eCommerce Analytics
It has been six years of owning my own eCommerce-based product and working on over 30 odd projects. Based on my understanding of user interaction, content creation and analytics, I thought of sharing my thoughts and understanding. I am no expert in this matter, but I can definitely guide people on this subject.
So when you are handling an eCommerce website, it is very important to understand the demographics, Geo-location, new vs returning customers, page viewed, session duration, site speed, content, etc.
Let's dig in a little to understand customer behaviour and buying patterns.
Metric for eCommerce Website:
- Audience
- Behaviour
- Acquisition
- Conversion
These are primarily the 4 main metrics.
Now let's briefly touch upon it to get a basic understanding.
- Audience:
For the eCommerce-based model, data of the audience is very important. Analytics boasts 9 different reporting sections under “Audience.”
These subcategories include Overview, Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behaviour, Technology, Mobile, Custom, and Users Flow.
When you are looking at data of the customers checking your product, which product and what’s their age group, are they returning customers and what is the frequency of returning customers?
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The gender of the customers is very important for different categories of products, it would vary and it's important to keep track of that. For example, fitness-based online products will see a 60–40 ratio, loans will see a 30–70 ratio and online fashion shopping will see a 70–30 ratio between women and men.
Geo-location if you believe it or not is very important to understand to run any marketing campaign.
- Which part of the city your customer is buying your product from?
- Which city do they belong to?
- Which city has more new and recurring customers?
If you know all these basic details, then it will help you run a campaign in that specific area to boost your sales.
The device of the customer helps you understand if your customer is purchasing from a mobile app, tablet or desktop. With the inception of mobile app purchasing behaviour have changed rapidly, so, it’s important to understand from which mobile the purchase is made.
2. Behaviour
It’s seen that first-time visitors hardly make a purchase on the first login. If the number of returns is small then there is an issue with your product or marketing campaign or the audience you are targeting. You should first analyse who to fire your product or marketing team.
To understand you should go and look at how far your new customers have gone as in the number of pages they have clicked or which page they have gone to and stayed for how long. It’s fairly simple to understand whether this customer will return or not. If the sessions have a bigger time duration and the page view is low then you can assume that the conversion will be negligible. One should always do an analysis of new vs existing customers what’s the conversion rate based on that and how much revenue we earned.
- Total Traffic & ROI on Marketing Campaigns — Understand the number of active users on your platform (brand awareness) and how they came to your website (conversions to the website through paid search, paid social media, organic search, website URL, etc.)
- Customer Lifetime Value — Understand the value of customers through acquisition medium in order to optimise the acquisition costs of future customers. High lifetime value customers need to be prioritized in terms of marketing campaigns in order to ensure retention
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys — CSAT and NPS scores need to be tracked and areas of improvement need to be identified.
- Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): This is the amount you pay for customer acquisition (lead or sale, this is defined by you) based on your marketing efforts.
- Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue generated from your marketing efforts is divided by your marketing costs.
- Value-per-Visit: This is total website revenue divided by total website visits, and is helpful in measuring the effectiveness of your various marketing channels.
KPIs like Repeat Customer Rate, and Customer Lifetime Value help to cut through the noise and give you a compass on what to focus on.
Understanding the Customer Stages;
Customers have different intents as they move through your buying cycle. Understanding their intent in each phase will help you select the right key metrics to measure and grow your business.
1. Product Discovery: How many people have come across our brand or our product line?
2. Consideration: What portion of people who have come across our brand is engaging with our brand?
3. Conversions: For example, transactions are expected to be made by the highest engaging customers and visitors to your site.
4. Retention: A repeat customer can provide a ton of value to a business. Measuring customer retention should form the starting point for understanding and improving customer loyalty.
5. Advocacy: The advocacy stage analyzes word of mouth and referral marketing stats. User-generated content is a great way to allow your customers to advocate for your brand. This can be done through video and photo content or by leaving reviews.
3. Acquisition:
Observe the campaign data related to cost, clicks, bounce rate, and conversion.
If the brand wants to run ads on Google Ads, that’s the best in the market where all the acute data are available and changes will be quicker.
The search engine is one of the most important parts of growing your brand, where you can generate the right queries and optimise your product accordingly.
- You can check the queries of the customers
- Study the performance of your product
- Alter the content and keywords to get a better result and reach the specific customers you are looking for
4. Conversion:
We have to understand the shopping and checkout behaviour of the customer.
From shopping behaviour, you will understand the product that customers are purchasing and ignoring which will help you to iterate your sales and marketing plan.
- Upselling/Cross-selling — tracking which product bundles/offers have the highest conversions to upgrade or cross-sell so as to increase the basket size and value of each purchase.
- Shopping Cart Abandonment — Checkout behaviour will help you to identify the customers who did and didn’t check after putting the product in the cart. Seeing at what point consumers quit their purchase and identify possible reasons — extra costs like shipping/taxes, too many pages/forms to fill out. The entire funnel needs to be analyzed and action steps to facilitate purchase completion are essential.
Loyalty, Loyalty, loyalty!
It's 2019, which means that even though your customers have bought from you, they’re constantly being courted everywhere else. Increased competition from other brands means that you must have a special “sauce”, spice that keeps customers coming back.
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