An eCommerce dashboard helps you track live sales data, alongside demographics and other statistical information, in order to improve metrics reporting, drive sales and increase bottom-line revenue.

 How To Build An Ecommerce Dashboard For Your Business

It’s important to have access to useful and actionable data to optimize the performance of your eCommerce store - Ecommerce Dashboard

1. What’s This Dashboard For?

First of all, we need to understand what an eCommerce dashboard is?

An eCommerce dashboard is a hub for important business and performance data, allowing you to get an overview of your business and drill down into your most important data.

At a glance, the dashboard can show you everything you need to know about your online store, including: 

  • How much traffic you’re getting (and where it’s coming from).
  • Your revenue and sales figures.
  • Your most valuable traffic sources.

Some example templates: 

 PREMIUM MAGENTO ADMIN PANEL

WORDPRESS FRONTEND ADMIN DASHBOARD

WEB2PRINT ADMIN MANAGEMENT DASHBOARD

ECOMMERCE ADMIN PANEL

Here’s an example dashboard:

 example dashboard

So, what’s this dashboard for?

This dashboard gives your eCommerce team an explicit overview of key financial and website KPIs. It allows you to track and analyze the core elements of your eCommerce businesses in real-time on a daily basis. And this means you'll always be on the lookout for the performance of your online store, without missing out on the key events of the customer journey and shopping experience.

  • Eliminate data silos by connecting your eCommerce platform, advertising channels, web analytics, fulfillment, loyalty, customer support, and more in one place for more holistic eCommerce statistics.
  • Instantly get an entire view of performance, with pre-built dashboards for eCommerce KPIs, marketing channels, customers, products, orders, inventory, and subscriptions
  • Drive customer acquisition and develop smart marketing strategies with powerful attribution, profitability, and lifelong value reporting for Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, email, and more
  • Build brand loyalty and increase customer retention with customer segmentation and merchandise recommendations
  • Ecommerce dashboards built specifically for subscription businesses assist you to track recurring revenue, grow subscribers, and reduce churn

A marketing dashboard

For further information, a marketing dashboard is a report that presents data on key performance indicators (KPIs) through a series of visualizations — bar graphs, pie charts, scatter plots, etc. That way, nontechnical users like your CMO - Chief Marketing Officer or clients can easily understand what the data is saying and use it to make decisions.

What kind of data? Essentially any kind you choose: digital, search, social, TV, radio, print, OOH, display, email, web, and beyond. And you can use them to track engagement, awareness, conversions, sales and all your other essential marketing metrics.

It’s called a “dashboard” because, like the one you have in your car, you can use it to observe your organization’s marketing performance in near real-time. And that gives you the power to make in-the-moment course corrections as necessary. (Ideally, data is updated regularly — usually daily, if possible.)

A good marketing dashboard will use blended data. It will bring together data from multiple sources and combine it all in a way that gives you a holistic view of performance at the campaign or channel level. For example, instead of only showing individual results for Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, and Twitter, your dashboard might also display results for them all under the umbrella of “organic social.”

You can also build your dashboard to show how your performance stacks up against your goals or your past results, giving you useful context when making business decisions. Dashboards make data human-friendly.

2. What To Include In An Ecommerce Dashboard

To build a successful eCommerce business, you should understand what’s going on day today. Understanding what's going on will help you make the best decisions possible for your business.

Ultimately, what you include in your eCommerce dashboard depends on your business goals and what you want to achieve with the data. But as a starting point, it's better to pay attention to these two areas:

  • Traffic sources: Traffic is essential for any eCommerce business. By monitoring your traffic sources, you can see which channels bring in the most traffic and revenue. If traffic from Facebook converts higher than any other channel, consider a strategy to help you generate as much Facebook traffic as possible.
  • Revenue: This is obvious, but there are many ways you can use revenue data in your dashboard. You can include overall revenue to give a snapshot of your business, or you can break down revenue by channel, product, and more.

3. Why Should I Start Using An Ecommerce Marketing Dashboard?

Why Should I Start Using An Ecommerce Marketing Dashboard?

Your company leadership, your customers - they are all smart enough to open a spreadsheet and if they have enough time and enough caffeine, capture what the data is saying. But why make them suffer when you have a better option to offer?

The roles of the eCommerce Marketing Dashboard will answer that question!

Overall, the dashboard makes it so much easier to comprehend what’s happening with your marketing, makes data simpler to understand, and enables speedier decision-making.

 

Marketing dashboard for web analytics gives users a simple, but in-depth view of essential KPIs.

Faster, More Scalable Reporting

Regular reporting on marketing activity is a fact of life, especially for many agencies. You must show your customers or internal stakeholders how their investment in your service is doing.

Dashboards are a more visually appealing way to communicate that information to customers than spreadsheets or PowerPoints, which are often not as interactive or nearly as flexible as dashboards. And when the dashboard is up and running, it automatically updates with new data as it becomes available - something PowerPoint can't do. You don't have to spend the last few days of each month racing to build reports. And it gives your end users more power to make precise minute-by-minute decisions about ad budgets.

The dashboard is also more extensible. Once you've built your basic dashboard, you can quickly duplicate it and, with a few tweaks, use it for other audiences. This is a particularly useful point for advertising agencies with dozens or hundreds of clients. Or for a franchise that handles marketing and communications for its vast network of franchise partners.

Advanced Insight

You don't have to stop with your monthly dashboard. You can also create more advanced dashboards designed to solve specific business problems.

For example, maybe you want to build a dashboard with a built-in calculator to determine where, when, and how much to spend on ads. That calculator - based on your historical performance data - can give you a better idea of what results your spending will generate, based on what happened in previous years.

Increased Accountability

Marketers face growing calls for accountability. Checkers want to make sure that the budget is contributing to the overall success of the business.

For brands, a good dashboard shows the value of your marketing and makes it easy to determine next year's budget. This can also give your marketing team a greater say in your organization's overall business strategy, if your insights lead the company to develop new products or pursue new audiences.

For agencies, your dashboard will do a better job of showing the ROI you're generating for customers or stakeholders. That will give you a stronger argument for retaining those customers. And you can (and should) charge for more complex dashboards.

4. What Should You Be Tracking On Your Ecommerce Marketing Dashboard

 

What should you be tracking on your eCommerce Marketing Dashboard

There are lots of metrics in Ecommerce statistics, some of them are very important which you need to track as follows:

Total traffic

Revenue comes from customers and customers are the result of traffic to your website. You as well as anyone know that not all traffic sources are equally valuable. And not everyone is ready to buy.

However, every person you come into contact with is a potential customer. That's why total traffic is a great key metric to gauge eCommerce's long-term success.

Do you know 12 Quick SEO Tips To Increase Organic Traffic?

Traffic sources

To better understand your marketing efforts, you'll need to add an additional table to your report where you break down traffic into different traffic sources. It's actually both a traffic source and a traffic channel.

Because when you evaluate your SEO team and PPC team you cannot just track traffic from Google, Bing, and so on. You will need to know how much traffic is from the channels organic search (SEO) and paid search (PPC).

If you put resources into big and expensive campaigns you could also create a table with the top 5 or 10 campaigns.

If you want to grow SEO for your printing website, you don't ignore this some tips: Best SEO Keyword Tips For Your T-Shirt Brand

Number of top organic keywords

For most eCommerce businesses, the best source of traffic is organic search from Google. At least this is the case with my online business.

Hence, I recommended tracking the number of top organic keywords in the top 3, top 5, or top 10 search results on Google. It's a great way to gauge your search engine optimization (SEO) activities. An even better metric, if your rank-tracking provider offers it, is voice-impression share, or the total visibility of all your keywords.

Customer acquisition cost for paid traffic

You should measure the customer acquisition cost for your paid traffic such as Google Ads and Facebook Ads.

The CAC (customer acquisition cost) is calculated like this:

The total cost of paid traffic / total sales from paid traffic = CAC

If your only paid traffic is from Google Ads, you'll find the total cost in Google Analytics (as long as your Analytics account is linked to your Ads account). If you get paid traffic from Facebook Ads or others, you will have to add those costs.

Total revenue from paid traffic is also found in Google Analytics with eCommerce tracking set up. The cost of customer acquisition should always be less than the lifetime value of the customer.

Revenue by traffic source

Revenue by traffic source shows you how much income is coming from each channel, such as social, paid search, organic search, or email. Use Google Analytics eCommerce tracking to see revenue breakdown from all traffic sources in one location.

Tracking revenue by traffic source shows you where to concentrate your resources. “Channels that generate high income should be targeted for growth. For example, a seller might double down on Facebook ads if they see that social networks are a high-conversion, high revenue channel,” comments Michael Ugino, co-founder and CMO of Sellbrite.

Tip for you: Good marketing doesn't mean advertising through as many sources as possible. Focus your energy and resources on the channels that offer the highest return on investment.

Conversion rate

The conversion rate tells you the percentage of people who make a purchase after visiting your website or the product page.

You can track conversion rates for your entire store, or you can break it down and look at conversions for specific pages or sections of the user journey. For example, you can look at conversion rates for each step in an ad campaign, as well as conversions for the entire campaign.

This is one of the top five metrics Peter Morrell, growth marketing at WizardPins, keeps track of. “Small increases in our conversion rates can lead to large increases in monthly or yearly revenue,” says Morrell.

Conversion rate is an important metric for e-commerce companies of all sizes. For example, beauty brands Chella and Molton Brown and clothing brands Tuckernuck both monitor it regularly. Tools like Google Analytics can help you track how many of your website visitors become paying customers.

Tip: Track conversion rates from different sources separately to see where you might need improvement. Compare website conversion rates against paid social, organic and other channels. Once you know which channels have the lowest conversion rates, you can focus on optimizing them.

5. Creating Your Own Ecommerce Dashboard In Google Analytics

Creating Your Own Ecommerce Dashboard In Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the most commonly used eCommerce analytics tools. This is because it is relatively easy to use and accessible to beginners as well as advanced users. If you're using Google Analytics to track your metrics, we'll show you how to set up your eCommerce analytics dashboard.

Step 1: Create New Dashboard

The first step is to create a new dashboard through Google Analytics. Make sure you are signed in to your Google Analytics account so it will be automatically saved and easily accessible when you sign in.

PRO TIP: To make these changes, you need Collaborate, Edit, or Manage User's permission.

On the left menu, click “Customize” and then “Dashboard”. This will bring up your Dashboard menu, which lists all the dashboards for you and allows customization. To create a new dashboard, click “Create”.

 ecommerce dahsboard

Next, we’ll choose how we want the dashboard to look when started, choosing between Blank Canvas (which comes with no widgets selected) or a Starter Dashboard (which comes with a default widget set). Dashboard templates can also be used by clicking “Import from Gallery.”

 ecommerce dashboard

Make a selection, name your dashboard, and then click “Create Dashboard.”

View more: Magento Google Enhanced Ecommerce Tracking - Scommerce Mage

Step 2: Add Widgets To Your Dashboard

What you've got now are going to be pretty basic, either completely blank or featuring common KPIs. From here, you'll start adding widgets and customizing the layout of your dashboard. There are six sorts of widgets that Google Analytics offers:

Metric: Straight to the purpose, this widget displays text values for the metric being tracked.

Timeline: A line graph plots the performance of a metric over time, helping you identify trends. you'll also stack two different metrics for straightforward comparison.

Geomap: See data segmented by location and region, with metrics being displayed on a map. you'll hover over the areas of the map you would like to urge the particular metrics.

Table: Tables allow you to display up to 2 metrics during a table format, enabling you to match the performance of content, sources, and more.

Pie: Use colors to offer you a breakdown of metrics, showing you percentages in an easily accessible visual. Hovering over a neighborhood will offer you details of that segment.

Bar: a standard data visualization format, bar graphs will display up to 2 dimensions, allowing the bars to point out further segmentation.

When choosing, you would like to settle on if you would like to use standard or real-time statistics. Standard widgets refresh everyone 15 to half-hour, while real-time widgets are continuously updating. The restriction of real-time data is that it only displays information on active users on your site.

 ecommerce dashboard

Choose which widget you're using from the list, ensuring you decide on from the quality or Real-time list as required. After choosing the widget type, you'll then select the metric which will be displayed using that widget. Clicking the metric box will offer you an extended list of obtainable metrics to settle on from. you'll select any metric from this list and even search via keywords to seek out the metric you would like faster.

From here, you'll customize the knowledge displayed for this metric, filtering data for a deeper analysis. Filtering allows you to sort the info employing a number of parameters. For instance, to look at revenue specific to Facebook, you'll filter to only show data that comes from this channel.

 ecommerce dashboard

Once you’ve adjusted the filter to fit your needs, click Save. This will add it to your dashboard and make it functional for future use.

 ecommerce dashboard

That covers the basics of setting up your dashboard and getting the first widget operating. Next, we’ll learn how to add more widgets.

Step 3: Add Additional Widgets To Your Dashboard

Now that you've started your dashboard, you can easily add more widgets, using the same method we outlined above. To do so, simply click on “+ Add Widget”. You can then choose the type of widget and the actual metrics to display.

ecommerce dashboard

Step 4: Integrate Revenue Data With The Dashboard

To display revenue data on your dashboard, you need to connect Google Analytics to the e-commerce tool that manages your online store. You can do this with different e-commerce platforms, but you may need the developer to put the Google Analytics Web Tracking code for you.

For popular platforms like Shopify, setting up yourself is relatively straightforward. Here's how to connect Shopify data to your eCommerce analytics dashboard:

1. Click the Admin button at the bottom of the menu on the left, then select “Ecommerce settings” in the third column, under View options.

2. From here, click the Enable Ecommerce button to toggle it to “On” to enable communication between Google Analytics and Shopify.

 ecommerce dashboard

3. Copy the Google Analytics code from the admin panel. Then go to Shopify and paste the code.

 ecommerce dashboard

4. Put Google Analytics code into your Shopify store by going to “Online Store” on the menu along the left of the screen, and then select “Preferences.”

 ecommerce dashboard

5. Insert your Google Analytics code into the empty box for your Google Analytics account and accept.

 ecommerce dashboard

This allows for basic communication between these platforms, allowing you to conveniently track your revenue with your other metrics. It's now set up and you can easily add revenue-related metrics to the widgets the same way you would with other metrics. You can also use advanced eCommerce tracking through Shopify for deeper insights.

Enabling revenue tracking allows you to measure the following metrics:

  • Revenue
  • Revenue per user
  • Transactions
  • Ecommerce conversion rate
  • Average order value
  • Product revenue

You can use these to create revenue-specific dashboards or add these metrics to other dashboards. This adds several different dashboard combinations, enhancing the amount of insight that you can quickly and conveniently plot using the ecommerce analytics dashboard.

6. 5 E-commerce Dashboard Templates You Can Use Instantly

The Google Analytics solutions library has over 5,200 eCommerce dashboards that you can connect to your Google Analytics data with just a few clicks. Here are five of the best eCommerce dashboards available in the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

1. All-In-One Ecommerce Dashboard

 All-In-One Ecommerce Dashboard

This dashboard gives you a snapshot of important data relevant to your business using simple charts and highlighting key revenue data. This dashboard shows:

  • Number of transactions in a selected period
  • How visitors and transactions compare.
  • Total revenue, conversion rate, and average order value.

2. E-commerce SEO Dashboard

 E-commerce SEO Dashboard

This eCommerce dashboard is perfect if you’re looking for an in-depth breakdown of how SEO affects your store. This dashboard shows:

  • Your net revenue from organic search.
  • The most viewed pages from search.
  • Total traffic generated from search.

3. Mobile Ecommerce Dashboard

 Mobile Ecommerce Dashboard

This dashboard makes it simple to understand how mobile visitors interact with your site and how much revenue mobile visitors generate for your business. This dashboard shows:

  • How much of your site’s revenue is generated by mobile.
  • The most popular mobile devices and the bounce rates for each device.
  • Mobile average order value.

4. E-commerce For Decision Makers

This dashboard gives eCommerce business owners and decision-makers a clear and uncluttered overview of the data that matters most to their store. This dashboard shows:

  • Top-selling items
  • Sales by city.
  • Average order value, revenue, and total visits.
  • Cart abandonment rate.
  • Device conversion rate.

5. Social Media Dashboard

Social Media Dashboard

This Social Media Dashboard by Justin Cutroni helps you to understand exactly how social media traffic is helping your business. This dashboard shows:

  • Visits from social media (including new visits).
  • Which social media sites send the most traffic to your store.
  • Total revenue and revenue per visit from social media site referrals.

7. Do You Need A Custom Ecommerce Dashboard?

It should be noted that there are several ways to approach the problem, based on your location in the origin of your online store. If you use an eCommerce platform, like BigCommerce, Shopify, or Magento, you can choose a specifically developed app or tool that was originally designed to be compatible with the platform of your choice.

In case you are interested in creating a unique custom eCommerce development, you have 4 options:

To integrate this website with a ready-made dashboard and analytics tool

To create a custom tool, just like you developed a unique online shop

To use ERP or BI integration to get access to neatly presented business data

To use a combination of the above

If you intend to customize your eCommerce Dashboard, please don't hesitate to contact us immediately via Support Ticket for a free consultation.

8. Sources Of Data For Dashboard Creation

Some of the sources provide a great graphic representation of data by themselves with lots of traceable data points, but the benefit of the dashboard is that it combines the data from different sources and grants a granular focus on the info, unavailable otherwise.

It also allows users to pull all data to one page in the CMS – that has a major aggregation point needed for this specific role of access. For example, a CTO might want to know about any inconsistency in servers’ functioning. Every second in page loading time costs a store 100K-a day or $2.5 million a year. But it’s still not necessarily a top priority for a CEO.

The key sources that may supply data to an eCommerce reporting software will be social networks, google tracking and analytics tools, CRM, payment systems, inventory management software, email marketing platform, warehouse software, Google sheets, BI or ERP solutions if used, among many others:

  • Google analytics
  • Google ads
  • Google BigQuery
  • GitHub
  • Amazon Aurora
  • Facebook insights
  • Facebook ads
  • Facebook Business Manager
  • Instagram ads
  • LinkedIn Pages
  • LinkedIn Ads
  • Twitter
  • Youtube
  • Google My Business
  • Moz
  • Majestic
  • Kissmetrics
  • Infusionsoft
  • Mail Chimp
  • Adform
  • Click meter
  • SemRush
  • Ahrefs
  • Bing Ads
  • KeyMetrics
  • CSV files

In Conclusion

An eCommerce dashboard will bring together all your important data in one place and keep your entire team on the same page while giving you a snapshot of your business. This means you can make sure you're achieving your goals and identifying new opportunities.

If you have any questions or concerns about the eCommerce dashboard, do not hesitate to contact us via Support Ticket to get free consultancy. 

Thanks for reading!