Ever wondered about the role of analytics in marketing your e-commerce store? Why is it important? We will tell you why. Only if you know how you are performing now, can you plan to perform better and achieve good results in the future. Otherwise, your marketing strategy for the promotion of your e-commerce store is like playing in the dark without knowing where the target is!
Analytics has to be the foremost thing on your mind when you create your e-commerce store. You have to be prepared to dig deep into audience details, acquisition, behavior, and conversions. Having data on your hand is like sitting on a pile of gold. E-commerce analytics is invaluable and helps you in everything right from understanding your audience, planning marketing strategies to the final growth in sales revenue.
Types of e-commerce analytics:
When you create your e-commerce store, the most important part is integrating Google Analytics into it to get an insight into the visitor activities and the effectiveness of your marketing strategies. Let us see the different types of analytics you need to understand for your e-commerce store.
1. Real-time analytics
Real-time data is as live as it can get. This section will show you the current number of browsers on your e-commerce store, their geographic location, and what pages they are browsing. This information is particularly crucial when you are running any campaign on social media or Google. You can track the visitors to a particular page or site to know the immediate impact of the campaign.
How does real-time analytics for an e-commerce store help you in your marketing strategy?
Real-time analytics can help you make better decisions.
If you have initiated an email campaign, blog, or social media post linking any of your product pages, you can view its immediate result.
If you have targeted any location in the campaign, you can also check if there are visitors to the stores from such locations.
2. Audience Analytics
The audience analytics in an e-commerce store will help you to gauge and plan your marketing strategy for your audience. The audience overview report is crucial as it contains information such as-
Audience demographics- Age, gender, geography, language.
Sessions- The total visitor sessions to your site
Users- The total users, new visitors, and return users to your site
Page views- The pages viewed on your e-commerce store
Pages per session- The average number of pages viewed by a visitor per session
Average session duration- The average amount of time the visitors stay on your site
Bounce rate- The percentage of visitors leaving the site after viewing the landing page
You will also get additional information on the audience country, city, language, browser, mobile service provider, and mobile screen resolution.
You can even compare two metrics to find out more about the audience. For instance, you can compare people who made a purchase to people who haven’t made a purchase to try and analyze the difference.
How does audience analytics for an e-commerce store help you in your marketing strategy?
The demographic information helps you discover your audience and create user personas.
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It gives you information on the devices from which they access your store so that you can target your efforts accordingly. So for instance, if you are getting visits from mobile devices, you can convert your website to an app using Swipecart so that you can increase your chances of getting more sales through it.
Using the location information you can decide to update and arrange for good shipping options from where you get a good amount of visitors to enhance the overall shopping experience.
Also knowing if your audience uses an Android or iOS device helps you to decide on the mobile app platform for the future.
The mobile app screen resolution prepares you to design responsive websites and campaign banners to fit in those particular device screen sizes.
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3. Acquisition Reports
The acquisition section gives you substantial information on how visitors found your stores online. The insight will help you know what sort of marketing channels are driving visitors to your site and which is the most successful. So, did your visitors discover your site through social media or Google? Did organic search do the trick or was your email marketing strategy useful? The acquisition reports give you information on-
The channels that helped visitors discover you
The channel that gets you the highest site engagement rate
Which channels drive in more conversions and sales
It is simple. It gives you information on how your marketing strategy to get new customers to visit your store is working. The Referral report gives you information on pages and domains linking to your store and driving traffic
How does acquisition analytics for an e-commerce store help you in your marketing strategy?
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Understanding which channel is driving more visitors helps you to focus on those which are more effective and tweak the marketing strategy for those that are ineffective. For instance, if the organic search is not yielding more visitors but getting better conversions, you know you have to concentrate more on SEO to increase visitors. Similarly, if there is the highest number of visitors through social media channels but the bounce rate is high, you know you have to work on improving the design and functionality of the landing page.
It helps you to get an insight into other websites linking to your store and the volume of traffic from them.
The most crucial element in the acquisition report is calculating KPIs such as CPL, CPA, and CTR.
Click through Rate (CTR)- This is the percentage of users who click on a specific link to the total number of impressions of the email/social media post.
Cost per lead (CPL)- This is the total campaign cost to the number of leads generated. This gives an idea of the costs involved in generating leads through paid ads or campaigns.
Cost per Acquisition (CPA)- This is similar to CPL, but it helps us to know the average cost of acquiring a new customer. This is calculated by dividing the total campaign cost by the number of sales generated through it.
4. Behavior Reports
The behavior section provides you with data on how visitors are reacting to the pages on your store. It also gives information on the load time of pages. More importantly, it gives you information on the bounce rate and the average time spent by the visitor on a page.
How does behavior analytics for an e-commerce store help you in your marketing strategy?
It helps you know which pages are getting the highest visitors and how the visitors are reacting to it. By this, you can study what products your visitors like and what they don’t like.
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If any page is getting good visitors, but the bounce rate is high, you have to work on making the page design better or look into the product and see what is affecting the visitor. It may be the price, the look of the product, its value to the visitor, or something else.
5. Conversion Analytics
The most crucial of all the e-commerce analytics is the conversion reports. The main intention to create your e-commerce store is to get more customers visiting your site and convert them into buyers. The conversion reports give you an insight into this and much more.
Which are the products your customers buy, how much, and what income is generated by the sale of these products?
What are the revenues earned, tax & shipping charges for each transaction?
What is the time taken for a visitor to complete a purchase starting from visiting the site through external links to completing the transaction?
Do customers buy during their first visit or do they make repeat visits to complete the purchase? Do customers make repeat purchases?
How many customers abandon their shopping carts?
Getting data of such metrics helps you place better products in the store and target your marketing strategy to maximize conversions.
How does conversion analytics for an e-commerce store help you in your marketing strategy?
Study which products sell better and are better suited for your customer preferences
Study if your marketing efforts to sell certain products are giving you the desired results
The number of products purchased and revenue earned per transaction will help you decide if you need to keep the shipping costs or if you can offer discounts on the product.
Calculate the average order value and try to maximize the profit per visitor. This, in turn, will increase your sales revenue.
Some of the metrics that you can track with conversion analytics are the sales conversion rate, average order value, and cart abandonment rate.
Sales conversion rate- The number of conversions to the total number of visitors to the site is the sales conversion rate.
Average order value (AOV)- The revenue earned from the number of orders is the average order value. It gives you an indication of the average amount a customer spends on purchases.
Cart abandonment rate- This is the percentage of shoppers who added items to the cart but did not complete the purchase.
E-commerce data analytics can help companies to measure the effectiveness of their marketing strategy. It improves decision-making, helps in gaining more website traction and in designing holistic marketing channels.
Wrapping Up
Now that you know what analytics are, it is important to use them to create your e-commerce store marketing strategies. It will help you make informed decisions and devise the best campaigns to generate the best results.
