eCommerce

How to Use eCommerce Analytics for Greater Success

Updated November 16, 2022  |  9 min read
Key Takeaways
  • Data analysis, specifically eCommerce analytics, is vital to the success of your eCommerce business.
  • eCommerce analytics give you the power to improve several key metrics or KPIs, since they tell you how you're doing and where you can improve.
  • It's best to use reliable tools and have data analytics for marketing and other eCommerce metrics built into your eCommerce platform.
  • With eCommerce analytics, you can optimize your marketing activities, platform content and design, and more, based on what works the best for your clients and business.

Why Use eCommerce Analytics?

The competitive landscape for enterprise eCommerce is crowded and, without a robust marketing strategy, your eCommerce business won't draw the attention of customers.

A crucial part of making your business stand out and building an effective marketing strategy is utilizing eCommerce analytics. With eCommerce analytics tools that gather and analyze data about key performance indicators or KPIs, you can determine how best to structure your site to suit customers' needs and wants. By doing so, you can increase conversion rates, retention rates, customer satisfaction, and other key metrics.

Best Practices for eCommerce Analytics

While using analytics and reporting tools is important, it's key to also:

  • Use reliable tools to gather information
  • Gather all your marketing data across channels and platforms
  • Analyze useful metrics or KPIs with all your data in one place
  • Apply the lessons learned from these analysis tools in the right ways
  • Use a comprehensive analytics dashboard with automated reports
  • Share reports with team members for better communication and decision making

An expert team and a customizable eCommerce solution with marketing and analytics tools built in can help you do all these things.

Other essential online marketing tools include SEO friendly design, social media integration, built-in content creation or blogging platforms, and task or workflow automation. Clarity's eCommerce solution has everything you need so you can focus on implementing marketing initiatives that attract new leads and make more sales.

KPIs to Track & Why They Matter

When it comes to eCommerce analytics, what metrics or KPIs should you analyze? The answer may differ depending on your industry and business. However, there are some basic metrics every eCommerce business ought to keep track of to measure business performance and learn how to improve. Let's dive into what these are and what they might mean for your business.

Site Traffic

Site traffic refers to how many people visit the site, and what pages are visited the most to the least. By figuring out what your high-traffic pages are doing right, you can bring those same principles to your lower traffic pages to boost them. A key determiner of site traffic is search engine optimization, or SEO, which can include search engine marketing (SEM) as well.

Click Through Rate (CTR)

CTR refers to how many people "click through" to your webpage from a link on another page (e.g., from search engine results or a link on your blog post to your product page). Low click through rate suggests something about the link text, design, or surrounding context may need to be changed.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is the percentage of people who visit a single page on your site and leave without taking any further action. This might indicate that people find what they're looking for right away and there's no need for further action, or it might indicate that your page doesn't meet expectations. It depends on what makes sense for the purpose of the page and your particular business.

Conversion Rate

Out of all the people visiting your site, how many become leads or complete transactions is the conversion rate. If you have a low conversion rate, there's something on the page that's deterring people from converting. It might be due to the design, content, or broken forms or links.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost refers to how much you're spending to get new customers. It's important to analyze how much you're spending and what returns you're getting from paid marketing campaigns and ads to determine if it's worth continuing.

Average Order Value

The average transaction amount for your eCommerce business is called the average order value. This can tell you more about what customers are willing to spend on certain products.

Social Media Engagement

Social media engagement is how much users are engaging with your social media posts, measured from click through rate, referrals, social conversions, and platform activity. Certain platforms or types of posts might engage your audience better, so once you know what those are, you can focus on improving and increasing that type of content and building a better social media marketing strategy.

Return Rate

The return rate is what percentage of people return products they've purchased. If the return rate is high, it might be due to unclear expectations about what the item includes, poor imagery or sizing information, or other factors. Looking at customer reviews is a great way to learn more about why a product is being returned.

Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate

This refers to the proportion of people adding items to their cart and leaving the site without checking out. This can be due to a number of factors, but potential blockers to finishing the checkout process are high shipping costs or other fees, a lack of payment options, security concerns, slow loading speed, and no guest checkout.

Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention refers to the number of customers who come back to your online store multiple times, or the number of customers that you retain within a set period of time. If your customer retention rate is low, there's something about the customer experience that is keeping people from coming back to your site, and you'll want to investigate to find out what that is so you can remedy the issue.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is the amount of revenue generated by customers throughout their relationship with you. Low CLV rates indicate your customers are only dealing with you for the short term, and you aren't getting the benefits of a long-term relationship. Introducing tiered memberships and product subscriptions to your site is one way to help improve CLV and loyalty.

eCommerce Analytics Tools

There are a number of tools you can use to gather eCommerce analytics on various factors. One such tool is Google Analytics, which gives you information such as pages per session, conversion rate, geographic data, conversion rate, bounce rate, returning visitors, top pages, traffic sources, and what related topics people might be interested in.

web analytics dashboard
Built-In Analytics Tools

Clarity's eCommerce solution has Google Analytics and other powerful marketing tools built in, making it easy to get the insights you need.

What You Can Do with eCommerce and Marketing Analytics

The insights you gain into your marketing data with advanced analytics give you the power to strategically adjust your marketing and sales strategies based on what works. With all the information you can glean, there are major benefits to what analytics can help you do.

Optimize to User Behavior

Learn how your customers interact with your website so you can optimize your conversion funnel and drive more sales and revenue from your marketing campaigns. Understand what language and design strategies move more sales, interaction, and convince customers to buy and keep coming back.

Identify Your Most Valuable Audience

Discover which referrals drive the most traffic to your site and which segment of your customer base is the most valuable to you. Then work on targeting those specific customer segments in your marketing strategy. Instead of wasting time, energy, and money on traffic sources that don't convert, you can use eCommerce analytics to be strategic with your marketing budget and get the highest ROI possible.

Measure Your Success

With eCommerce platform and marketing data analysis, you won't have to wonder if you're posting the right content, if your email campaigns are working, or why you gain or lose customers at X stage in the funnel. You'll be able to view and understand those metrics yourself with Clarity's advanced analytics dashboard.

Evaluate Trends to Plan Strategically

Analysis of data trends or patterns provide information about your business's current and likely future performance. This gives you the power to plan ahead strategically about many processes and goals, such as hiring and sales goals as well as when products should be made available or when to have sales. Data analysis of market trends also give you insight into your industry so you can remain aware of possible opportunities and risks.

Enhanced Analytics Solution

Don't miss out on opportunities—get an eCommerce platform that monitors all your KPIs and presents data analytics in an easily digestible manner. Get started with our free, no-obligation discovery session—we'll go over your business's needs and give expert advice on what solutions would be best.

FAQs

 

eCommerce analytics help businesses understand user behavior to better structure the site to suit their wants and needs. User preferences, pages with more conversions, and other metrics are used to analyze what should or shouldn't be changed. Data analytics also help you plan ahead based on trends, maximize ROI (return on investment), and optimize your marketing strategy.

 

Some of the best eCommerce analytics tools for eCommerce include Google Analytics, Hotjar, Surfer SEO, and Ahrefs. Clarity eCommerce Framework comes with marketing and analytics tools for your eCommerce business, so you can get the most out of your endeavors.

 

Google Analytics is a useful eCommerce analytics tool to help you boost conversion rates and traffic to your site. It has eCommerce-specific reports and features, plus it's free.

 

Best practices for eCommerce analytics include using reliable analytics tools to gather information, collecting all your marketing data across channels into one interface or eCommerce dashboard, analyzing important KPIs to understand how you're doing and how to improve, automating reports, and sharing analyses with team members.

 

Success in eCommerce can be measured by the performance of certain metrics, including site traffic, click through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, customer acquisition cost, average order value, social media engagement, return rate, shopping cart abandonment rate, customer retention rate, and customer lifetime value.

Still have questions? Chat with Jeremy on the bottom right corner of your screen #NotARobot

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Autumn Spriggle is a Content Writer at Clarity Ventures who stays up to date on the latest trends in eCommerce, software development, and related topics to provide readers with the latest and greatest. She strives to help people like you realize the full potential for their eCommerce business.