave your website right away instead of exploring it?
• What is the most popular page to visit?
• What marketing content does the audience respond to?
• Which products elicit a great deal of interest but little sales?
• How much time do your visitors spend on your site on average?

These types of questions can help you figure out how your website is currently being used, so you can figure out the typical path consumers take when engaging with your online store.

If you notice that most visitors do not scroll through your inventory or leave your page soon, you should investigate your website’s page load times.

Users who leave a page quickly suggest that they did not find what they were looking for. This could indicate that your business is now what they expected and that there is a problem with the keywords you are targeting in your marketing campaigns.

Overall, behavior analytics will assist you to identify the aspects of your store that may be improved to increase engagement and conversion rates.

3. Conversion

Conversion data refers to the point at which an online user becomes a paying customer. It should be tracked over time to see when conversion rates increase or decrease, as well as the likely causes.

There are two questions to look at when it comes to conversion analytics.

• When do online users convert into actual customers?
• How do online users convert into actual customers?

You simply cannot overlook this aspect while developing your marketing plan.

When you start digging further, you will discover a plethora of information –

• How long does it take for an average user to become a paying customer?
• Do clients typically convert once a year or several times?
• Do clients tend to buy things after just one visit to your e-store, or do they need to make multiple visits before they buy?
• Are customers likely to make repeat purchases?
• How many customers abandon their shopping carts rather than convert?

Being aware of such details might help you improve your marketing messaging and identify how to communicate with consumers and potential customers more successfully.

It’s also crucial that you understand things like the average revenue your store receives per transaction, Average number of products in your customers’ single transaction.

This information is crucial because it helps you to determine what types of discounts and special offers will appeal to your present consumer base.

4. Audience

Analytics data on your target audience gives you information on their geographic location, age, gender, and possibly their interests or product preferences.

Moreover, audience data informs you about what medium your visitors use to reach you.

Do they primarily reach your store via mobile phone or desktop? If the phone, do they prefer Android or Apple devices? 

This can provide you with valuable insights about how your online store is being accessed, allowing you to tailor your efforts accordingly.

Based on the location of their audience, audience data allows eCommerce business owners to tweak how they handle shipping options and advertise.

You’ll be able to rethink the many themes you’re covering as well as how your marketing content is displaying on different devices. This is where data about your audience’s sessions and the types of technologies they’re using might benefit.

5. Paid Advertising

Aside from the four statistics, we’ve just discussed, another important factor to examine is your paid marketing activities. This will help you in calculating the precise return on investment (ROI) for various paid marketing campaigns.

• How much revenue have you made off of your social media ads?
• Have you made more money from your advertising than you spent on developing and marketing them?
• How much money have you made as a result of your pay-per-click advertisements?
• What about your email marketing campaigns?

If you don’t evaluate your current paid marketing activities, you’ll end up wasting money on marketing strategies that don’t benefit your bottom line.

What Is the Importance of Analytics for Your eCommerce Store?

Now that you know what eCommerce analytics are, it’s time to figure out why they’re significant. Analytics are important because they allow you to make more informed choices that will improve your e-store stats. To better illustrate this, we’ll go over some of the most important eCommerce analytics benefits in a wider context.

5 eCommerce Analytics Advantages

#1. Individualize experiences by using customer data.

Understanding how customers connect with your company is critical for determining which formats, content, and channels will appeal to and resonate with your target demographics. You may utilize eCommerce data analytics to help you position your products more effectively and improve your consumers’ shopping experiences.

#2. Data-driven insights can help define your strategy.

eCommerce analytics allows you to use data analytics to inform your strategy. This will provide you with valuable insight into what is going on in your company and the industry as a whole, allowing you to identify important market trends and potential hazards that you should avoid.

#3. Optimize price, upsell, and inventory performance.

With eCommerce analytics, you will be able to have a granular understanding of what drives pricing for each consumer segment. 

You can utilize this knowledge to find the ideal price points at the product level rather than the category level, allowing you to generate the optimum revenue.

#4. Analyze data trends or patterns to make accurate forecasts.

eCommerce analytics empower you to have a deeper knowledge of how your business is currently operating and predict your performance in the future. This forecasting will inform everything from hiring and sales goals to ensuring that the correct products are available at the right time to meet the expectations of your customers.

#5. Analyze the success of your marketing and sales activities.

eCommerce companies can use data analytics to measure the success of their marketing activities, improve decision-making, achieve greater omnichannel traction, and inform holistic marketing plans.

The Distinction Between Metrics, KPIs, Analytics, and Reporting.

Many often use these names interchangeably, however they are completely distinct from one another. The secret to a successful eCommerce business is to be able to employ all four in tandem to achieve the best outcomes.

To do so, you must first grasp what each of these terms represents, so let’s have a look:

• Metrics – A metric is a measurement standard. Your bounce rate, for example, could be a measure.
• Reports – A report summarises both historical and current facts. It’s all about what happened.
• KPI – KPI is an abbreviation for key performance indicators. KPIs are used to assess levels of success by comparing actual data to projected data. This is what prompted something to happen.
• Analytics – Analytics are commonly used to forecast future performance. What can we do better?

Best Practices for eCommerce Analytics

Now that you know how valuable eCommerce analytics can be to your business, you’ll want to make sure you put it into practice properly so that your company may thrive. Don’t have a road map? WebScoot to the rescue, we’ll help you.

• Make a plan, including a wishlist, a map of requirements, and a list of business questions.
• Start with an audit to see what questions can be answered correctly.
• Utilize the tag management system approach throughout design implementation.
• Start with the most important/critical items and work your way down.
• Documentation of the business questions, including links to reports and visuals.
• TESTING is important

Let’s put it all together in further context – 

#1. Keep an eye on the shopping behavior flow on your website

You may monitor several crucial areas in this regard, including sessions with transactions, sessions with checkout, and sessions with add to cart.

If you notice a sudden decrease in flow, this suggests that there is a problem with your checkout process, and you may also be experiencing troubles with the speed of your website. As a result, analyzing and monitoring this movement is crucial.

#2. Keep track of your product categories and individual products throughout time 

Both your marketing and sales monitoring activities will benefit from granular product data analysis. You’ll be able to figure out what your greatest revenue drivers are if you track the performance of your product category and individual products over time.

This is an excellent place to start if you want to figure out which products are functioning well and which ones aren’t performing as well as you had anticipated.

You can delve deeper by looking at the sales performance of all of your products under a given category. Look for the best-performing things with the most purchases, income, and unique purchases to see what your consumers are interested in and which products could use a little more affection.

#3. Connect the dots between your customers and the numbers

Don’t fall into the trap of obtaining data simply because you feel obligated to. There must be a reason. Looking at a sheet with numbers on it will not get you anywhere. However, it is when you link these data with your clients that the magic happens.

Marketing technologies generate a large amount of data, but they were not designed for cross-channel reporting. However, if you only look at the facts in isolation, you won’t be able to see the whole picture. This will have you make poor decisions and mistakes.

As your marketing stack grows, having all of your data in one place will allow you to gain a comprehensive picture of your users’ activity and identify areas for improvement.

#4. Adjust data for seasonality and other trends

This may seem obvious, but many online companies overlook the importance of tempering their data against big industry events, trends, seasonality, or any other changes in the competition.

The key to this strategy is to make sure you’re not just focused on what’s going on in SEO right now. This is because SEO is a long game to play. As a result, if you simply focus on micro-moments in the data, you can only paint a small part of the broader picture.

#5. Bring together all of your marketing data from various platforms and channels

It can be a bit of a jumbled beginning point, as most organizations will have data dispersed across multiple mediums. However, you must gather all of your data to organize it.

You might be feeling overwhelmed. It’s entirely fine. Make a list of where you think all of your data is located.

The good news is that this data can be combined quickly and easily. You may pull data from any source right into Excel or Google Sheets by using a pre-built data connector. This process does not have to be handled manually, which makes a significant difference.

Conclusion

So there you have it: All you need to know about eCommerce analytics and why they matter so much to your business.

You can make better-informed decisions that will propel your company forward and, in turn, enhance your bottom line by utilizing data.

This is the only method to evaluate which aspects of your company are operating effectively and which need to be changed or improved. You can’t enhance anything if you don’t measure it.