The world is moving towards a digital revolution, and as a savvy business owner, you have taken the leap by investing a significant amount in your online business. However, imagine a single marketing misstep could potentially lead to disastrous consequences for your company. The stakes are high, and you cannot afford to take a hit, especially when you’re just starting out.
Trial and error may work for some time, but relying on guesswork to make crucial marketing decisions is like fighting a war with a blindfold on. In this era of cut-throat competition, you need to be ahead of the game and have a winning growth strategy that sets you apart from the rest.
That’s why eCommerce analytics has become the need of the hour. If you haven’t come across this term before, don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into the realm of eCommerce reporting and explore why your business needs it.
Let’s start by understanding what eCommerce analytics is and how it can help you make informed business decisions that set you on the path to success.
What is eCommerce Analytics?
eCommerce analytics is a total game-changer for businesses, no matter the size! It’s like having a crystal ball that gathers data from multiple areas of your online website and transforms it into informative and actionable insights. This data-driven approach lets you make smarter decisions based on facts, numbers, and data.
With eCommerce reporting, you can create a seamless customer journey that caters to their needs and goes above and beyond their expectations.
You can gain valuable insights into customer behavior, likes, dislikes, interests, search activities, and metrics like views, conversions, acquisition, and advocacy. These insights enable you to optimize your online business and drive growth.
But, the real magic happens when you use eCommerce analytics correctly. That’s why in the next section, we’ll dive deep into the importance of eCommerce analytics and how it can unlock your business’s full potential.
And, if you’re new to eCommerce analytics and want to know how it works, we recommend taking a free demo from Putler. It’s an excellent way to understand how data is aggregated, and how it can help your business.
Importance of eCommerce Analytics
Think of eCommerce analytics as a companion in your business’ growth journey. This tool will answer all your queries pertaining to your website activity. This being said, let’s dive into why you really need to bother with it.
You will know what’s working for you
You probably know for a fact that you have a limited number of resources at your disposal. Marketing requires a budget to function. Having eCommerce reports will give you detailed insights on areas that are reaping benefits as well as those that are lagging you behind.
Having a direction will allow you to allocate your budget in the right places in order to thrive.
What are the major benefits of eCommerce reporting?
Data is powerful
Have you ever heard of the revolution of ‘Big Data’? It’s revolutionary because it is powerful. Let me give you an idea. According to Statista, global online sales are expected to grow by 4.1 trillion by 2021. This statistic was presented in 2018, and ever since then the number of people and online stores have rapidly.
Businesses need to understand consumer behavior just the way a multinational company would understand consumer behavior. This isn’t an easy feat but eCommerce data can make this simple for you by giving you insights into your consumer’s behavior so that you may get the opportunity to expand, connect and sell.
It all boils down to the insights of data.
Bring higher conversions your way
Having data at your fingertips will allow you to get a starting point for experiments on your website. Once you know what’s working for you, you will be able to plan strategies that work in the favor of your website.
For example,
- If emails don’t work for you, then you can experiment with social media.
- If your website has a high bounce rate, then you can play with user-friendly design interfaces or include add-ons like a chatbox, pop-ups, videos, visually appealing headers and so on.
Data helps you to read your customers and their likes and dislikes. Once you figure out what they like, you can strategically place marketing campaigns that will lead to conversions.
Create funnels for your customers
Do you know what your website visitors are doing on your site? Are they buying or leaving without making a purchase? Creating funnels for your customers can help you answer these questions and optimize your website for conversions.
You can create funnels by analyzing the website activity of your audience. Let’s explore what website activity will show you:
- The audience that loves your website
- The audience that just purchased something on your site and then forgot about you
- The audience that stumbled across your site
- The audience that doesn’t even know that they need your products
This activity further bifurcates your audience based on location, gender, purchase history, search activity, cart details etc.
Having all this data will help you to create segments that you can bifurcate into important targeting funnels. By giving each audience what they need, you will be able to create a personalized experience.
Take yourself as an example, the emails and sponsored posts that you receive, don’t they make you feel like the brand knows you personally? That’s the magic of data.
What are the best metrics and KPIs to track for eCommerce?
Tracking the right metrics and KPIs is crucial for any eCommerce business looking to grow and succeed. To help you out, here are some of the best metrics and KPIs to track:
First up, performance metrics. These will give you insights into your website’s overall performance, such as traffic, bounce rate, and load time.
Next, marketing metrics. These will help you understand the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, including metrics such as click-through rates, conversion rates, and cost per acquisition.
Don’t forget customer metrics. These will give you insights into your customers’ behavior and preferences, such as customer lifetime value, repeat purchase rate, and average order value.
Product metrics are also important to track, such as inventory turnover rate, product margin, and product page views.
When it comes to conversion optimization, metrics such as cart abandonment rate, checkout completion rate, and product return rate can help you identify areas for improvement.
Lastly, user experience metrics are critical to ensure a smooth and enjoyable shopping experience for your customers. These can include metrics such as page load time, mobile responsiveness, and user feedback.
Tracking these metrics and KPIs will give you the insights you need to make data-driven decisions and optimize your eCommerce business for success.
What eCommerce metrics you should be tracking?
Every metric has a story to tell. Every click, every view, every impression, and every conversion leads to something. What you really need to do here is understand the numbers that your website is trying to tell you. You can do so by keeping an eye on key metrics like:
You can do so by keeping an eye on key metrics like:
Sales insights
This is precisely the most important metric. Sales conversions are what you have to focus on the most. All your marketing strategies should be directed towards growing this single metric.
You have to keep an eye on net sales, refunds, and average revenue by day, month, year etc.
Email opt-ins
Emails are as crucial for eCommerce as the sun is for plants. You need email marketing to GROW. Higher email open rates lead to higher sales conversions and this is a fact.
Customer insights
This is an umbrella metric that naturally covers different aspects of customers. You need to keep an eye on things like:
- Customer lifetime value- this predicts the amount of revenue you can gain from the customer before he churns.
- Customer acquisition rate- the cost of acquiring a new customer.
- Churn rate- the number of customers that are at the end of their cycle.
- Average revenue- The average revenue that you get from the customer based on day/month/year.
- RFM- customer profile based on recency, frequency and monetary aspects.
Product insights
Products are your core offerings to the customers. It doesn’t matter whether you have a single product or multiple, what matters is how your product performs. Hence, you need to follow:
- Top products
- Worst performing products
- Quantity sold per day
- Inventory
- Average revenue from product sales
- Frequently bought together
Transaction insights
Transaction insights tell you the behavior of your audience during the time of purchase. It tells you how our business is performing and how you’re earning exactly.
- Fees incurred on transactions
- Taxes paid for a set date range
- Refunds
- Total amount
- Total transactions
Subscription insights
Subscription metrics help you determine key insights on third-party subscriptions and SaaS metrics like:
- MRR- the normalized recurring earning from all your active subscriptions
- LTV- the earnings from a customer’s lifetime. Average Revenue Per Paid User / User Churn Rate
- ARPPU- average revenue per paid user
- Churn rate- the customers you are losing
- Revenue churn rate- the revenue that you are losing on churned customers
- Revenue- the total and average revenue per subscription
Audience insights
Audience insights focus on visitors that have come across your website and their potential of becoming a customer. To decipher the same, you need to look at:
- Views
- Visitors
- Impressions
- Click-Through Rate
- Popular search terms
- Popular pages
Google Analytics can help you
In the world of eCommerce, Google Analytics is considered the analytics tool for insights. With its user-friendly interface and comprehensive analytics feature, it has simply become one of the best integration tools for websites. Let’s not forget that it’s completely free!
It’s easy to connect GA with your website. You have to integrate and enable the system to set up tracking. First, you need to set up your Google Analytics account and enable it across your website and mobile application.
- Google has explained the entire process very comprehensively on their website. Here is the resource: Getting Started With Google Analytics
- Next, you need to set up your Analytics account for eCommerce tracking and reporting: Set Up eCommerce Tracking
Just follow the steps mentioned and you should be good!
Google is great, but it lacks something…
Although Google Analytics is great, it still leaves a lot to desire. It is comprehensive, yet not comprehensive ENOUGH for eCommerce platforms.
Need for customer analysis
We can’t specify the importance of customer profiling enough. An eCommerce business runs solely on what the customer needs and demands. Hence, having insights into your audience’s online behavior is crucial.
Google Analytics tracks only the location and time of a customer’s visit. It doesn’t give you detailed insights into the customer’s activities or profile. This will later become a hindrance for small owners and it might lead them to make wrong marketing decisions that would be directed based on only geography.
Need for product analysis
Products are your bread and butter. As an eCommerce business owner, knowing how your products are performing should be a routine task. You need to have insights into the products that are driving your business and the ones that are lagging you behind. If you launch something new, then you need to keep an eye on its performance for at least a few months until you decide to remove it. Google Analytics gives you only basic product reports. There is a lot that you’re missing out over here.
Other limitations
- GA tends to calculate either extra or fewer data, it creates issues and gives you an error when you count total sales or total products.
- It does not calculate refunds. Refunds are an important part of any eCommerce website and if those don’t get calculated then you may end up with haywire profits.
- For your subscription business, you need important metrics like LTV, MRR, churn rate etc. Google Analytics does not provide you with any of the above.
- GA does not allow integrations with third-party businesses like PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, Etsy, WooCommerce, etc. This becomes limiting for businesses that rely on these third-party tools.
Need for conversion tracking<
Won’t you be amazed if someone showed you how you achieved conversions? Conversion analytics is basically tracking conversions and the details pertaining to it. What Google Analytics does is that it shows you the number of conversions that you have received on your marketing campaigns. What it fails to do is show you the revenue that you’ve generated on those conversions or which audiences were converted.
If this handy information is available, it can turn into a handicap for business owners.
But don’t worry there are tools crafted to help you. Let’s check them out.
eCommerce analytics tools that outperform Google Analytics
There are various third-party tools available in the market that can easily replace Google Analytics. These tools don’t just provide you with standard eCommerce data analytics but also give you insights on audience, conversions, products, and so on.
Mixpanel
Mixpanel is primarily an analytics platform that has built-in tracking features for conversion rates and data. It measures customer actions which are defined as ‘events’ and accumulates data for your viewing.
Kissmetrics
Kissmetrics is a paid analytics platform that has a user-friendly and easy-to-track customer conversion process. With this eCommerce reporting tool, you can find out where you’re acquiring customers and the areas that need adjustments.
Heap
Heap is a great conversion tracking tool that accumulates customer actions from website and mobile applications and aggregates them. It provides you with retroactive analysis and displays every type of action that a user takes on your website.
These tools are pretty handy to manage your data.
But what if you get all this and more in a single platform?
Putler is an eCommerce reporting platform that cumulates data from every single area of your eCommerce website and converts it into actionable insights that help you make business decisions.
At Putler, we have worked with numerous clients who required help with data. We make a conscious decision to understand our clients businesses. Many a time, they find it tough to decipher the data that their website has collated even after using eCommerce analytics tools.
Hence, with all their pain points in mind, we make a conscious effort to equip Putler with all the features that an eCommerce business may need.
What are the eCommerce analytics and reports available in Putler?
Putler comes with tons of analytics and reports that can help you achieve your eCommerce business goals. Here are a few of them.
Customer reports
Know your customers in and out with the help of Putler’s customer tracking. Now you can find all types of customers like new,returning, lost, average LTV, top 20% customers, refunded customers, etc
Customer segmentation
Putler doesn’t just segment customers for you, it does it based on customer activities like recency, frequency and monetary among other factors like location, time, date etc. With this, you’ll be able to decipher the most profitable customers, customer profile, curbed customers etc and create funnels that suit your campaigns.
Sales report
Get a detailed sales report based on date, day, month, year, audience etc. Putler creates your own sales heatmap for you to decipher. You can look at sales trends, net sales, refunds, average sales, etc.
Product report
Know which products are performing well. Filter data as per your need and understand what your customers like and don’t like. Putler’s product report will give you minute actions that are taken for every product. This way, you can keep a track of everything.
Audience report
Audience report will not just give you insights into the profile of your audience but also their actions. Putler assimilates every action done by an audience whether it’s visits, clicks, conversion process, impressions, click-through rates, position, profitability, popular pages, etc. You can also find the amount of revenue that audiences generate for your business.
Subscription report
Subscription report dives deep into SaaS metrics that we mentioned above like LTV, MRR, ARPPU, user churn rate, revenue churn rate, growth rate, revenue refund, total subscriptions, subscription statuses, etc.
Transactions
Putler dives deep into transactions that happen on the website like fees, taxes, refunds, revenue, etc.
Time machine
We don’t just measure, we help you forecast your performance based on current metrics. We forecast revenue and sales, customer acquisition, conversion targets, churn, etc. You literally have your very own time machine.
Insights
How would you feel if you asked for a slice of pizza but got the whole itself? Putler does more than reporting, we give you relevant insights based on holiday season sales, daily average, ARPU, visitors, best holidays, etc.
Multi-store reporting
Have more than a single store to manage? No stress! Putler can aggregate data from all your stores and converts it into comprehensive actionable insights by using a single dashboard. So you will have multiple stores but a single tool to handle each.
Multi-channel integration
Putler can integrate with multiple businesses like PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, Etsy, WooCommerce, Gumroad, Mailchimp, Shopify, EDD, etc.
Final thoughts
So, there you have it!
eCommerce analytics may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. With Putler, you can easily track and analyze your business’s performance, make data-driven decisions, and take your online business to the next level. Whether you’re looking for real-time sales data, customer insights, or marketing metrics, Putler has got you covered.
As the world of eCommerce continues to evolve, it’s essential to stay ahead of the game. By keeping up with the latest trends and using cutting-edge tools like Putler, you can stay competitive and thrive in the digital marketplace.
So, what are you waiting for? Try Putler today and see how it can transform your eCommerce business.
FAQs
Which eCommerce analytics tool is the best?
The best eCommerce analytics tool for your business depends on your specific needs and requirements.
To determine which tool is the best fit for your business, you should consider factors such as your budget, the size of your business, your analytics goals, the features and functionalities of each tool, and how user-friendly the tool is.
It’s also worth noting that some eCommerce platforms offer built-in analytics tools, so it’s always worth exploring these options too.
Ultimately, the key is to find a tool that provides the data and insights you need to make informed decisions and grow your business.
Here are some of the best eCommerce analytics tools to help you grow your brand.
What are the key concepts in eCommerce analytics?
eCommerce analytics is a critical aspect of online businesses, enabling them to gather and analyze data on customer behavior and sales strategies.
Key concepts in eCommerce analytics include tracking user behavior to better understand how customers interact with your website, analyzing customer segmentation and creating segmented marketing campaigns to tailor your message to specific audiences, and understanding purchase trends to optimizing your product offerings and pricing.
Additionally, predicting customer lifetime value can help you make strategic decisions about customer acquisition and retention.
By mastering these key concepts, eCommerce businesses can gain a competitive edge and achieve long-term success.