E-commerce analytics can be scary if you don’t know where to begin. But, once you know the basics you will be able to grow your business and measure success.

Why are e-commerce analytics important?

Understanding your analytics is very important in learning about your business. Out of all of the analytics for e-commerce, one of the most important is the user journey.

The user journey is the flow or “route” that a customer takes when they visit your site. It’s the chain of pages and links they click to get from point a to point b. By monitoring this, you can understand more about customers’ interests and how they navigate your website. You can figure out which page they started on and learn what page or information caused them to convert.

The analytics will show you what copy, content, and products resonate with consumers. It can also reveal any bugs that might be hiding in your site that you aren’t already aware of. Overall, the information will help you improve the customer experience and tailor your website to your audience. 

The most helpful analytics for e-commerce

There are many types of e-commerce analytics that are important to your business, and they aren’t limited to just your website! Here are a few that you can start focusing on:

Website analytics

Analytics on your website can help you understand things like where your traffic is coming from, how people move throughout your site, and what products they gravitate toward. Since your website is something that you have exclusive control over, this is one of the most important resources you have.

Email analytics

Email analytics let your track open and click-through rate. These statistics can help you understand what messages are working to entice customers, allowing you to further develop a strong email strategy.

Social media analytics

Social media analytics help you understand your audience and what type of content you should be posting. These insights will help you shape your social media strategy to fit your goals, and it will ultimately help you drive traffic to your website.

3 metrics that analytics can help you improve

There are many metrics you can improve when using e-commerce analytics. According to Sana Commerce, these are three of the top metrics that can have a big impact on your website.

Conversion rate

A conversion is made when a user completes the goal you want them to complete. This can refer to button clicks or email sign ups, but for many e-commerce sellers, it refers to sales. In that case, the conversion rate would be the percentage of website users that complete a sale. 

Monitoring your conversion rates and how they fluctuate will allow you to tweak your website and strategies to benefit sales.

Abandoned carts

When a customer adds items to their virtual cart and then clicks out, leaves the website, or doesn’t complete the purchase, the cart is referred to as “abandoned.”

Can you believe that the average cart abandonment rate is 70%? That is a lot of untapped sales potential for any business. Use analytics to find areas of opportunity to hopefully drive conversion and increase sales, in turn reducing your cart abandonment rate.

Return on investment

Return on investment (ROI) refers to the return or benefit your business is getting back based on the time and money spent to achieve it. For example, if a $1 advertisement click produces a $30 sale, the ROI or return on investment is $29.

Analytics can tell you the ROI of many different aspects of your business including advertisement ROI, social media ROI, and more.

E-Commerce analytics tools to try

There are a lot of different e-commerce tools out there, but these are some of the most beneficial platforms for collecting valuable data.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a great place to start when beginning to look at your analytics. It is a free tool that can help you see information about where users are coming from, what devices they are browsing on, and more.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg provides data that is easier to understand for those that are new to analytics. You can see a heat map of your site that will show where your users are spending the most time and clicking around. You can also view recordings of how users are interacting with your site which can help locate problem areas.

CRM Software

It is important to keep consumer information secure, and a CRM software will help you do that. It will also help you organize the data. This is beneficial later when sending emails or running website tests. There are many CRM platforms to choose from, such as Netsuite.

Optimizely

Optimizely is a great tool to use when you want to create A/B tests surrounding e-commerce analytics. This tool is best to use when you have a good understanding of your site’s analytics and want to improve them.

Building your e-commerce analytics strategy

To create a strong strategy you first need to make sure that your data is reliable. Try to avoid any mistakes when collecting and storing your data. Additionally, try not to let yourself get too caught up in one specific metric or test. While you work on creating your strategy, make sure you are running plenty of A/B tests to continue learning and gathering more information on what your customers enjoy interacting with.

It may take some time for you to understand the data you are collecting, but over time you will become a pro!

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Yours in success,

Sarah x