eCommerce Analytics : The Complete Guide

We have divided the Complete eCommerce Analytics Guide into 6 sections :

1. Understand An eCommerce Analytics

2. eCommerce Analytics Metrics (AARRR)

3. eCommerce Analytics Reports 

4. Popular eCommerce Analytics Tools

5. eCommerce Analytics Best Practices

6. Future of An eCommerce Analytics

Bonus For Getting Successful with eCommerce Analytics,

Google Analytics Best Practices For An eCommerce Store 

This guide aims to help the "Average Joe" understand eCommerce Analytics easily and utilize standard practices to grow your business.

1. Understand An eCommerce Analytics

It is very important to understand eCommerce Analytics fundamentally so that it will open up unique opportunities to increase revenue from what currently missing out.

1.1 What is Analytics?

1.2 History of An Analytics

1.3 Analytics Terminology

1.4 Importance of an eCommerce Analytics

1.4.1 Get to Know Your Visitors Well and Enhance User Experience

1.4.2 Supply Chain Management 

1.4.3 Merchant Analytics

1.4.4 Know Your Best Content and Focus on It

1.4.5 It Helps Your Site’s SEO

1.1 What is Analytics?

Analytics is a system or tool that allows you to understand your user’s behavior. On-site, eCommerce analytics tells you where your users came from, how much time they spent looking at a particular product, where they spend most of their time, and much more! It is also known as a tool for reporting visitor metrics, identifying order trends, shaping merchandising strategies, and helping maximize the efficacy of your marketing campaigns. This means you have a comprehensive, end-to-end view of customer engagement and revenue across all of your marketing channels available in one place. By understanding your store’s performance, you will save time, resources, and money. Analytics is available in all stores, regardless of the plan. Note that Analytics will not be enabled if you have chosen to disable analytics cookies. Disabling analytics cookies will switch on Classic Analytics, which is a basic analytics suite that collects data in compliance with GDPR.

1.2 History of An Analytics

Analytics have improved at exponential rates and will likely continue to do so as we look to the future. It’s important to see how far this technology has come to place just how meaningful it has been on business growth throughout time. There are clear and direct correlations between the evolution of business analytics platforms and the booming success of industry expansion. Analytics refers to the skills, technologies, and practices for continuous iterative exploration and investigation of past business performance to gain insight and drive business plan. The use of Analytics business can be found as far back as the 19th century, when Frederick Winslow Taylor initiated time management exercises. Another example is when Henry Ford measured the speed of assembly lines. In the late 1960s, Analytics began receiving more attention as computers became decision-making support systems. With the development of big data, Data Warehouses, the Cloud, and a variety of software and hardware, Data Analytics has evolved, significantly. Data Analytics involves the research, discovery, and interpretation of patterns within data. Large business uses analytics to drive the entire organizational strategy. Some examples include:

Capital One, a credit card company in the U.S., uses analytics to differentiate customers based on credit risk and they match customer characteristics with appropriate product offerings.

Harrah’s Casino, another U.S. company, identified that against popular belief, their most profitable customers are the ones playing slots. To leverage this insight, they have created marketing programs to attract and retain their most profitable customers.

1.3 Analytics Terminology

Words used to talk about eCommerce and analytics are usually clear to those who have a long tenure in the industry, but in some cases the terminology isn’t obvious, especially considering that different words are used to refer to the same or similar things and that the industry changes quickly. To establish a better understanding of some of the core concepts, here is a list of terms found in eCommerce analytics that are closely related but indicate important distinctions.

Average Order Value (AOV): The average order value is the average value of a store's order over a given period. In other words, this is the average amount each customer has paid per order. It is derived by dividing revenue by orders.

Return Rate: The percentage of all items from orders in the period that was returned. These are returns from orders that happened in the given period, rather than only returns that happened in the period.

Cart: A cart is a place where a visitor stores the items from a merchant’s website that he or she is considering purchasing. Note: A cart is considered abandoned 30 minutes after the visitor leaves the site without purchasing the items placed in his or her cart.

Cohort: A group of subjects who have shared a particular event during a particular period.

Return Visitor: Visitors who have returned after at least 30 minutes of inactivity for another visit to the same website.

Product Revenue: The Sum sale price of a given product, minus discounts, returns, and refunds over a given period.

Referrer: A referring website is any website that links to a merchant’s website and from which a visitor arrives at a merchant’s website.

UTM: A simple code that you can attach to a custom URL to track a source, medium, and campaign name.

1.4 Importance of an eCommerce Analytics

In a physical store, you can see your customers come and go. You can talk to them face to face and help them find what they are looking for. In other words, you have direct contact with them. An online store is different. You do not see your customers. You might not even know they visited your store. However, this does not mean that there are no other ways for online sellers to know their customers and serve them better. Website analytics have been one such way through which you can get insights as to what is happening on your online store. Running your eCommerce store without analytics is just like driving a car in heavy rain without wipers. Given the constantly changing customer behavior & market dynamics, collecting all this data becomes important to make better decisions concerning the marketing strategy of your store, as well as to serve your customers better. We’ll share the major reasons why website analytics are important for your business growth.

1.4.1 Get to Know Your Visitors Well and Enhance User Experience

When it comes to making big (or small) business decisions, it’s important to ensure your decision doesn’t hurt your existing customers, but rather enhances their user experience. It’s more rewarding if it can attract more new users. So, to make a safe and informed decision, you’ll need to know your visitors first. When you know who your site visitors are by their age, gender, geographic location, interest topics, etc., you can take proper measures to enhance their user experience. Similarly, when you learn about the technology (device, operating system, and browsers) they’re using to browse your site, you can test your site’s compatibility with those technologies and make necessary improvements.

1.4.2 Supply Chain Management 

This includes managing data for products right from the warehouse to the customer. eCommerce industries use analytics extensively to manage Inventory. Also, a significant portion of the work is into optimizing transportation and pricing of delivery.

1.4.3 Merchant Analytics

Merchants from the core of the eCommerce industry. If the merchant grows, eCommerce provider also grows. So eCommerce players do extensive analysis for Merchants to get into new markets or set the right price for their goods. For instance, Amazon can recommend a Cricket Bat vendor to keep Hockey sticks because of growing demand in his locality. Such decisions would have been much more expensive for the vendor, had they not partnered with eCommerce players.

1.4.4 Know Your Best Content and Focus on It

Website analytics tools like Google Analytics show you exactly which content gets the most visits, average duration, and bounce rate for the individual pages, so you can analyze, and optimize, for better engagement. You can add more call to action (CTA) buttons, purchase links, etc. on the top pages of your site and boost your conversions. Similarly, you can update the top landing pages with the latest information or revamp their whole design and structure to make them look fresh and updated. Also, you can learn what type of content works and what doesn’t. That way, you can focus on the type of content getting more visits to boost your site engagement and gain more customers.

1.4.5 It Helps Your Site’s SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most crucial aspects in determining your business growth. The more organic traffic your business site receives, the more leads and conversions it gains. Website analytics help your site’s SEO in various ways. By knowing your visitors’ demographics and interests, you can create targeted content and get better visibility on search engines. Furthermore, you can gain some insights on backlinks by tracking your referrals. Moreover, using MonsterInsights and Google Analytics, you can connect your Analytics account with Google Search Console and track what search queries are sending you the most traffic. It provides you with the actual data of total clicks, impressions, average click-through rate (CTR), and average position.

2. eCommerce Analytics Metrics (AARRR)

AARRR known as the pirate metrics was coined by entrepreneurship guru, Dave McClure, AARR is often looked to as THE system that drives true business growth. Using the AARRR metric method is one of the best ways to grow your eCommerce business. Many people over-complicate business and focus on the wrong things. Before getting into the nitty-gritty of how you can be using web analytics, testing tactics, and segmentation and targeting initiatives to ignite growth in all layers of your eCommerce sales funnel, you first need to understand the fundamental structure and function of each layer in a sales funnel.

AARRR stands for:

2.1 Acquisition

2.2 Activation

2.3 Retention

2.4 Revenue

2.5 Referral

Let’s get into the different parts of AARRR:

2.1 Acquisition

The acquisition is basically how you attract and “acquire” visitors. These days, most of the traffic comes from search engines (Google, Bing), social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) and pay-per-click ads through advertising giants like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Whatever your acquisition strategy is, make sure you are measuring how each traffic source (channel) performs and moves through the AARRR funnel Your acquisition numbers should be the starting point to analyze which of your marketing channels are working better. Where are the big spikes coming from, where are the slow and steady streams? And at this point, low volume is not always a bad thing – we will follow acquisition sources throughout the whole AARRR funnel and low volume can often surprise you by being the most profitable.

Many people break down Acquisition into two general stages: landed and engaged. Until a visitor has completed the engaged or Activation criteria, they are stuck in the landed category.

2.2 Activation

Activation for means either signing up for the product or subscribing to a newsletter. For eCommerce, activation can be “measured” through a few key visitor activities that could be part of the activation criteria:

• Signing up several online stores still requires and encourage creating accounts with them to provide better business value to their customers.

• Subscribing for a newsletter some eCommerce offers the content first to interested parties, to create passionate customers that belong to a community with shared interests.

• Starting the checkout process. This is the key process for every eCommerce. If that could be tracked and monitored to identify abandoned carts in different status is a key indicator for identifying UX problems.

• Adding a product to their shopping cart which usually indicates a purchase intention.

• Browsing at least a few products or product categories. These should be used with special attention to not be considered as a vanity metric.

To improve activation, you can invite people to subscribe to your newsletter that includes special discounts or access to exclusive deals or content. That way, even if people abandon your online store, you can reach out to them later and remind them to get back. It is important to focus on your Activation performance long before you invest heavily into any further Acquisition, and especially before you start spending valuable developer hours on new features.

2.3 Retention - Why are your users coming back?

Retention means people regularly come back to use your product. For an eCommerce business that means someone not only buys from you once but multiple times. For an app, that means that users keep coming back and opening / using the app. For a SaaS business, that means that people who are subscribed to your software keep using it (often) and stay subscribed. The opposite of customer retention would be customer churn. It is so incredibly important to measure your customer churn rate, I cannot emphasize it enough. For one, your churn rate will tell you if you have achieved a good product/market fit. If a lot of people are dropping off your product after they start using it, then clearly something might be wrong with either your product or your messaging. Third, according to a survey, it’s 5 to 25 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. It’s also easier to sell to someone who has purchased from you before as trust between you has already been established. Therefore, it is a lot cheaper and easier to cross-/up-sell or sells again to a customer, you’ve already acquired before than to a “stranger”.

So how can you increase customer retention?

The easiest way is to keep a nice share of the mind of your customers by staying in touch. Email automation is a great method for this.

2.4 Revenue

Marketing experts can’t agree if the revenue stage should come before or after the referral one, but creating revenue for your business is undoubtedly one of the core elements you should focus on when developing a project. This phase is all about making sure that what you do online turn into a real-life stream of income. What’s important, it does not have to mean that you introduce a paid plan only policy at your SaaS startup. No matter what take you to decide on when it comes to creating revenue, make sure that you measure different income sources to find out which ones are bringing you the most value (just like you did with acquisition channels)

2.5 Referral

Once again – you have already acquired these customers. Chances are, they have friends and family that could also be interested in your products or services. You can either make it easy for them to invite somebody else to your business, incentivize them to do it, or just be amazing and making them happy. Then let the “word of mouth” do the work. Word of mouth marketing is the best performing ROI you will ever have. Referrals, particularly between 2 people who know each other, are the highest conversion rates you will get in your eCommerce and have the potential to grow your user base exponentially. Getting users into the referral stages means they not only like your product, but they think that their contacts and friends could also benefit from that value. They want to be the person responsible for the discovering that value.

3. eCommerce Analytics Reports

eCommerce Insights provide merchants the ability to drill down on information, such as what products should get top placement on your site, and which marketing channels bring you customers that spend the most over the lifetime of their relationship with your brand with minimal legwork on your part. In a few clicks, users can view information on repeat purchase rates, cohort performance, and product performance without having to sift through data, create reports, deal with Excel, or any cloud-based reporting solutions. eCommerce Insights is available for merchants to add on separately in addition to the reports that come with their plan.

3.1 Product Report

3.2 Marketing Report

3.3 Customer Report

 

3.1 Product Report

This report allows you to see how much revenue was generated from an individual product, how many unique purchases occurred, the quantity sold, and average price. On top of that, it also lets you map shopper engagement for a particular product. Being able to see this information allows you to, for example, determine which products with a low price point are selling in higher quantities, and give you the insight you need to bundle them with more expensive items. It allows you to see what products users are more likely to purchase after looking at the product details. From this, you can gain insight into your eCommerce product page design.

Why do companies use Product Reports?

Product analytics allow companies to fully understand how users engage with what they build. It is especially useful for technology products where teams can track users’ digital footprints step-by-step to see what they like or dislike and what leads them to engage, return, or churn. Analytics is a critical piece of modern product management because most apps and websites aren’t designed to run detailed reports on themselves. Without  reports, the data they collect is often inconsistent and improperly formatted (known as unstructured data). Products report  makes that data useful again by integrating all data sources into one single organized view.

Why is product report important?

Products report shows  companies what their users really do, not just what they say they do. These are known as revealed behaviors and they’re highly telling. Users aren’t very adept at predicting their own futures (consider any given new year’s resolution) and having reports  allows product teams to dig deeper than human-error prone surveys and user interviews. Hyper-detailed data leads to more profitable decisions. 

3.2 Marketing Report

The marketing report is geared around showing you how your visitors are finding your store. This can help you gauge the effectiveness of a marketing campaign or find a new avenue for advertising. Understanding how each visit origin contributes to total sales is important when deciding where to send your marketing dollars. Monitor how each visit origin is trending to measure the impact of any changes in your marketing actions and how it affects your avenue. The trends from these metrics can also help you predict future behavior.

Companies use product analytics to analyze their users and to improve their customer experiences. Analytics makes tracking users easy because it automates the collection and management of data. Product leaders, designers, and developers use this data to guide their decisions and studies show that companies who rely on product analytics are far more profitable than their peers

Why marketing analytics is important;

Over the years, as businesses expanded into new marketing categories, new technologies were adopted to support them. Because each new technology was typically deployed in isolation, the result was a hodgepodge of disconnected data environments. Consequently, marketers often make decisions based on data from individual channels (digital marketing and website metrics, for example), not taking into account the entire marketing picture. Social media data alone is not enough. Web analytics data alone is not enough. And tools that look at just a snapshot in time for a single channel are woefully inadequate. Marketing analytics, by contrast, consider all marketing efforts across all channels over a span of time – which is essential for sound decision making and effective, efficient program execution.

What you can do with marketing reports;

With marketing report, you can answer questions like these:

• How are our marketing initiatives performing today? How about in the long run? What can we do to improve them?

• How do our marketing activities compare with our competitors’? Where are they spending their time and money? Are they using channels that we aren’t using?

• What should we do next? Are our marketing resources properly allocated? Are we devoting time and money to the right channels? How should we prioritize our investments for next year?

3.3 Customer Report

Customer report is the study of customer behavior, such as buying habits and experience data, that yields insights to help make key business decisions. It involves techniques including predictive modeling, data visualization, and information management. Insights from customer analytics can inform marketing, promotion, pricing, and customer experience management. Customer report is an  information collected of customer behavior that is going to help business to make key decision through predictive analytics and market segmentation. Customer report enable organization by providing them with efficient information about customers behavior when interacting with their organization, so organization can respond accordingly. The key driver of customer report includes rising competition between businesses and growing demand for improved customer satisfaction in fueling the customers analytics market growth. The Customers report helps you better understand and analyze customer behavior. This report will show you where your customers are coming from, the percentage of new versus returning customers, their total spend and when they last placed an order. You'll also have access to individual customer profiles that details every order a customer has placed, and every product they've purchased. This information will help you build effective customer loyalty programs and create tailored marketing campaigns based on customer history so you can tap your existing customers rather than constantly trying to acquire new shoppers. Companies that use customer analytics comprehensively report outstripping their competition in terms of profit almost twice as often as companies that do not.  To see these returns, companies must learn how to use customer report analytics.

Why is Customer Report Important?

• Due to the rising demand for improved customer satisfaction, the market study is growing faster. Customer report is highly used in the retail industry for the development of personalized communications and marketing programs. This may help to enhance customer experience and loyalty, by knowing precisely which buyers are buying which products, and personalizing marketing based on shopper data

• Currently, in the retail market, consumers not only appreciate, but also expect a personalized omnichannel experience. Due to this, many retailers are leveraging technologies, such as customer report, to gain a more in-depth understanding of a consumer’s wants and needs.

• As the growth of the retail sale is increasing, customer report is highly used in the retail industry for the development of personalized communications and marketing programs. It also helps to enhance customer experience and loyalty, by knowing precisely which buyers are buying which products, and personalizing marketing based on shopper data. 

4. Popular eCommerce Analytics Tools

As the eCommerce industry continues to grow bigger, businesses are leveraging the use of analytics and real-time big data to enhance their decision-making, improve overall customer experience, and provide the right recommendations to customers according to predictive algorithms. Analytics remains to be one of the top tools of the trade for eCommerce companies  rely on. It’s unsurprising why running your business without analytics is like driving your car with your eyes closed. This is crucial as 60% of consumers are going online more often to purchase and look for products and services according to a survey. By leveraging these analytical tools on your eCommerce site, you will be able to get a behind the scenes look at your business. You can use the information gathered by your analytical tools to enhance your customers’ buying experience and tailor recommendations to your audience.

There isn’t much these analytical tools can’t do! Some of these analytical tools even track the mouse movements of your site’s visitors, providing powerful insight into your site design’s performance. With today’s merchants facing the challenge of building a website that matches the current consumer standards, eCommerce analytics software is vital to understand, analyze, and act upon data. Analytics is a key part of growing eCommerce. Analytics is everything. It is useful for anything: from optimizing the copy of your CTA to determining the quality of traffic that reaches your website. Therefore, any marketing professional should be guided by numbers. While I would recommend analytics tools to be the first tool any website owner should install on their site, certain features make them an absolute must on eCommerce sites. In this article, we have selected the ones that are the best analytical tools for eCommerce.

4.1 Google Analytics

4.2 Yotpo

4.3 Metrilo

4.4 Crazy Egg

4.5 Kissmetrics

4.6 Adobe Marketing Cloud

4.7 Woopra

4.8 Clicky

 

4.1 Google Analytics

One couldn’t possibly leave Google Analytics off of this list! Perhaps one of the most popular analytical tools available, Google Analytics offers detailed reports that provide valuable insight into your website and its visitors. Everything is organized and presented in a visually pleasing way to your dashboard. Whether you need simple metrics or complex, detailed reports, you can’t go wrong with Google Analytics. The best part of using Google Analytics is that there are plenty of resources and tutorials that can help you learn how to use it. It’s eCommerce essential that any digital entrepreneur should be using. Google Analytics can tell you so much more than how many visitors are checking out your site on a day-to-day basis. Representing one of the best eCommerce analytics out there, Google analytics and its enhanced eCommerce capabilities can help merchants close the loop for new and returning customers alike

4.2 Yotpo

Yotpo helps you transform your customer feedback into actionable insights   to improve how you make business decisions. As a user-generated content marketing platform, this solution allows you to maximize what your customers are saying about your brand and products. This is vital for your eCommerce business to analyze feedback at a scale and act intelligently from those insights. Extract customer data by breaking down customer feedback using sentiment analysis and natural language processing It provides you with data-driven information to make smart business decisions. Yotpo enables you to measure your business performance over time, look for opportunities where you can improve your workflow and customer experience, and determine how you can stack up with industry benchmarks. Since it integrates with popular eCommerce platforms, you can easily maximize your user-generated content

Here are reasons to choose yotpo

i. Trend Monitoring: By tracking consumer preference and business performance, you can easily identify changes and trends to leverage your eCommerce strategies.

ii. Customer-Feedback Breakdown: Figure out which factors and how they affect the customer experience. By this feature, you can drill down your customer feedback through various factors such as product, period, and location.

iii. eCommerce Platform Integration: The tool integrates with popular eCommerce platforms and apps such as Shopify, Magento. This lets you generate more value of your user-generated content from the system.

4.3 Metrilo

Another one of the best eCommerce analytics tools is Metrilo. Metrilo can track orders in real-time, keeping your revenue reports up-to-date and extremely accurate. It allows you to compare the results of campaigns and provides deep insight into the customer retention material is an actionable analytics platform that comes with not only analytics but an integrated CRM and automated email marketing systems. This allows you to look at reports, and act upon them straight away.

The tool also comes with a Retention analysis, which can help you understand your customer lifecycle and it can also help you send out marketing material at the right time and can help you turn one time buyers into loyal- a feature that's rare in usual analytics solutions. In short, Metrilo gives you eCommerce analytics that will help you fine-tune your marketing activities and boost sales. Also, Metrilo integrates well with WooCommerce, Magento, and Shopify and syncs historical data, which means once you integrate, it would feel just like you’ve had Metrilo all along

4.4 Crazy Egg

This user-friendly software specializes in Heatmaps. This feature allows you to see what parts of your website are getting lots of attention and what parts are being overlooked. Crazy egg keeps its dashboards simple and easy to read, so you can study your data without getting overwhelmed. This software records the mouse movements of site visitors to provide you with real-time behavior analytics. It’s a great tool to use to see how well your site’s design is performed. Crazy Egg also offers scroll maps and A/B testing to help you visualize and experiment like never before. Crazy Egg is so simple to use that it is being implemented on non-eCommerce sites too. It’s a nifty tool that makes tracking customer moves easy.

4.5 Kissmetrics

This is one of the most detailed analytics tools available. It tells you exactly what actions visitors are taking on your eCommerce site and which products they are looking at. By collecting such detailed and comprehensive data, you will be able to drastically improve your email marketing campaigns and glean more engagement on your Facebook ads. It’s a great choice for companies with the need to track people and enough budget for that. It also does a great job of finding the leaks in the funnels, so if your customers for some reasons don’t convert into buyers, this tool may help find out the reason. With KISSmetrics, you can easily monitor customer behaviors and the impact of your campaigns. KISSmetrics is a must-have analytical tool for any eCommerce entrepreneur who wants to get to know their customers on a deeper level. This tool provides you with robust analytics on what your customers are doing on your website and which products they are interacting with. These insights can help you deliver behavior-based engagement to acquire, keep, and grow your customers. The tool uses deep insights to get to know your customers to improve engagement through targeted Facebook and email campaigns. With a tool that’s powered by data-driven insights, you get a solution that can help you drive sales.

4.6 Adobe Marketing Cloud

Adobe marketing cloud is an integrated digital marketing solution that you can use to dig deep insights about your customers. Its analytics features give you the information and ability to improve customer experience across all your channels. Adobe Marketing Cloud digs deeper than just site visits and clicks. While it takes advanced knowledge to get it up and running, this integrated software offers predictive data and tailored customer experience. It’s truly intelligent marketing software that can improve customer satisfaction across the board. When it comes to your eCommerce business, this product lets you get to know your customers beyond collecting clicks and visits. Instead, it utilizes customer intelligence through audience enrichment, prediction, cross-channel analysis, and segmentation to extract actionable insights. This solution acts as the core intelligence engine in running your business. All its functionalities operate in real-time. This includes giving you an objective view of your customer’s entire journey and making analytics accessible and understandable to every member of your organization

4.7 Woopra

In eCommerce, there’s nothing worse than an abandoned order. Maybe you made your visitors have to deal with too many obstacles. Maybe there was something about your prices that downgraded a potential buyer. Either way, cart abandonment is an evil that affects all eCommerce professionals. The average abandonment rate is around 70%. That’s why solutions like Woopra have emerged specifically to combat the plague of abandonment of shopping carts. Woopra’s analyses emphasize the concept of “shopping success,” focusing on drop points as well as the time it takes customers to buy. By looking at the basic abandonment rate in specific actions such as adding shipping or payment, it is very clear which aspects of your funnel require attention.

The platform also generates individual profiles that allow you to know your most valuable customers and how they interact exactly with your store or sales team.

4.8 Clicky

Clicky is a real-time web analytics platform you can use for your eCommerce site gain insights into monitoring, analyzing, and reacting to your traffic in a data-driven way. The on-site analytics solution shows you the number of visitors who are on your site and the current page you’re viewing. It also lets you launch Heatmaps according to page, segment, or visitor without requiring to leave the site. The real-time report contains comprehensive information for each segment that shows you every individual visitor, event, and page view. It also has bot detection and blocking tool to ensure only real activities are recorded. With clicky, your website’s uptime is monitored from 7 locations around the world to ensure you cover as much base as possible. It sends you alerts when your site is down to react swiftly.

5. eCommerce Analytics Best Practices

Analytics best practices enable your users with guidelines, standards, and processes for the discovery, interpretation, and presentation of data. In addition to the common best practices listed here, consider what additional organization-specific practices you will layer on top to enable your users with repeatable processes that will evolve into analytical capabilities Research shows that eCommerce websites using analytics for decision making are 6% more profitable than those that don’t. Companies understand the value of analytics, they want to be predictive and proactive, and are pushing the envelope in terms of analytics and the platforms to support analysis. Analytics might move your organization from visualization to big data visualization; from slicing and dicing data to predictive analytics; or to using more than just structured data for analysis.

5.1 Start with a proof of concept.

5.2 Good insights get lost in poor visualizations

5.3 Utilize disparate data.

5.4 Take training seriously

5.4 Take training seriously

5.5 Put controls in place

5.6 Act on your data

 

5.1 Start with a proof of concept.

Companies succeeding with predictive analytics often start with a metric they’re already measuring, so they can demonstrate that they can predict that metric they know it's valuable and will get attention.

5.2 Good insights get lost in poor visualizations

Today there are a variety of excellent visualization tools available to help you showcase your insights. However, you need to choose your visualization tools carefully and ensure that the tool you have, gives the stories you weaved, a wow factor. There is no better way to convince management of the viability of your insights, than with an impacting, powerful visual.

5.3 Utilize disparate data.

Although structured data and demographic data are the mainstay of analysts and modelers, disparate data types can enrich a dataset and provide lift to models. Think about incorporating data beyond the traditional types you might have in your data warehouse or on your servers. Good starting points include data and text.

5.4 Take training seriously

The democratization of analytics is moving ahead. However, you need to think about the skills you’ll require for data management, as well as the skills to build your models and deal with your data. With statisticians in short supply, think about what skills you’ll need for the kinds of models you want to build. Part of the process is balancing the costs and benefits of the models you're considering. Allocate your resources wisely. Training will become an important part of your next-generation strategy.

5.5 Put controls in place

Democratization means that business analysts will try to use more advanced technology. Make sure controls are in place before a model is put into production. This might include confirming the validity of a model.

5.6 Act on your data

Analytics without action won’t yield measurable impact. Even if you aren’t ready to operationalize your analysis, it makes sense to start implementing a process to take action, even if it's manual action. You’ll be building a more analytically-driven culture for when you want to build more operational intelligence.

6. Future of An eCommerce Analytics

The eCommerce market is set to encounter exponential growth by the year 2021. Analytics have contributed immensely to enable eCommerce websites to attract a large customer base. Price comparisons and recommendation engines are a result of data analytics and have improved sales and revenue in the eCommerce world. Like many of the industries reaping the benefits of analytics, eCommerce industry seems to be benefiting the most due to the Volume and footprint of data each customer is provided with each transaction. Even though many of these companies can handle Terabytes of data, but processing the huge volumes of data is still a challenge for these companies. Let's take a look at some future trends of eCommerce analytics.

6.1 Enhanced Shopping Pattern Analysis

6.2 Effective Customer Service

6.3 Predict Future Operations Plans

6.4 Mobile Commerce Improvement

6.5 Customer Analysis Improvement

 

6.1 Enhanced Shopping Pattern Analysis: Analytics is a great way of understanding customer’s shopping behavior to predict patterns that will help make better business strategies. Customer’s preferences, most popular brands or product that people seek, any product that people are seeing multiple times, but is not offered by you, spikes in demands, what time of the year does  customers shop more, so on and so forth can be accessed through big data analytics.

6.2 Effective Customer Service: The success of any eCommerce business depends on effective customer service. As per a survey conducted by Deloitte, 72% of companies believe they can use analytics reports to improve the customer experience. Analytics will, therefore, help in identifying major issues and resolving them and enhancing their processes so that customers enjoy doing transactions online Businesses then will experience the customer delight which will be a big boon to their growth.

6.3 Predict Future Operations Plans: Analytics gives you greater depth in understanding the overall operations of your business. Using data for eCommerce helps you manage, inventory, supply chain, forecasting demands, better pricing strategies, and sales strategies. eCommerce will have the added advantage of flexibility in deciding the best ways of operational efficiency across various channels. There may be a scope to learn in this area through various eCommerce case studies too.

6.4 Mobile Commerce Improvement: The increase of Smartphone usage in modern society is simply put enormous. Recent research shows that PCs are a dying breed. Laptops, notepads and mobile phones are the future. Mobile technology is providing analytics with multiple sources for information gathering, and it makes it easier to see what is trending in today's society. Always a pioneer, Google is giving a clear advantage to websites which allow users access on their mobiles. The brands that do not provide mobile-friendly websites are about to see a big decrease in their sales due to low traffic on their domains.

6.5 Customer Analysis Improvement: When you can understand how customers think and what they like, you can sell them your products easier. Analytics allows eCommerce owners to better understand their customers’ desires, which products are trending online, how to make their products more popular and increase sales on their websites. With this knowledge, you can cater to the shopper's needs and be ahead of your competition. Social media has become a large factor in our modern lives. It not only affects the social aspects of human life, but it also impacts the business. Not only business owners can use it for marketing, but it can also be used for analysis and sales improvement purposes. 

7. Google Analytics Best Practices For An eCommerce Store 

Google Analytics is an amazing tool that helps SEOs, Marketers, Business Owners and companies as a whole understand how people are interacting with a website. This free tool tracks users from when they first visit a site through their exit, it can even tell if the user comes back. It is a must for any website and can help in targeting online and offline strategies. With all that data to gather, perhaps one of the most effective tools in the industry of data analytics is Google’s very own Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a great tool that can give you the data you need to optimize your eCommerce strategy, and its features are yet to be explored by those who truly value data available at their fingertips. Here are tips you can use to optimize your efforts and strategies within your eCommerce site:

7.1 Block Out Referral Spam

7.2 Install eCommerce Tracking to Unlock eCommerce Conversions

7.3 Observe Audience Demographics and Interests

7.4 Analyze Multi-Channel Funnels

 

7.1 Block Out Referral Spam

Recently, we have seen a tremendous increase in referral spam, also known as ghost traffic or spam crawlers. Carlos Escalera has explained how spam crawlers terrorize and fool your Analytics, and he did suggest a workaround on how to stop those ghosts from spamming your data. However, I suggest a different method, a stress-free tool called Referrer Spam Blocker developed by Stijlbreuk, a digital agency from the Netherlands. You simply have to log into your Google Analytics account, visit their site, follow the instructions on the site, and voila! Just sit back and relax as it automatically filters all the spam. You can also import their segment that filters these spam from your historical data. Why do you need to block referral spam? Blocking these spam data can clean your Analytics and you can determine if a campaign is truly working or not. Referral spam only adds to your bounce rate, so if you’re experiencing a high bound rate these past few months, you should start installing filters on your Master View to filter spam in the future.

7.2 Install eCommerce Tracking to Unlock eCommerce Conversions

Installing eCommerce tracking is more complicated than your paste before the head tag, but it will reap benefits that can help you dig deeper with Google Analytics. We recommend that you get this done by a trusted web developer. Moreover, you can use Google Tag Manager to make it easier for you to implement eCommerce Tracking.

7.3 Observe Audience Demographics and Interests

Know your audience better with demographic and interest data. This way, you know what age group, gender, and interest category to target. This can be a guide in coming up with promotions, content marketing, and more. This website is an eCommerce site for plastic travel cases; judging from the data above, the majority of buyers are male adults in their 25 to 34 years of age. Most of them are Technophiles or Automotive enthusiasts, with more emphasis on TV and Video. We can focus more on producing content that matches the interests of the audience to capture their attention, whether they may be new users or returning customers.

7.4 Analyze Multi-Channel Funnels

We all know that a customer will come from different channels, and there will be times that conversions will be assisted channel per channel. Looking at the Multi-Channel Funnel Overview will give you an idea of where most of your conversions are happening. You can now target the channels that work best for your client.