In e-commerce, the customer always comes first. They have the power of reliable reviews and the ability to compare prices between online stores and choose the most fitting shipping option.

No wonder that their expectations are high. To grab their attention, you must step up your game and give them the reason to buy from your store. There’s no way around; you need to offer them the best possible online shopping experience.

No matter what initiatives you take, there’s something that can help you. It’s data.

Follow me to learn more about the importance of data and understand e-commerce analytics.

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What Is E-commerce Analytics?

Before we step up to action, let’s talk about e-commerce analytics for a bit.  

Ecommerce analytics is the set of practices and processes that use data to gain an overview of your sales performance, marketing activities, customer behaviour, and shopping trends.

We can divide eCommerce analytics into 6 different categories:

- Marketing - how well are you attracting traffic to your e-shop?

- Conversions - do the visitors turn into paying customers?

- Performance - how much do you sell?

- Product - which items are popular and which should not be re-ordered?

- Customers - who are the people who purchase your products?

- User experience - is it easy to shop in your store?

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Each category provides its own set of metrics and data that can help you assess whether your store is on the right track or there’s still room for improvement.

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Why E-commerce Analytics Is Important

E-commerce analytics provides you with the power to uncover and understand all the data and information provided by the customer during the purchase. It can help you analyse your customers’ behaviour and habits and check their activity in the sales funnel.

Moreover, with e-commerce analysis, you can track where your customers are coming from. Analytics such as traffic, traffic sources and search keywords can help you understand what is attracting the customers to your site. Having that knowledge, you can improve your marketing activities and focus your attention on most efficient methods. You can also adapt your actions to the needs and requirements of customers.

Analytics lets you see when customers are converting and when they’re bouncing from your site. This data can help you make informed decisions to help increase your conversion rate. Also, e-commerce analytics provide you with the information you need to improve customer experience and ensure that your customers are happy and satisfied.

On top of that, the information provided by analytics can give you the opportunity to streamline process orders, order-to-cash management, and make the purchase easier for your customers.

E-commerce Analytics Best Practices

As I mentioned before, data analytics plays an increasingly important role in running e-commerce business. I’ve created a list of e-commerce analytics best practices to help you make use of your data and increase your online sales.

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Gather scattered marketing data

With all your data scattered around different channels and platforms, it may feel overwhelming to analyse it. Copy/pasting all the information to one file sounds horrible, doesn’t it?  

However, there’s no need to worry. There are easier and more effective ways to compare the data without wasting your precious time. With the pre-built data connectors, you can download data from any source directly into Google Sheets, Excel, or Google Data Studio. Thanks to this solution there’s no need to shuffle between different platforms and reports; you can focus on analysing your data.

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Understand the numbers and the customers

There’s no use in gathering data just for the sake of having it; it’s a waste of your time and money.  

Marketing tools provide you with a vast amount of information, but they are not going to do the understanding part for you. That’s why you shouldn’t look at data in isolation, as it does not give you the big picture, and you can easily make mistakes and wrong decisions.  

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Introduce Automation

No one wants to waste their time on creating manual reports. That’s why I would strongly advise to invest in automation. Besides saving you time and energy, automation minimizes any room for mistakes. Introducing automation can help you create a data-driven culture, with a reduced reporting time and focus on the analysis and insights.

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Streamline communication with shared data

To make informed decisions, it’s important to have a transparent and streamlined communication across the company. Sharing information and knowledge across departments is fundamental for business growth, so having centralised access to data it across the team is the right thing to do.

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The Power of E-commerce Data Analysis

If you want to create a competitive e-commerce business, you must incorporate e-commerce analytics throughout the customer lifecycle. These insights will provide direction to optimise consumer experiences and guide you through the twists and turns of the market.

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