Ecommerce Marketing Analytics: From Visitors to ROI
Have you ever been in a relationship with someone who genuinely confuses you with what they want — or DON’T want, and you feel like you spend more time second-guessing than you do confidently growing your connection?
The iconic memes of men asking their girlfriends if they want anything from the drive-thru only to be told “No.” three times. So they order their own food, and when they settle in to enjoy it, their girlfriend descends like a pack of starving wolves and eats the food they said they didn’t want.
Or the romantic who feels they do everything their partner asks for but never seems to do it right, resulting in arguments and “That’s not what I asked for!” and “But that’s what you said!” being tossed back and forth while both feel overwhelmed by their frustration.
What if you had a tool to analyze all the subtle and deep behavior, desires, and actions needed to end all this chaos and get the dreamy relationship you’ve always wanted without all the trial and error feelings of failure on the path to loving success?
That’d be incredible, right!?
Well… if you find one, let me know! Unfortunately, I don’t have that to offer today.
In romantic relationships, anyway…
But there IS such a tool to help you with your BUSINESS relationships! Welcome to the world of eCommerce Analytics!
What is Ecommerce Analytics?
In our previous post, we defined the difference between Web Analytics and Marketing Analytics. Today we’re throwing more analytic fun into the mix by discussing eCommerce Analytics- yet another area of web data to help you grow and thrive in your business without all the hit-and-miss money and time waste.
As a refresher, Web Analytics is the skill of analyzing, interpreting, and utilizing the data created in your business actions online. This data comes from your social media to your online store to even your email platform. This information should be used to create your goals, key performance indicators (KPIs), marketing campaigns, and even your merchant components.
The utilization of web data is done with a variety of tools, some of which we’ll be introducing today, and this is where eCommerce analytics comes into play.
E-commerce analytics is a system or tool that lets you demystify the behavior of all who come into contact with your business. Whether they’re prospects that didn’t convert or loyal clients who return over and over again.
With this understanding, you’re able to make strategic decisions to have more of what you want and less of what you don’t.
Though most eCommerce analytics happen to focus on your site itself, it’s far from limited to that and has quite an expansive reach when done right.
E-commerce Analytics Basics
Owning a small-to-medium e-store, you likely have a specific amount of resources available for marketing, tech, and revenue generation, so your investments towards quality client relationships need to be made with care.
Cultivating a relationship with your eCommerce data will help you avoid spreading resources thinly over multiple marketing efforts that don’t deliver and help you get straight to the money-making activities.
To do this, you should be focusing on the KPIs that lead to Traffic, Conversion, and Retention.
These will help you answer questions like: Am I spending on the right campaigns? Am I getting a return on investment that’s worth it? Are these loyal and frequent customers? How do I keep getting better results while decreasing loss?
Let’s dive in!
Traffic; How Do My Prospects Find Me?
In web analytics, there are four main traffic categories:
- Search; traffic derived directly from search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing
- Campaign; tagged traffic coming through a marketing process like a Facebook Ad or Email Campaign
- Referral; traffic coming from a link on another site, maybe a JV partner
- Direct; traffic that doesn’t have a known source
You can easily track these with Google Analytics to see what your primary traffic source is and how to make it even better with targeted marketing.
Pay-per-click ad campaigns and email campaigns are one of the hottest traffic generation sources, and it’s important to make sure you’re not falling into the trap of resource spreading, as we mentioned above.
Take the time to learn the terms and elements these campaigns utilize — no matter if you’re doing these in-house or through an agency, so you can have a clear understanding of focus and performance.
Conversion; How Do Prospects Become Buyers?
Once your traffic generator has brought prospects to your site, what happens? It’s incredibly important to know your process performance step-by-step so you can minimize issues and increase conversion.
KPIs to measure during the conversion flow can feel overwhelming when you see them listed out, but just focus on a few main ones until you get more data-savvy.
Conversion Rate; the number of visitors who actually become customers. Find this by dividing the number of sales closed from the number of visitors to your site.
Bounce Rate; the number of visitors who leave immediately after landing on your site. Find this by dividing the number of visitors who leave your site by the total number of visitors.
Cart Abandonment Rate; the number of shoppers who add items to their cart, but leave the site before making the purchase. Find this by dividing the number of visitors who’ve left before completing the purchase to those who’ve entered the checkout process — whether they completed the purchase or not.
Product Page Conversion Rate; the number of prospects that make a purchase on the sales page. This reveals how your imagery, copy, buttons, and page elements are functioning.
Page Load Time; the amount of time it takes for your page to load for prospect interaction. Load times may vary depending on traffic surges during campaigns, so make sure yours is optimally set as not to have any crashes.
Time Spent On Site; how long do your viewers spend on your site?
These are but a few core metrics to help you make sure your conversion journey is primed and refined to make sure your ideal prospects have a seamless journey into becoming a loyal lifetime subscriber to your products and services.
Retention; How To Deepen Your Customer Relationships
They’ve made it through your traffic generation processes, converted into paying clients, and now you want to make sure they stay loyal, passionate, and active consumers. How do you do that?
Get that Retention game going! Here are a few KIPs to track and take action on if you see the numbers aren’t matching your goals.
Repeat Customer Rate; how many repeat purchases your customers make. You’ll find this by dividing your total repeat purchases by your total purchases overall.
Average Order Value; how much do you generate on average through each transaction. You can find this by dividing your total number of orders from your total revenue.
Customer Retention Rates; how your tactics and strategies perform as a whole during a specific period. How many new customers did you acquire during that time? How many new customers repurchase? If your numbers are dropping, pay attention to where that leak may be!
Customer Lifetime Value; the long-term revenue relationship your customers share with you. Look to this for indicators on where you may be dropping the ball in overall retention and satisfaction.
80% or your sales come from 20% of your clients, don’t neglect this part of your business development.
Wow, that was a lot! Let’s wrap these main KPI data points up for now and get into WHAT TOOLS to use for the best success.
So How Do I Get The Data?
Though you CAN get some of this information on your store platform, like Shopify, they’re often missing some very vital elements that skew the necessary KIP metrics. To remedy this, we recommend merchants use Google Analytics in conjunction with their native site analytics to make sure they’re getting the whole picture.
With Google Analytics, you’ll be able to find the answers to all the data points we discussed above and a whole lot more!
In addition to tracking site visitors, sessions, and other customer behavior on your store, Google Analytics provides a more holistic image of store performance within a fuller, well-rounded dashboard.
You can gest started here: https://marketingplatform.google.com/about/analytics/
Another great tool to aid you on your journey is Google Search Console. This free tool lets you see how Google views your website and shares insights on how to improve your organic reach and findability in searches.
You can learn more about Google Search Console here:: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
Google Tag Manager is a great and effective tool to help you with that, but we’re saving that for our next post where we’ll cover the nitty-gritty of tagging to get amazing insights, so stay tuned!
Is Your Brain Still With Me?
E-commerce analytics can be challenging, and it’s not for everyone. But with the right tools and a moderated introduction, you’ll be well on your way to mastering your data in no time!
*Pro Tip: Take an hour this week and schedule out time to spend with your analytics. Even if it’s only to open up Google Analytics, click on a few tabs, and see how the platform functions.
Starting somewhere is better than starting nowhere.
If you feel you need some help, visit our site, we’d be happy to help you find solutions that fit the unique needs of your company. Until next time, happy analytics!
