The eCommerce industry is booming, and its rapid growth makes the space more competitive than ever.
Thriving in this high-stakes environment requires making informed business decisions — which you can only do with a data-backed understanding of your company’s performance. That’s where eCommerce analytics come into play.
Of course, your data isn’t going to analyze itself. You need web analytics eCommerce tools to consolidate and unlock the power of your data to obtain meaningful insights and build your brand.
Learn more about how analytics lead to success and the best resources to optimize.
What are eCommerce analytics?
eCommerce analysis involves gathering and systematically examining information generated from online business activities. Cumulatively known as eCommerce data, the analytics to assess include:
- Site visits
- Individual consumer behavior insights
- Ad clicks
- Product views
- Product-by-product sales volume
- Category-specific sales data
- Cart abandonment rates
The efficacy of your eCommerce analytics efforts hinges on two variables: your tools’ quality and data’s completeness. You need high-quality, accurate, and diverse data to effectively peer into consumers’ minds and dissect business performance.
Types of eCommerce analytics
Typically, eCommerce analytics software offers three main categories of analytics data: acquisition, conversion, and retention. Each set offers a glimpse into a particular part of the customer journey.
Acquisition
Acquisition data focuses on your lead pipeline. You can track various types of acquisition data, such as click-through rates (CTRs) and website visits.
By compiling and analyzing acquisition data, you can determine where most of your visitors come from (paid ads, organic search, social media, etc.), which marketing assets are delivering results, and how best to structure your next advertising campaign.
Conversion
In the world of eCommerce, the primary conversion metric to monitor is purchases. You can break this down by calculating the conversion rate of each marketing channel and then combining the data to determine your cumulative conversion rate.
Retention
Retention data helps you determine how many customers are sticking around to make multiple purchases. While acquiring new business is great, loyal customers drive your brand forward. It costs less to re-engage existing customers, and they may even be willing to buy more each time.
Why should you monitor eCommerce analytics?
eCommerce metrics gauge whether your company is trending in a positive direction, but there are more nuanced benefits to collecting and analyzing this data.
More personalized experiences
Once you understand how customers interact with your brand, you can revamp marketing and sales strategies to align with their preferences. If your analytics reveal that 60% of sales traffic originates from Instagram, for instance, prioritize this channel in your next marketing campaign.
At a more granular level, analytics data reveals opportunities to present customers with personalized offers based on past purchases and behavior.
Data-driven insights
Analytics technologies take the guesswork out of running your business, such as making informed decisions regarding what sales to run, how much stock of each product to carry, and where to advertise.
Optimized pricing and inventory performance
ECommerce data analytics help you identify what’s selling and what isn’t. Using this knowledge, leverage these insights to optimize pricing and adjust inventory levels according to consumer preferences.
To maximize pricing and stock management benefits, though, you’ll need an agile inventory system that can adapt to changing demands and priorities. Fishbowl’s features help track stock flow and pinpoint necessary adjustments to your inventory strategies.
Increased understanding of trends
Consumer preferences often change without warning, but eCommerce analytics signal early warning signs of impending shifts.
Suppose your leading product’s sales declined over the past 180 days. You can use that information to adjust your sales strategy, perhaps running a sale that offsets the change in demand.
Enhanced campaign efficacy
Running a digital marketing campaign is a labor and cost-intensive process, so don’t rely on guesswork to compose content or decide where to advertise. With eCommerce analytics, distribute marketing resources and connect with consumers on their preferred channels with intention.
Potential challenges of leveraging eCommerce analytics
Despite the ample benefits, there are numerous hurdles to implementing eCommerce analytics at scale. Familiarize yourself with these barriers to better prepare for overcoming them. This knowledge helps you implement a meaningful analytics strategy that supports long-term success.
Logistics
Modern supply chains are wildly complex, making it difficult to gain accurate, real-time insights into overall performance. For instance, delayed reporting among supply chain partners or incompatibility between various systems often leads to an incomplete view of your business.
Disparate data
One of the primary barriers to gaining well-rounded analytics is data silos. A data silo occurs when information is gathered by or stored in one application but not available to other platforms or departments. Tear down these silos through software integrations to obtain a complete picture of company performance.
Security and privacy
Today’s consumers are concerned with privacy and security. To demonstrate a commitment to safety when collecting consumer data, establish a strong cybersecurity posture. If you amass customer information and suffer a breach, you could be liable for any losses your customers suffer.
6 eCommerce analytics tools
Despite the many associated challenges, compiling and analyzing data is the best way to understand your company’s performance and direction. Here are six eCommerce analytics tools that will help you put your business data to work.
1. Google Analytics
Google Analytics (GA) uses a combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to capture and analyze eCommerce data. And it’s free to use.
Among other things, GA allows you to track where your website traffic comes from, the highest performing pages, and drop-off points in the customer journey, such as shopping cart abandonment.
2. Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is extremely sophisticated and an especially great option for eCommerce brands. You can track metrics like visitor-to-purchase rates, average revenue per person, and feature usage.
Unfortunately, Kissmetrics isn’t free and can be quite costly depending on your team’s size.
3. WooCommerce Analytics
WooCommerce Analytics is free and open-source. It’s popular among WordPress website users as it easily integrates into these site types. The platform also offers several customization options, such as selecting filters and metrics most useful to your business.
4. Optimizely
Optimizely is all about personalization. It has built-in A/B testing features designed to try out multiple versions of ads or marketing content. Once you run a few iterations, you’ll know which content audiences love and which versions they’d rather not see again.
5. Hotjar
Hotjar transforms complex eCommerce data into easy-to-digest visualizations. The platform displays “hot” and “cold” spots on your site and gathers user feedback. Pinpoint weak points on your website with Hotjar and make the most of high-performing content.
6. Fishbowl
With Fishbowl, you won’t have to leave their sales management platform to tap into timely and relevant data insights. This is an all-in-one eCommerce solution that can handle everything from tracking sales to running reports and forecasting.
eCommerce analytics best practices
Once you’ve found the right analytics platform for your business, it’s time to start collecting data and generating reports. The following best practices make the most of these insights.
Gather all your data
First, make sure you’ve tracked down and collected all the relevant information. This requires gathering it from your social media channels, website, paid ad campaigns, and any other source where you interact with customers.
Look beyond the numbers
It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers once you start running reports. While insights like conversion and bounce rates matter, don’t forget the underlying purpose of eCommerce analytics: to find patterns and better understand customer needs.
Track product categories and individual goods over time
Make it a point to analyze a mixture of big-picture and granular metrics.
Let’s say the home goods category is thriving. If you only analyze this group at the category level, it looks like everything is flying off the shelves. However, when you look at individual goods, you find that two or three trendy items drive sales volume.
Since you looked at category-level and individual item data, you determined that most of the products in that category are underperforming. Apply this information to adjust stock levels and make better use of storage capacity.
Fishbowl: the best solution for eCommerce brands
Gathering analytics means you can cut through the noise and truly understand your company’s performance. But the key to making the most of your data-analysis efforts is choosing the right tool.
Enter Fishbowl Sales, an all-in-one platform loaded with inventory and sales order processing functionalities designed to make your life easier. Fishbowl offers a complete eCommerce analytics and reporting function, plus additional features like campaign automation and order management to make all facets of your business run smoothly.
Schedule a demo of Fishbowl Sales to learn more.