Ecommerce Analytics: Metrics, Tools, and Best Practices to Grow Sales

Ecommerce Analytics: Metrics, Tools, and Best Practices to Grow Sales

Ecommerce analytics provides valuable insights into customer preferences, sales performance, and marketing effectiveness. It empowers online businesses to make informed decisions for optimisation and growth. This guide explores essential ecommerce metrics, top analytics Magento tools, and best practices. Ready to maximise your performance and outpace competitors? Let’s get started!


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Key Takeaways

  • Ecommerce analytics are crucial in optimising sales and making data-driven decisions, enhancing customer relationships, streamlining operations, and boosting profits.

  • Key ecommerce metrics include discovery, acquisition, and conversion. It also includes retention and advocacy.

  • Top-notch ecommerce analytics tools offer valuable insights into user behaviour patterns. It enables eCommerce businesses to fine-tune their stores accordingly.

  • Embracing best practices in eCommerce analytics, such as automating dashboards and sharing metrics with team members, allows businesses to increase sales through personalised shopping experiences. Maximise return on ad spend (ROAS) via advanced segmentation strategies that drive profitability.

  • Ecommerce analytics enhance online stores by showcasing customer behaviour, best-selling products, and marketing effectiveness.

Importance Of Ecommerce Analytics

The ecommerce industry is expected to reach 6.54 trillion US dollars in sales. Online shopping is growing fast, and businesses must analyse their online store data.

Ecommerce analytics help make intelligent choices to build customer relationships, run better businesses, and make more money.

These analytics use many measurements that cover the customer journey, from finding a store to buying and advocacy. Businesses can use this information to improve and get better results.

Data-driven strategies enable companies to optimise product development processes. You can decide based on consumer preferences rather than guesswork or outdated market research methods.

Key Areas Of Ecommerce Metrics

Ecommerce analytics can be divided into critical parts to help businesses learn and make intelligent choices. These parts include:


1. Discovery Metrics:

Understand how people find your online store. Look at search rankings, search volume, impressions, and reach.


2. Acquisition Metrics:

See how well your marketing brings new customers. Check click-through rates (CTR), cost per lead (CPL), and cost per acquisition (CPA).


3. Conversion Metrics:

Learn how well your store turns visitors into buyers. Focus on sales conversion rates and average order value (AOV).


4. Retention Metrics:

Understand customer loyalty and happiness. Watch cart abandonment rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), churn rate, and net promoter score (NPS).


5. Advocacy Metrics:

Know how happy customers help your business grow. Check word-of-mouth referrals and social media shares.

Top Tools for Ecommerce Analytics

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics logo - a key tool in ecommerce analytics

Google Analytics is a popular tool for ecommerce data analytics. It helps business owners understand user behaviour, website performance, and how well their marketing efforts are working.

Online stores can track the success of email marketing campaigns and find web pages with the most sales.


When used with platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce, business owners can make informed choices for optimising their online business.

2. Optimizely

Optimizely logo - tool for enhancing ecommerce performance

Optimizely is a top tool for ecommerce analytics that helps businesses better understand customer behaviours and increase online sales.


The platform focuses on A/B testing and experimentation to improve the shopping experience, making it essential for ecommerce businesses. Retailers can understand the customer journey, from discovering a product to promoting it.


It seamlessly integrates with other tools like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, Glew.io, and Supermetrics to give a complete picture of an online store's key performance indicators.

3. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg logo - effective ecommerce analysis tool

Crazy Egg is an easy-to-use tool for ecommerce analysis. Using simple and clear data helps businesses improve their online stores and grow sales. Its features include heat maps to see customer interactions and identify trends in customer acquisition.


The Confetti feature displays various colours that show website clicks and traffic sources, like social media, providing insight into customer behaviour. Scroll Maps help ensure calls-to-action buttons are in good spots on web pages for optimal conversion rates.

4. Glew. io

Glew.io logo - platform for ecommerce analytics and insights

Glew. io is an ecommerce analytics tool that provides personalised recommendations to increase sales, optimise ad spending, and improve customer retention.


It works with platforms like Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce, offering advanced customer segmentation, customisable reports, and automated alerts.


Glew. io helps with decisions using essential data over the customer journey, from discovery to advocacy, improving metrics like average order value and bounce rate.

5. Supermetrics

Supermetrics logo - combining ecommerce data for optimized sales performance

Supermetrics is a powerful tool in ecommerce analysis, helping online businesses optimise sales performance. It smoothly combines data from ad channels like Google Ads, Facebook Ads and ecommerce platforms such as Shopify and WooCommerce.


By integrating with Google Analytics, Supermetrics enables better ecommerce tracking and analysis for deeper insights into the customer journey and data-driven marketing strategies.

6. Woopra

Woopra logo - measures ecommerce business success and reduces cart abandonment

Woopra is a helpful ecommerce analytics tool that measures business success, including shopping success and reducing cart abandonment rates. Offering free and paid plans (starting at $999 per month), it's accessible to businesses of various sizes. Woopra focuses on the customer journey, from discovery to advocacy, supporting data-driven decision-making.


When paired with Google Analytics, it offers even more data to help businesses make more intelligent choices based on user behaviour and product performance.

7. Matomo

Matomo logo - powerful ecommerce analytics for sales optimization

Matomo is a powerful tool for ecommerce analytics, letting businesses use data to optimise their online store and boost sales. With more features than Google Analytics, it integrates with platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce to track key performance indicators such as cart abandonment and customer retention rates.


Matomo allows businesses to control their data, ensuring privacy compliance and secure storage. By analysing purchasing trends, users can also increase their return on ad spending through optimised cross-selling and up-selling strategies.

Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce For Online Stores

Enhanced Ecommerce in Google Analytics gives helpful information about the whole customer journey. This goes from finding a product to buying it and more. Online stores can improve by looking at user behaviour, product, and marketing data.

Insights Gained From Enhanced Ecommerce

  1. Find out where customers stop in the sales process with the Checkout Behavior Report. It helps stores make their checkouts better.

  2. Look at how products do with the Product Performance Report. It shows the best-selling products and those needing removal from the store.

  3. Learn about popular promotions with the Internal Promotion Report. It helps businesses know which promotions work best for customers and change marketing plans.

  4. Track how coupons work with the Order Coupon and Product Coupon Reports. It helps businesses make the best discount plans and ensure vouchers make money.

  5. Look at how customers act on product lists with the Product List Performance Report. It gives information on how customers use product listings. It helps decide where to put products and how they should look.

  6. Learn where traffic comes from and which marketing plans lead to sales with the Marketing Data section. This looks at the cost of getting customers and how much money is made from different marketing channels.

  7. Learn more about how users act on the website with User Behavior Data. It tracks clicks on things like buttons and pictures to see how the website design can be improved.

Benefits Of Ecommerce Analytics

Key benefits of Ecommerce Analytics

1. Data-Driven Product Development

Ecommerce analytics help businesses know what customers like and don't like. They do this by looking at customer behaviour and what they buy.


For example, the store Warby Parker used sales data and customer feedback to make new glasses frames that looked good and worked well. They found that many customers wanted to be happier with how the glasses fit. So, Warby Parker made new technology to measure glasses sizes and added more dimensions.

2. Better Inventory Management

Managing inventory well is essential for stores that want to sell more and make money. Ecommerce analytics helps stores make their list better. They do this by cutting costs and making sure popular products are always available.


Using data, businesses can watch trends, see which items sell best, and guess what customers want next. Tools like the Unified Analytics Suite by Cart. com or Glew. io can be used to see how products do and how customers buy them, so businesses sell only a little.

3. Maximise Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

Ecommerce analytics help businesses make the most money from ads. They do this by using data to find which ads make the most money and who they should be shown to.


Businesses can learn how much money each ad channel makes by looking at things like the cost of getting new customers and how many people buy from ads. Then, they can change their marketing plans to do the best with the money they have.

4. Personalised Shopping Experience

Ecommerce analytics can make shopping personal for customers. You can do this by using data to know what each customer needs and show them the right products at the right time.


For example, if someone looks at a product a few times but doesn't buy it, the store can send them a special offer for that product. Another way stores can make shopping personal is by watching how people use the website. Then, they can change things to make the site better for users.


Tools like heatmaps and scroll maps can be used to see where people click the most and how far they scroll on a page. With this information, businesses can change their website to fit their customers' needs and likes better.

Best Practices For Ecommerce Analytics

Using data and understanding how customers shop, automating your online dashboards, and sharing info help you do well in online store analytics.

1. Gathering And Integrating Data

Data is essential for online store analytics. To do it well, you should:

  • Collect data from all relevant sources: Get data from places like Google Analytics, ads, social media, and customer feedback.

  • Use connectors and integrations: Use tools to move data from one place to another to analyse it together.

  • Ensure data accuracy: Check the data to ensure it's good, using tools like Supermetrics.

  • Store data in a centralised location: Put all data in one place to make it easy to access and analyse.

  • Define goals upfront: Set goals for the data you want to look at to make the best choices.

2. Understanding Customer Behavior

To make your online store better, understand how customers shop. Data can help you know who they are and what their habits are.

Companies can monitor critical metrics by analysing the data generated from website traffic sources. It includes:

  • Cart abandonment rate
  • Search volume
  • Keyword rankings
  • Click-through rates (CTR)
  • Average order value (AOV)

For instance, if a company notices that certain web pages have high bounce rates, they may want to investigate what is causing users to leave those pages quickly.

3. Automating Ecommerce Dashboards

Automating ecommerce dashboards is essential for effective data management and decision-making. They save time and make fewer mistakes.

Geckoboard offers an easy-to-use dashboard that integrates with various popular ecommerce platforms to display KPIs. This way, you can always know what's happening and change things as needed.

4. Sharing Analytics For Streamlined Communication

Sharing ecommerce analytics is essential for businesses to make data-driven decisions and streamline communication among team members. When everyone can see the data, teams can work together and improve the online store.

FAQs: Ecommerce Analytics

1. What is ecommerce analytics?

Ecommerce analytics is a way to understand and improve online stores. It uses data to know how customers shop and make better choices about products, website design, and ads.


2. How is data analytics used in ecommerce?

Data analytics helps online stores by analysing customer habits, checking website traffic, finding reasons for abandoned shopping carts, and testing different strategies. This helps improve customer experience and increase sales.


3. How do I set up ecommerce in analytics?

To set up ecommerce analytics, use a tool like Google Analytics and sign up for an account. Then, add your website to the history and put a tracking code on your site. You also need to turn on "ecommerce" in the settings of your account.


4. Is Google Analytics suitable for e-commerce?

Yes, Google Analytics is beneficial for online stores. It gives detailed customer data and helps make better decisions to grow your store. And the best part is, it's free to use!

Summary

Unlock your online store's success with ecommerce analytics! This article covered vital metrics, best analytics tools, and practices that help drive profitability and growth. Use ecommerce analytics data to develop products and shopping experiences that resonate with your audience.


Excited to dive deeper into data-driven insights? Don't miss out on Magento news for more valuable tips and information.

Nikita S.
Nikita S.
Lead Technical Writer

As a lead technical writer, Nikita S. is experienced in crafting well-researched articles that simplify complex information and promote technical communication. She has expertise in cloud computing and holds a specialization in SEO and digital marketing.


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