In order to understand the efficacy of a given e-commerce business or a website, it is crucial to employ Analytics and performance tracking. With the use of analytics, the decisions made are all data backed and are beneficial to the user by increasing sales and enhancing marketing strategies. Following are the tools and components to focus on:
Metrics that should be monitored
Traffic Metrics
– Sessions: Defines how many times the website has been visited during a time frame
– Unique Visitors: Refers to the number of individual customers that visit the website
– Traffic Origins: Describes the sources from where the traffic comes from such as paid ads, social media etc.
Engagement Metrics
– Bounce Rate: Visitors who check a page and leave without going to any further can be reflected through this metric as a percentage
– Average Session Length: Time spend on the website by visitors on average per visit
– Pages on sessions: How many pages are checked during a session on an average
Conversion Metrics
– Conversion Rate: The ratio that shows the ratio of the visitors who completed the intended task on the site such as buying an item/ signing up etc.
– Cart abandonment Rate: The percentage that indicates the number of people who pick items and place them in a cart without completing the purchase
– Average Order Value (AOV): Revenue earned from a single transaction
Revenue Metrics
– Total Revenue: Income earned over a specified amount of time
– Customer Life Value (CLV): Estimate of how much revenue would be earned from a customer during the period of time they are a customer
– Cost per Customer (CPA): Total cost that would be incurred in bringing a new customer on board
Tools for Measuring and Tracking Analytics
– Google analytics 4 (GA4): analytics tool that keeps track of apps and websites and monitors their performance.
Presents analysis of user actions, conversion funnels, and user statistics.
Heatmap Tools
Hotjar or Crazy Egg: Offers a graphic representation of website user movements including their scope of clicks and scrolling.
E-commerce Platforms
-Shopify Analytics or BigCommerce Reports: These features aid in the monitoring of sales and stock volume as part of common features available.
-Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
-HubSpot or Salesforce: Assess the paths followed by a customer and measure the efficacy of the communication.
Marketing Analytics Tools
-Google Ads: Outcome of sponsored advertising.
-Facebook Ads Manager: Results of social media advertisements.
Best Practices
-Set SMART Goals: Specify S.M.A.R.T. parameters of the goals to be achieved in the tracking set for them.
-Use UTM Parameters: Use campaign tags in URLs to evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign.
-Implement A/B Testing: Landing pages, ads or email campaigns variations can be tested to see what performs better.
-Regular Reporting: Establish dates for the reports to be created so as to assess the success made.