For many businesses, e-commerce analytics gradually plays a key role in business success or failure. Because analyzing and understanding available data will help businesses understand past mistakes and find solutions, and discover new business opportunities. And instead of just making decisions based on feelings or judgment, with e-commerce analytics business owners will have a very intuitive and scientific basis for making better decisions.

Understanding the Significance of E-Commerce Analytics

E-commerce analytics is the process of collecting, aggregating, and using data related to e-commerce business activities to better understand consumer behavior and new consumer trends.

By analyzing data, you can gain insight into the factors that influence your business decisions. As a result, decisions are made more accurately, in addition, it also helps to increase revenue and reduce investment risk.

E-commerce analytics tells you where your users are coming from, how much time they've spent looking at a particular product, where they spend most of their time, and more! E-commerce business analysts include metrics relevant to the entire customer journey from discovery to transformation, conversion, and ultimately retention and advocacy.

Exploring the Diverse Spectrum of E-Commerce Analytics Categories

Website Traffic Analytics

• Number of Visitors: This metric measures the total number of visitors who land on your website within a given timeframe. It provides an overview of your website's reach.
• Unique Visitors: Unique visitors represent the number of distinct individuals who visit your website. It helps you understand the size of your potential customer base.
• Page Views: Page views count the number of times pages on your website are viewed. It helps gauge user engagement and popular content.
• Bounce Rates: The bounce rate measures the percentage of visitors who leave your website after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate may indicate a lack of relevance or poor user experience.

Conversion Rate Analytics

• Conversion Rate: Conversion rate is the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or filling out a form. It reflects the effectiveness of your website in driving desired outcomes.
• Funnel Analytics: Funnel analytics track the progression of users through your sales or conversion funnel. By identifying drop-off points, you can optimize the funnel to improve conversion rates.

Sales and Revenue Analytics

• Total Sales: This metric represents the overall value of sales generated by your e-commerce business within a specific period.
• Average Order Value: Average order value calculates the average amount spent by customers in each transaction. It helps assess customer spending habits and identify opportunities for upselling or cross-selling.
• Sales by Product/Category: Analyzing sales by product or category provides insights into the popularity and profitability of different product offerings. It helps you identify high-performing products and optimize your inventory and marketing strategies.
• Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): CLTV predicts the total revenue a customer is likely to generate during their lifetime as a customer. It helps you determine the long-term value of acquiring and retaining customers.

Customer Behavior Analytics

• Time on Site: Time on site measures the average duration visitors spend on your website. Longer durations may indicate higher engagement and interest in your offerings.
• Click-Through Rates (CTR): CTR measures the percentage of users who click on a specific link or call-to-action (CTA). It helps evaluate the effectiveness of your website design, content, and CTAs.
• Cart Abandonment Rates: The cart abandonment rate calculates the percentage of users who add items to their shopping cart but do not complete the purchase. Analyzing abandonment reasons can help you optimize the checkout process and reduce friction.
• Product Views: Product views indicate the number of times a specific product page is accessed. It helps you identify popular products and evaluate customer interest.

Customer Segmentation Analytics

• Demographics: Demographic segmentation involves categorizing customers based on attributes such as age, gender, location, and income. It helps tailor marketing campaigns to specific audience segments.
• Behavioral Segmentation: Behavioral segmentation divides customers based on their actions, such as purchase history, browsing behavior, or engagement with specific marketing campaigns. It enables targeted marketing strategies based on user behavior patterns.

Marketing Channel Analytics

• Click-Through Rates (CTR): CTR measures the percentage of users who click on an advertisement or promotional link. It helps assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and channels.
• Cost per Acquisition (CPA): CPA measures the cost of acquiring a new customer through a specific marketing channel. It helps evaluate the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of different marketing channels.
• Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): ROAS calculates the revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. It helps determine the profitability of your advertising campaigns.

Product Performance Analytics

• Product Views: Product views indicate the popularity and interest in specific products. Analyzing views helps you identify trending products and optimize merchandising strategies.
• Add-to-Cart Rates: Add-to-cart rates measure the percentage of users who add a specific product to their shopping cart. It reflects product appeal and purchase intent.
• Conversion Rates per Product: Conversion rates per product show the percentage of visitors who make a purchase for each product. It helps identify top-selling products and optimize product descriptions and pricing.

Customer Retention and Churn Analytics

• Repeat Purchase Rates: Repeat purchase rates measure the percentage of customers who make more than one purchase from your store. It indicates customer loyalty and the effectiveness of your retention efforts.
• Customer Churn Rates: Churn rates track the percentage of customers who stop making purchases or disengage from your brand. By identifying churn reasons, you can implement strategies to reduce customer attrition.

Mobile Commerce Analytics

• Mobile Traffic: Mobile traffic analytics track the number of users accessing your website through mobile devices. It helps you understand the significance of mobile commerce and optimize the mobile user experience.
• Mobile Conversion Rates: Mobile conversion rates measure the percentage of visitors using mobile devices who complete a desired action. Analyzing mobile conversion rates helps identify potential barriers to mobile conversions and improve mobile user experience.

A/B Testing and Experimentation Analytics

• Conversion Rates: Conversion rates are compared between different variations of a webpage, feature, or marketing campaign. This analysis helps identify the most effective variant and make data-driven decisions.
• Engagement Metrics: Engagement metrics, such as click-through rates, time on page, or form completions, are compared between variants to determine the impact of changes on user behavior and engagement.

Unveiling the Imperative Need for E-Commerce Analytics

Measuring data is not a simple task, it requires managers to spend a lot of time and money to implement. So, the question was raised, why do businesses need to do this activity? What do they get for spending so many resources? 

The basis for decision-making

You cannot operate your business based on your judgments about the market. The specific data will show you the performance of the business, market trends, and customer behavior,... From there, you will know what to do next and the ability of the business to perform. your career. Accurate decisions made based on analysis from reliable data will help you limit business risks.

Deep understanding of your customers

By using e-commerce analytics, you can better understand consumers while on your website. Information such as time on site, the actions they take, the pages they view, the products they view, and products added to the cart,... can give you a picture of your customer behavior. It is the basis for you to take follow-up business activities like recommending related products and sending cart reminder emails.

Personalize User Experience

Insights into customer behavior and preferences will allow you to better personalize the customer experience. This is also the key to helping you retain customers and increase their loyalty. You can rely on analysis of customer behavior and intent to recommend the information they need such as related products, and articles on the same topic without the need to navigate around your site

Essential Factors Under the E-Commerce Analytics Microscope

A lot of information you need to collect and analyze to serve your management activities. To make it easier, you can divide them into related groups as we divide them below.

Acquisition

• Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users who click on a specific link, to the number of total users who view an email or social media post.

• Cost per lead (CPL): the average cost of generating new business leads.

• Cost per acquisition (CPA): this metric goes one step further and measures the average cost of acquiring a customer.

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): tells you how much you spend on bringing new customers.

Behavior

• Cart abandonment rate: the percentage of users who add products to the cart but do not go to the checkout step.

• Bounce rate: the percentage of users that leave immediately after viewing only one page on the website. This low rate can be due to bad user experience (Long loading time, not user-friendly, poor web design,...)

Retention 

• Customer lifetime value (CLV): the total amount of money a customer is expected to spend with your business during their lifetime.  

• Customer churn rate: the percentage of customers your company has lost during a given period. It is the opposite of the customer retention rate.

• Customer retention rate: the percentage of existing customers who continue to engage with your brand after a given period.

• Returning customer rate refers to the number of customers who’ve made more than one purchase with you. 

Conversions

• Conversion rate: the percentage of people who perform conversion actions such as leaving information, making a purchase, etc.

• Value per visit: The average value generated from each visit. Calculated by dividing the total value by the total number of visits.

• Cost per Conversion: The cost you pay for each conversion.

Performance metrics

• Number of purchases: the number of orders completed over a period of time.

• Revenue: The total amount of money the business collects from transactions over a period of time.

• Profit: the amount of money that the business keeps after paying all expenses.

• Average Order Value (AOV): the average amount of money spent when a user buys something from your e-commerce website and other channels.

Indispensable Tools for E-Commerce Analytics Mastery

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a valuable ally in the e-commerce war for consumer money. The detailed information it provides contains a lot of information about your website, your visitors, and where they come from. All of this information can be used to find new customers and increase conversions. 

You can't bypass google analytics for your e-commerce store. It's free, easy to use, and with Google's free demo account, you can use the tool before deploying it on your website. Google Analytics also comes with a search dashboard tool, making it a great package for e-commerce entrepreneurs. Google Analytics can help you drill down into richer metrics that can be used to make decisions in marketing your business. Here’s what you can look out for: 

• Free tool

• Custom graphs and reports

• Enhanced eCommerce analytics

• Customer lifetime value

• Conversions

• Customer Personas

Why do you need Google Analytics? If you own an actual storefront, you are likely to see your customers. You can see their habits firsthand and talk to them. Without e-commerce analytics and related KPIs, websites leave you blind to a lot of the visitor and customer information you often see.

With Google Analytics, you can track all of your online traffic sources. Understanding where your website traffic is coming from is crucial in running an online business. Installing Google Analytics right from the start of a new website is essential to start collecting traffic data. Identifying the different traffic sources and understanding why and how much traffic is appearing on your website allows you to track the benefits of your strategies.

Traffic source and channel analysis reports can be accessed in Google Analytics Conversions. Combining a user's location data like city or country with traffic data helps you understand where your users are mostly coming from. 

Google Search Console

Indeed, the first step to helping people find and browse an e-commerce site is “clearly publish all the products for sale” either in-store or online or in both places because this “will help Google to index information and show it to users looking for products to buy”.

In general, “this means creating pages on the site that explain the product to sell”, or the classic PDP – Product Detail Pages or product pages – that can be improved by respecting some best practices.

So, What’s the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console? Today we have completed a lot of plans. Bottom line: Google Analytics will help you understand who is using your website, how they found it, and what they're using your site for. It's a great way to understand if your online efforts are working and what you can improve on. 

On the other hand, Google Search Console helps you check your SEO performance/rankings and the technical structure of your site. Together, they provide a whole lot of insight into what’s working well and what’s maybe not working so well, allowing you to better update and cater to your website for the best possible SEO and content creation strategy.

Google Search Console helps analyze the site’s performance: After setting the pages and verifying that they are indexed, the next step is to monitor their performance: Waisberg suggests using the Performance Report, offering some specific tips for e-commerce and, in particular, four ideas to start with for the analysis of data patterns.

• Checking on the queries bringing the most traffic to the site: Are people looking for the name of the business, specific products, or the generic type of product offered by the site? Having this information allows you to improve the content in certain areas of the site and optimize the performance in the Search for the queries we want to focus on.

• Checking the CTR of the most important product pages: It is important to keep an eye on the Click-Through Rate for the main product pages: if it is low, it means that users are not clicking on our search results, and so it may be the case to write descriptions or better titles or add structured data.

• Checking the pages that do not give product results: If a specific group of pages does not generate product results, this may be an opportunity to improve the implementation of structured data. For example, Waisberg says, “You may find that some products are not producing multimedia results, which may depend on a specific template that lacks structured data”.

• Checking the display in Search: Lastly, it is always useful to check the search appearance to understand at a glance the volume of traffic coming to the website through multimedia product results.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a tool that calls itself “all-in-one”, as it includes both analytics and gathering feedback from users. This tool is intended to help you understand what your visitors do on your website. Hotjar's highlight is that it combines, on a single platform, an array of essential analytical functions with user feedback tools. 

Before Hotjar existed, we needed different platforms to access this set of features, each adding to the cost and complexity of your optimization toolkit. Hotjar brings together different analytics, CRO and user feedback functions on a single platform (and at a fairly affordable price).

For an eCommerce business to be successful, it is imperative not to make decisions based solely on assumptions. Hotjar is an extremely valuable tool for modern online merchants and helps improve their website's clickthrough and conversion rates. With Hotjar, you can view heat maps of your website along with real-time logs of your visitors. 

Hotjar lets you:

• Find out whether your visitors are clicking your CTAs

• Analyze which content or offer is keeping them engaged

• View heatmaps and recordings

• Identify key areas of improvement

While it's nice to see that Hotjar includes form analysis as part of its platform, it doesn't provide the depth of analysis provided by specialized form analysis tools. For example, Formisimo tracks nearly 60 metrics to track form performance, while Hotjar tracks only nine metrics. For example, Hotjar reports are also not intuitive: they don't allow you to divide data by date range or view trends by week and month.

Like Hotjar's conversion funnel reports, their form analytics can give you an overview, but it's not enough to help you identify the causes of your problems and fix them as quickly as possible. You will always need a second tool to further analyze the problems you discover. 

Conversific

Conversific is a new kind of analytics tool for Shopify & WooCommerce that helps you optimize your traffic and conversion, gather better data, and grow online sales.  

When you own an e-commerce store, there's a lot of data you should use to grow your business. So you are compelled to pay someone to analyze it or worse, spend hours understanding it for yourself. (I sometimes feel there is a direct correlation between trying to understand data and being upset.)

Whether you are a global brand or just starting your e-commerce business, with Conversific you can easily understand the invaluable context of your data. 

The 4 pillars of Conversific  

• Reports - see all your important store metrics in one place; 

• Benchmarks - compare your store's performance against peers in your industry; 

• Insights - tailored recommendations based on your data; 

• Analytics - dig into product & customer insights that drive revenue growth; and much more, all while enriching user profiles.

If you want to be provided with free set-up Google Analytics and Google Search Consoles, contact us and we will set up free for you. 

CMSmart - Your trusted partner will help you with integrating analytics tools

E-commerce analytics is a key component of the digital transformation of businesses. It makes it possible to track the customer journey across omnichannel touchpoints and build a comprehensive view of what drives revenue. This insight informs better business decision-making. With e-commerce analytics, businesses can better manage all phases of inventory, from vendor management and manufacturing to pricing and delivery. It also makes it possible to detect fraud, enhance marketing, and deeply understand customer expectations. 

Discover the power of data-driven insights! With CMSmart, you can seamlessly integrate advanced analytics tools into your e-commerce website, unlocking valuable information about your customers, sales trends, and overall website performance.

Gain a deeper understanding of your customer’s behavior and preferences. Identify opportunities for growth and optimization. Make informed business decisions to drive your online store's success! Elevate your e-commerce business with CMSmart's analytics integration!

If you have any questions regarding e-commerce or about it, please contact us for a free consultation.