How Real-time Analytics Helps To Boost Your Business?
Data analytics is extremely important these days as it is a valuable source of marketing and sales information for your store. Do you know how to handle them?
In today’s article we are going to dig a bit deeper in the urge for faster and more accurate results that has driven many businesses to go the extra mile and adjust the way they manage their data; via real-time analytics.
If you find the term “real-time” disputable, just know that data are available at scale within seconds after activity is measured on a website.
Real-time analytics involves gaining an instant access to live stream of data from all customers’ actions. The ability to monitor real-time analytics provides entrepreneurs with many actionable insights to help guide their eCommerce business tactics and increase the growth of their online store.
It enables much faster, more precise and more effective decisions than conventional decisions made based on stale data or worse, no data. So, how can you track your data in live and what things should you pay attention to, as an entrepreneur? Let’s see!
Tools to track data in real-time
Analytics tools are cool, not only do they collect, measure and analyse your website traffic but they also help in terms of market and business research. Let’s name at least a few free tools to give you some examples: Piwik, StatCounter, ShinyStat, whos.amung.us, W3Counter, etc. Of course, there are many more both free and paid tools providing real-time analytics, and don’t worry if you’ve never heard of the ones above because you are most likely already familiar with the most popular ones; Google Analytics or / and MonkeyData.
Top 6 crucial metrics entrepreneurs should focus on
1. Number of unique online visitors
Watch very closely how many active people are using your online store at the very moment. Knowing the exact number of unique visitors that are online right now gives you the valuable ability to ensure that your online store website has sufficient bandwidth to handle the rush. Make sure you are ready whenever necessary, especially during holidays!
2. Traffic sources
It is vitally important to know which traffic sources are bringing the most customers right now. Is it from an unpaid search engine results link, a referral from another website (such as a blog), direct traffic or is it from paid campaigns, such as PPC ads and paid search engine keywords? Monitoring this data enables you to offer services to your customers at particular times based on what the majority of these customers will want.
For example, offer customers coming from PPC ads more information on your products and how to buy them (as these visitors are more likely to make a purchase).
If you want to know how to drive more traffic to your store inexpensively, read the top 5 tips on how to market your eCommerce business for free.
3. Campaigns tracking
Monitor all of your campaigns to find out which ones are bringing users right now. Compare the immediate impact of your blog posts, social media posts and newsletters on your visitors and measure your effectiveness at particular moments such as campaign launches.
For example, you likely run campaigns across many sources, and then you may notice that one of your Facebook posts worked really well as you have many visits from it. Therefore, you can increase your budget there and keep the traffic flowing.
4. Segmentation by devices
Knowing which device your audience uses to browse your store is also helpful. How many desktop users are browsing your website right now compared to visitors using a mobile phone or a tablet? Understand how users browse your eCommerce site at particular times of day and use this information to optimize their browsing experience and to offer appropriate services to your customers.
You can, for example, provide store locators for mobile customers accessing your online store website on weekends. This is important as mCommerce is on the rise!
One more tip, don’t forget to make sure your design is responsive and looks great on every device, despite the OS and the screen size.
5. Segmentation by country
Monitor where your visitors are coming from at specific times. Monitoring your visitors’ geographic location is important, especially when selling in different countries. This way you will be able to allocate your efforts to accommodate the needs of your potential customers.
Follow Metalshop’s example and use this knowledge to both dominate your homeland and spread across the planet!
6. Pageviews
Don’t forget to observe what pages your visitors are on right now. This will enable you to help them out in case they are stuck anywhere and guide them towards a purchase. Also, once you know which pages have the fewest views, you can adjust the content to better attract your audience.
Pay an extra attention to the 3 most important pages of your online store — home page, product page and shopping cart!
Of course, there are many more important metrics to focus on to be successful in eCommerce. With those described above you will be able to move your analytics strategy from a vision to reality and boost your customer acquisition process!
Analyzing this kind of audience data will help you in pinpointing your target group and once you know who your target customer is, what they want and where they spend their time on your website, you can focus your efforts accordingly to convert your visitors into customers — and with real-time analytics you can watch it happen from the first row!
Did you ❤ our story about real-time data?
Do you use real-time analytics? How they improve your every day business? We’ll be happy if you share with us in comments!
Have a great day & enjoy analytics!
