The Guide To E-commerce Analytics: How To Boost Online Sales

The e-commerce industry is highly competitive. 

Millions of online stores compete to attract more customers and grow their sales. And this competition only continues to grow as the e-commerce market cap expands.

If you’re looking for a way to stay ahead, it’s necessary to take a deep dive into analytics and understand your customers’ behavior. With all the data at hand, you can make better-informed decisions for your online store.

This blog article will dissect e-commerce analytics particularities and explain how to leverage their power to boost online sales. But before we go into the analytics types, let’s briefly explain what they are.

What is e-commerce analytics?

Online store analytics includes all the relevant data about your visitor behavior, such as the number of visitors, returning customers, and on-page activity. 

Using it is a way to better understand your store’s visitors’ demographics, behavior, and acquisition. Analytics can be a powerful tool that helps you make the right choices and move your business forward to ensure better sales. 

The best part is that all modern CMS platforms support analytics integration. That means that no matter if you’re running a custom-built Shopify store, a WooCommerce store, or one built on Magento, you’ll be able to collect all the different analytics data.

Types of e-commerce analytics

Getting a complete image of your visitors requires a detailed analysis of all the data at your disposal. That means combining the following metrics:

• Customer demographics
• Traffic origin
• Audience behavior
• Customer retention
• Enhanced Ecommerce
• Marketing analytics

Let’s take a close look at how you can use data from each category to further boost your sales numbers.

Customer demographics

Exploring customer demographics in Google Analytics is an excellent way to learn more about your audience: their age, gender, and location.

Why is this important? 

You can use the data to create customer personas, which is essential for future marketing efforts. You can create ad campaigns that target a very narrow audience and bring more buyers to your store. That will also help optimize your paid media expenses because they’ll be more effective.

Furthermore, if a high percentage of your visitors are coming from a foreign country, you can explore how to improve the experience for them. For instance, you can find a faster shipping solution to strengthen your service.

Traffic origin

As you attract more customers, you’ll set up various acquisition channels, including:

• Organic — people who find your website through Google search.
• Social media — visitors coming from your social media platforms.
• Referrals — customers coming from referral sites you collaborate with.
• Direct — those who entered your website address in their web browser.
• Email — visitors coming from your email list.
• Paid search — if you’re running a paid campaign, they’ll appear in analytics as paid search traffic.

After careful analysis, you’ll see which channel is underperforming. You can then either introduce A/B testing to improve your advertising efforts or invest heavily in better-performing channels.

This is where a tableau consulting service can be needed. By leveraging the power of Tableau, you can visualize your data in a more meaningful way, making it easier to identify trends and make informed decisions.

Additionally, if you look at the numbers, you can calculate information such as cost per acquisition for each channel. That way, your marketing investments work better for you as you try to lower the customer acquisition cost.

If you successfully lower the cost per acquisition of new customers, you can get more traffic to your website for the same amount of money, leading to more sales in your online store.

Audience behavior

In general, audience behavior analytics is vital for achieving higher conversion rates. That’s the percentage of your traffic that buys products from your store. The higher the rates become, the better your sales will be.

After getting plenty of traffic to your website, you need to analyze how visitors behave. You can see which pages they visit with Google Analytics, but using a heatmap might be an even more effective solution to paint a clearer picture.

These tools show a graphical representation of your visitor’s activity. They are a helpful solution for improving your shop’s design. The red colors on the map indicate which parts of the pages receive the most clicks. Green, on the other hand, stands for low activity.

Using these analytics can help you understand why your visitors leave particular pages. For example, you can improve your cart abandonment rates by changing the layout of the cart. Maybe some element is confusing the buyers, and they decide to leave.

Customer retention

If you’re looking to turn your store into a brand customers return to, this is an important metric to track. Getting new customers is much more expensive than retaining the current ones. Therefore, one of the goals you should set for your store is high customer return rates.

Customer retention percentage is the number of people who come back to buy from you again in the future. If you notice that this percentage is low, it’s time to take steps to improve it. Here are some of the approaches to try to get more returning customers to your business:

• Set up an email list — subscribers are already interested in your brand, so you can send special promotions, leading them to buy from you again.
• Create a loyalty program — create an incentive for your loyal customers.
• Run promotions on social media — some of your social media followers have already bought from you. Create discounts for them and see them return to purchase from you again.

Track the metrics to follow whether your loyalty strategies are working!

Enhanced Ecommerce

Another free feature that Google Analytics provides is the Enhanced Ecommerce plugin. Like the whole platform, it’s compatible with WooCommerce, Shopify, and Magento and offers more detailed e-commerce insights that show additional room for improvement.

Product data

If you want to learn more about your products, you’ll find plenty of information in the Product Performance Report. You can explore the summary view and shopping behavior view:

• The summary view provides insights about your products’ average quantity and price, unique purchase details, and product revenue.
• In the shopping behavior view, you can see how many times customers put a product in the basket and remove it, as well as the number of sales.

In the Sales Performance Report, you can dissect the revenue figures, including tax. Meanwhile, the Product List Performance Report provides up-selling and cross-selling details.

User data

If you want detailed analytics and e-commerce statistics of your visitors, this section is the place to analyze. You can find two reports that say a lot about your buyers: Shopping Behavior Report and Checkout Behavior Report.

The first will show you every step of the funnel in your online store. You can see the number of visitors who viewed your items, placed them in the cart, went to the checkout page, and completed the purchase.

You’ll see the numbers going lower from one process to another. When you look at the data, you can see which part of the funnel is underperforming. It’s the easiest way to notice which part of your buyer’s journey needs fixing.

On the other hand, the second report only covers the steps at checkout. Analyzing this metric will help you detect a challenge with checking out and reduce cart abandonment rates.

Marketing data

You’ll benefit from exploring these metrics if you’re running internal promotions on your website. Marketing data shows how well your links, images, and other promotional materials lead to your other store pages. 

Moreover, you’ll find reports for Order Coupons, Product Coupons, and Affiliate Code. This way, you can easily track what kind of numbers your promotions are generating. 

The affiliate metric is interesting for shops that offer affiliate marketing as they can track how many new customers are coming through their affiliates. This can help build better relationships with affiliates and reward them, so they put more emphasis on promoting your store.

Marketing analytics

Aside from tracking your platform analytics, there’s more to consider, which includes email and social media analytics, as well as your PPC campaign analytics. It’s important to measure the effectiveness of all three, as they help you bring more traffic to your online shop.

For example, Instagram insights can show your audience engagement. If you notice that it’s below industry standard, you should create more engaging content that elicits comments from your community.

Use giveaways, competitions, and other similar approaches to bring more engagement to your social media channels. As your following grows, so will the number of people coming to your online store.

Another place where A/B testing can help is email marketing for ecommerce. Check the click-through rates of different titles and try different email templates to find the ones that bring the most traffic to you.

Last but not least, see how many visitors your paid campaigns bring in. While being competitive with your ads strategy is necessary for today’s market, carefully managing your marketing budget is no less essential. Therefore, see what you can do to maximize the results of your PPC campaigns, run different ad templates, and consistently play around with keywords.

Benefits of e-commerce analytics

Aside from driving sales figures, there are more benefits you get from analyzing the above-mentioned metrics. Let’s look at them individually.

1. Better organized store

With precise numbers on which products sell better, you can reorganize your store and help your customers navigate more easily to what they need. That includes creating better categories, menu items, and website subsections. Put the items that sell best so that they are easily noticeable.

2. Personalized experience

Personalized experiences matter. According to Epsilon, 80% of customers are more likely to buy from you if you offer personalization. In the e-commerce sector, that means offering quality product suggestions based on an individual person’s preferences. The visitor will feel like you already know what they need and buy from you.

3. Optimized cross-selling

Analytics show which products often go together. That way, you can cross-sell and up-sell plenty of products in your inventory. That is useful not only for those browsing the site but also for those on your email list. 

Use the purchase history data to send offers for items they’re more likely to buy. It’s the perfect way to ensure higher customer retention.

4. Predicting behavior

When you examine analytics annually, you can pick up different trends in particular quarters. That’s important because you can better prepare for those year periods. Being able to answer your client’s expectations will result in more sales.

For example, you can better prepare for the upcoming holiday season and organize your inventory accordingly. Also, you can prepare better shipping procedures so that you can ship a high number of orders every day.

5. Customer satisfaction

Analytics are not just about the numbers. Another great benefit is helping your customers have a great experience using your platform. That way, whenever customers land on your page, they can seamlessly navigate to the product they need and quickly order it. 

Concluding thoughts

Analytics help you boost online sales and provide abundant data to make better business decisions. Don’t forget that while following all these metrics separately is helpful, their true power lies in combining all the data.

You can then have a complete picture of your funnel and detect which parts need improvement. Try out different approaches and measure their effects. You’ll be able to scale your store by growing the number of customers and sales by carefully examining analytics data.