Many ecommerce vendors know they need to break into analytics, but are reluctant to do so. While analytics can be admittedly daunting, data is really just another way of telling a story about your visitors. Where do they come from? What are they doing once they are on your site? What drives them to the check-out button, or what prevents them from purchasing your goods?
Not only are data analytics good for gathering these findings, they also provide insights to improve conversions and the customer experience.
Below we’ll look at a few of the reasons ecommerce vendors ought to adopt analytics and what you can do to get started.
Incoming Traffic
Everyone wants to drive more traffic to their website, but without the proper data, vendors can’t make informed decisions about resource planning. Be sure to adopt tools that assess traffic coming from popular search engines, social media pages, partner websites, on-site blogs and more.
Once you know where your audience is coming from, you can adjust your strategies to save money on advertising, reaching new potential shoppers or increase focus on certain methods of outreach.
Cart Abandonment
Cart abandonment is basically a four-letter word for ecommerce owners. Believe it or not, almost three-quarters of the world’s online shopping carts are deserted! How can someone get so far through the check-out process without closing the deal?
With a little data and detective work, you can remedy this fiasco. Google Analytics is a wonderful mechanism for tracking online audiences and analyzing their behavior, from first click to check out. Integrating Google Analytics is easy depending on your platform provider. Shopify, for instance, is a cloud ecommerce platform that allows vendors to copy-paste Google’s code into their settings page.
Search Term Report
What content or products drive customers to your store? Unless a consumer is already familiar with your brand, they likely arrived at your site via search engine. Which is why it’s crucial to understand the search terms they used.
If you sell pop-culture clothing, but most of your prospective consumers arrive to your site searching for “Star Wars sneakers,” you may want to increase the prominence of that specific product on your site.
Social Media Analytics
It’s not only valuable to learn which social media services are driving web visitors to your ecommerce site. It’s also important to understand which posts are performing well. For instance, a Twitter update about a ‘how to’ blog post might pull more clicks than a tweet about an upcoming sale.
Try using tools like Twitter Analytics to monitor high-performing posts, or spring for a service like SproutSocial to monitor multiple accounts from a single platform.
A/B Testing
Of course, data analytics should also be used on your site to determine the best ways to improve the customer experience. A/B testing analyzes two versions of a page or element to determine which appeals more to shoppers.
Which technique inspires more conversions: placing a prominent “clearance sale” image at the top of your homepage, or a photo scroll of popular products? A/B testing will let you know.
Email Marketing & Open Rates
Some e-store vendors are dismissive of email marketing because they think it’s outdated, but nothing could be further from the truth. In actuality, email marketing has one of the highest ROIs for ecommerce sites; for every $1 invested, stores see $45 in return!
Certain services like MailChimp track user interactions including open rate, top-performing links and most engaged subscribers. This way, you know exactly what factors are serving your business and what is merely fluff filling your email.
Turns out analytics isn’t so scary after all. So, what are you waiting for? Start exploiting your data today!
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