Imagine if you were an astronaut and your rocket is ready to launch in few minutes to reach a new planet like Earth. Your team just assumed that you would be alright during the launch- no testing, no checking, and no data calculation. They just assumed it because there was clear weather so everything would be okay.
Would you like to take off?
Believe it or not, but this is the story of today’s eCommerce businesses.
Internet is a digital universe where billions of people are searching for something every second and billions of websites are wandering to provide them what they need.
Here, your website is like a rocket that wants to reach its target destination (customer). In the current digital world, you can’t make the right decision without data. Most business owners who failed in their venture is due to making decisions based on either popular assumptions or taking risks at random experiments, and both are unable to give the perfect results.
Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner Research says “information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine.”
Real success happens when there are well-analyzed processes, trends, and concrete numbers which act as your compass in online business.
This is the power of eCommerce analytics.
If you have an online store or eCommerce website, and despite implementing many online marketing strategies, you are not getting good numbers of sales, maybe it is time to pay high attention to data.
Analytics gives you good data to understand your customer behavior and make the right decision. You can create a marketing plan without data, but you can’t have success without data. It is the undeniable fact. Top industry leaders know data can either make or break your business.
The expectations of today’s buyers are high so you have to give them strong reasons why ultimately, they should purchase from your website. You need to offer them the best online shopping experience if you wish to convert visitors into paying customers.
Here in this blog post, eSearch Logix will tell you how you can grow your online sales with the power of eCommerce analytics. By implementing these practices, you will be able to make a flawless decision and your store will witness a high growth in online sales.
Fasten your seatbelt and pay close attention for few minutes.
What is eCommerce Analytics?
eCommerce analytics is a system or tool which enables you to understand your user behavior about your online store or website. It is the process of accumulating data from all of the areas which have an impact on your store.
eCommerce analytics includes a wide range of metrics concerning the full buyer journey such as discovery, acquisition, conversion, retention, and advocacy. These analytics tells you where users come from, how much time they spent looking at a particular product, where they spend most of their time, and many more.
In short, eCommerce analytics gives you the significant numbers and insights that lead to a clear picture behind customer behavior and buyer psychology.
Why do you need eCommerce analytics?
The whole purpose of having eCommerce analytics is to track and measure the growth of your online business. Analytics are critical because they allow you to make intelligent decisions based on real-time data which shows you the right path to improve the performance of your store.
To understand why you need to track your eCommerce analytics, you should watch out these latest statistics:
- 81% of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase online.
- 58% of consumers stop purchasing products from a store because of poor customer experience.
- On average, only 1.94% of eCommerce website visits convert into a purchase.
- Younger people shop online more than older people
- mCommerce accounts for 45% of US eCommerce sales
Above statistics clearly indicates why most eCommerce businesses struggle to make new customer and increase their sales growth. They don’t know who their right target audience is and what are their real interests. To simplify, eCommerce analytics gives you power so you can:
- Measure the effectiveness of your marketing and sales campaigns
- Evaluate the trends or behavior patterns in data to forecast accurately
- Optimize pricing, up-sell, and inventory performance
- Use customer data to personalize user experience
- Upgrade your strategy with data-driven insights
Areas of eCommerce Analytics
Analytics is after all a collection of data, so it makes obvious to get lost in numbers. Data is important, but it doesn’t mean you have to care for all data. There are some specific key metrics to track and measure the growth of your online store.
These are called key performance indicators (KPIs) which help you track and analyze your sales performance over time in different areas and improve conversion rates in long run.
For eCommerce tracking, the AARRR metrics method is the best way to measure your online sales. Many business owners overcomplicate marketing and focus on all data which never gives the right results. With AARRR metrics, you have a clear roadmap of the primary 5 areas where you need to focus specifically while growing your business.
AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Revenue, Retention, Referral
- Acquisition
It is about knowing where your visitors are coming from. Most businesses see visitors coming from search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, social media channels, and paid advertising (Google ads, etc). No matter what your user acquisition strategy is, it is important to track where they are coming from and work specifically on the sources which feed your website consistent traffic.
- Activation
It is the stage when a user signs up for a product trial or for your newsletter. It means your funnel wheel is moving and they have started to take actions that lead to purchasing from your store.
- Revenue
It is pretty straightforward and the biggest sign of sales funnel success.
- Retention
Just because a visitor has bought from your store once doesn’t mean they will buy again, and this is where retention comes in.
- Referral
Customer trusts on customer more than businesses. Ads merely influence the buyer’s decision, but it is the impact of word-of-mouth that assures a person to buy anything from a particular company. That is why referral is important to know how many customers are coming from referrals.
However, there are other KPIs for eCommerce metrics which businesses also use in their growth measurement:
- Conversion rate
- Gross margin
- Average order value
- Cost per acquisition
- Cart abandonment rate
- Customer lifetime value
- Revenue on advertising spent
- Device type
- Site speed
- Customer Engagement
- Bounce rate
- Customer product reviews on your site and online
- Traffic source
- Traffic volume
- Social media engagement
- Valid email collection rate
- Blog views and shares
Essential eCommerce Analytics Tools
- Google Analytics
Google analytics gives brands the capability to have a deeper understanding of how visitors are using their eCommerce websites. Google analytics reports provide companies with rich data to help them create well-planned marketing strategies and drive eCommerce business successfully.
For this, Google offers a dedicated dashboard of enhanced eCommerce. Most eCommerce website development companies realize its importance, but few of them know how to gain the maximum value and insights from enhanced ecommerce Google analytics.
Its comprehensive analytics features give a clear picture of the performance of your website, content, and products. As this is a storehouse of complex information, you need guidance and leadership to fully set up and extract valuable insights from Google analytics. And eSearch Logix provides comprehensive Google analytics services to make the best out of the tool.
- Google Search Console
It is Google’s another tool that allows anyone with a website to see how Google views it and provides insights on how to improve organic search. Google Search Console enables you to measure your website traffic as well as performance so you can do your best in online search results.
- Buzzfyr
Buzzfyr is a social proof tool powered by eSearch Logix to empower website increase conversion rate. This is eSearch Logix’s own tool which is used by many online businesses worldwide.
Buzzfyr works on the idea of social proof which is to provide reviews and feedback that influence visitors to make a purchase quickly. This tool is equipped with powerful features which make it easy and effective to interact with customers and build trust.
Ecommerce Analytics Best Practices
Now that you have a better understanding of how beneficial eCommerce analytics, the next step is to implement the right methods to extract valuable things from the analytics report. If you follow these best practices, you will get perfect knowledge to improve your online sales and bring success to your company.
1. Create Buyer Personas from Ecommerce Analytics
If you don’t know who your customer is, your website will wander like a random rocket without a fixed target. To get the highest ROI from your marketing and money spent on PPC campaigns, the first step is to build out a laser targeted buyer persona which goes beyond demographic information such as age, gender, location, income range, etc.
Through eCommerce analytics, you can get relevant information to create a detailed buyer persona that goes deep into the psychology of your ideal customer. You can create forms, or quick buttons to get information from visitors to know about their lifestyle, concerns and common goals of exploring products.
It may sound a complex task, but top brands in the world work on acquiring such information from visitors to create useful buyer personas. When you have such features enabled to your site, you can easily get this data from your analytics report. Just like Shopify which guides its store owners on building a detailed buyer persona.
2. Collect All of Your Scattered Marketing Data
It can be a bit exhaustive task as most businesses will have data spread across various different mediums. However, you need to bring all of your data together so it can be organized. Prepare a list of places where you believe all data will be. Here are some examples you may find helpful:
- Email providers
- Google Ads
- Your BigCommerce store
- Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
- Google Analytics Enhanced eCommerce data
- Google Sheet
There are still many more places where you can store your data and consolidate it in a quick and easy manner. When you have data collected at a defined place with required columns of KPIs, filters, and other metrics, it becomes easy for marketers to directly pay attention to the important data and utilize it for better marketing plans.
2. Understand the Numbers and the Customers
Having data is good and shows you are concerned about the importance of data. But you should not feel proud if you are not able to segregate data into key figures. You have to understand the numbers through the spectacles of consumer behavior. Marketing tools give a large amount of information; however, they are not meant for cross-channel reporting.
Therefore, having all your data in one place gives you a clear picture of users’ behavior and detects key areas for improvement. Create data filters and columns to differentiate what are the most useful numbers to reach out to customers.
3. Use Customized Alerts to Take Action on Time
You have made your decision with data-driven information. It sounds good, but again, eCommerce marketing is solely about targeting consumers according to their behavior. You can’t wake up late at night and promote your seasonal offers as most people might be sleeping.
You need to know when to act because timely action is the key to success in eCommerce business. By using customized alerts when a specific campaign or marketing plan is performing well or inventory is running low, act accordingly. As a result, you will be able to double down on things that are working well and remove campaigns which aren’t bringing the desired results.
4. Automate your eCommerce dashboards
Sorting and filtering data is tough and extracting insight from data is tougher. So, it is better to automate your eCommerce analytics measurement to let your marketers focus on key functions of improving your online sales.
Instead of pulling manual reports, you can set your reports to refresh automatically while you look at data analysis and giving value to the consumers. It will empower you to create a data-driven work culture where you can reduce reporting time and focus on the analysis and insights.
5. Share Analytics for a Streamlined Communication
Transparent and streamlined communication across a company is vital for making right business decision. However, with the availability of data sharing tools, companies do have not much difficulty sharing data with team members in real-time.
Since sharing knowledge across departments is the foundation of business growth, having centralized data makes it easier to understand and share across different departments within the organization and enhances productivity in long run.
6. Track Product Categories and Individual Products over Time
Tracking your product category and individual product performance over time allows you to discover what your biggest revenue generators are. It is a great place to start with if you find out what products are performing well, and which items are not performing well as you expected.
By paying close attention to the sales performance for your products with a particular category lets you dig deeper for golden insights. Find out the top-performing items which have the highest number of purchases and revenue to determine what your customers are most interested in, and which products require a bit more love.
The Final Words: Time to Act Now
Data beats emotions. As a business owner, if you believe in making decisions based on assumptions and random experiments, you won’t get satisfactory results. Data is a big tool for improving decisions. Therefore, eCommerce analytics is necessary to dig out the golden keys that unlock the secrets to success in online sales.
People want to buy your products that is why there are searching on Google. Only you have to identify the right audience and provide them what they exactly need. And this can be done when you have assured data, figures, and relevant information that guide you to create a smart strategy.
Data has now become data science and we believe you are not an expert in this; if you were you wouldn’t have searched for this topic on Google right?
Well, eSearch Logix is a renowned eCommerce website development company in India who has empowered many business organizations and entrepreneurs in upgrading their online stores just with the power of eCommerce analytics.
If your online store is also struggling to generate leads and conversions, collaborate with us and we will enhance your sales growth by deeply analyzing your Google analytics report with additional tools.
Book a free consultation and talk to our experts now.
