eCommerce analytics: A guide to driving more sales with data

The online marketplace is dramatically changing as innovative technologies are driving growth tactics. According to a report from Insider Intelligence, worldwide eCommerce sales will exceed $5 trillion for the first time, which is expected to surge to $7 billion by 2025.

In eCommerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) businesses, customers have all the power, which is why they are everything. Their expectations are always high, and to give them a stimulus for purchase, you must offer them a seamless customer experience at every touch point. Now, big question! How do you do that effectively?

As data and BI are disrupting every domain, so is the case with e-commerce. The data brings customer trails, and analytics enables organizations to harness value from this data. eCommerce analytics platforms enable you to track the performance of customers, identify the most- and least-performing products, analyze buying behaviour, and determine issues. Let us see what eCommerce analytics can offer your business and why it is necessary.

So, what is eCommerce analytics?

According to a report from Deloitte, the data shows that “49% of respondents say that analytics helps them make better decisions, another 16% says that it better enables strategic decisions, whereas 10% said that analytics improved relationship with both customers and business partners.

We can say it is a process of accumulating data from disparate sources, ingesting and processing the data, and getting a “single source of truth” within an organization. This unified view of customers’ preferences allows businesses to make data-driven decisions. In eCommerce analytics, multiple metrics can drive strategic decision-making. But there are 5 key pillars to catch, which include discovery, acquisition, conversion, retention, and marketing ROI.

Key areas of eCommerce analytics

When it comes to eCommerce analytics, organizations usually get overwhelmed when they start focusing only on “how”. i.e., How much information do they need? How will the process go? In many cases, the decisions are based on gut feelings rather than real-time requirements. So, a reliable business partner that can navigate your business across is the first thing to do a thing. Looking forward, here are 5 key pillars to understand to drive growth in e-commerce:

Discovery

The first step is to collect the data from multiple sources. These could be web-tracking, surveys, customer registrations, categorizations, social media, cart abandonment rate, transactional data, marketing information, and offers like incentives and discounts. Multiple tools and reliable e-commerce analytics platforms are available that can help with the ETL (extract, transform, load) of data. These data will drive insights that help organisations to develop the right customer personas.

Acquisitions

Acquisition data answers questions like which marketing channels are most effective in bringing the most visitors. Moreover, it also tells which channels are leading the sales and conversions. By utilising acquired and related data, organisations can answer many other questions:

•  What types of visitors are from multiple channels like social media platforms?
•  Which customers directly landed on the website?
•  The effectiveness of paid ads?

This kind of data helps you understand the importance of determining the most effective marketing channels in terms of conversion and profitability.

Conversion

Now, that you have managed to bring visitors to your store, conversion is the next crucial step. At the conversion stage, an organisation can get the answer of “when and how” during purchase.

•  When have customers made a purchase?
•  How do customers get into actual sales?

These are two of the most important questions that conversion metrics answer. When probing deeply, these analytics answer the most demanding questions of the customer journey, like how long it takes to convert visitors into sales, what is the customer conversion period, any repetitive purchases from customers, and the customer abandonment rate.

Retention

Retention is one of the key metrics. According to research from Bain & Company, increasing customer retention rates by a 5% increase in customer retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit. Retention-related metrics and analytics enable organizations to comprehend a few of the most valuable KPIs in the entire customer lifecycle. These are:

•  Customer lifetime value (CLV)
•  Customer retention rate vs. churn rate
•  Advocacy and marketing activities

Paid marketing activities

Another key area for eCommerce analytics is understanding your paid marketing activities. These metrics allow you to get in-depth knowledge of the return on investment (ROI). Marketing activities are one of the highest investments and a key success indicator for any e-commerce business. Marketing analytics answers questions like:

•  Have you earned more revenue in comparison to your advertisement investment?
•  How much revenue have you generated from social media?
•  What is the status and success of email marketing?

Wrapping up the journey

The evolution of technological innovation will continue to drive growth in every industry. Self-service business intelligence and modern analytics are now an integrated part of the business. According to Statista, in the year 2021, global retail e-commerce sales reached an estimated value of 5.2 trillion U.S. dollars. It is anticipated that this value will witness a significant surge over the upcoming years, with a projected growth of 56%, resulting in a total value of approximately 8.1 trillion dollars by the year 2026.

Delivering a seamless customer experience is only possible when ingested data is properly processed. A true retail analytics platform ensures your investment is safe and you are ahead of the competition’s curve. Insights generated from customer-related data provide the right direction towards a seamless experience across every stage of their buying lifecycle.